Songs of the Meadow-Sweet: Wordsworth, Rossetti, and Poets of the Wildflower Fields

July 4, 2020

Today is National Meadows Day in the United Kingdom, that soft, fragrant celebration of wildflower meadows—their shimmering grasses, their clouds of butterflies, their hum of bees in the warm air.

Every July, across England’s fields, gardens, and commons, celebrations bloom anew in tribute to these ancient grasslands, those sanctuaries of quiet beauty and wilder grace. The meadow invites us to slow down, to listen, and to rediscover the natural abundance that shaped both our landscapes and our literature.

We begin with Wordsworth, who knew better than most the spiritual liberty that flowers embody:

How does the Meadow flower its bloom unfold?
Because the lovely little flower is free down to its root,
and in that freedom bold.
— William Wordsworth, English Romantic poet

It feels like a creed for the meadow itself—freedom and boldness growing from the humblest soil.

There is nothing cultivated or corseted here; the beauty is spontaneous, democratic, belonging to all who pause to see it.

Christina Rossetti, always tender in her observation of nature’s distinctions, draws the line between meadow and garden, that eternal dialogue between wildness and order:

In the meadow - what in the meadow?
Bluebells, Buttercups, Meadow-sweet,
And fairy rings for the children's feet
In the meadow.

In the garden - what in the garden?
Jacob's Ladder and Solomon's Seal,
And Love-Lies-Bleeding beside All-Heal
In the garden.
— Christina Georgina Rossetti, English poet, In The Meadow - What In The Meadow?

Her verses remind us that while gardens are crafted, meadows are given. The one is an art of design; the other, of surrender. The heart of a gardener often belongs to both.

Next, Charles MacKay’s tender voice gives Meadow-Sweet her due. Long the unsung bloom among summer’s showier company, she stands as a symbol of modest grace:

Rose! We love thee for thy splendor,
Lily! For thy queenly grace!
Violet! For thy lowly merit,
Peeping from thy shady place!

But mine airy, woodland fairy,
Scattering odors at thy feet,
No one knows thy modest beauty,
No one loves thee, Meadow-Sweet!
— Charles MacKay, Scottish poet, Meadow-Sweet

The meadow-sweet, with her creamy plumes and honeyed scent, thrives best where life is a little unkept—by rivers, among reeds, or on the untamed edges of things. If there is poetry in humility, she surely embodies it.

Francis Wynne’s “Meadow-Sweet” continues that tender association of the flower with beauty, love, and memory. His poem is a reverie of youth and affection, set to the soft rhythm of summer air:

The Meadow-Sweet was uplifting
Its plumelets of delicate hue,
The clouds were all dreamily drifting
Above the blue.
On the day when I broke from my tether
And fled from the square and the street
Was the day we went walking together
In the meadow, sweet.

The Meadow-Sweet with its clover
And bright with its buttercups lay;
The swallows kept eddying over,
All flashing and gay.
I remember a fairylike feather
Sailed down your coming to greet,
The day we went walking together
In the meadow, sweet.

Ah! the Meadow-Sweet! and the singing
Of birds in the boughs overhead!
And your soft little hand to mine clinging,
And the words that you said
When bold in the beautiful weather
I laid my love at your feet,
The day we went walking together
In the meadow, sweet.
— Francis Wynne, Irish poet, Longman’s Magazine, Meadow-Sweet

Love and nature intertwine here, as they so often do in the English countryside.

The meadow becomes both setting and soul—where memory lives on among the grasses long after footsteps fade.

Finally, William Leonard Courtney lingers on the same blossom, but with a wistful, almost ghostly reverence. His “Meadow-Sweet” blooms amidst nostalgia and quiet yearning:

In summer fields the Meadow-Sweet
Spreads its white bloom around the feet
Of those who pass in love or play
The golden hours of holiday;
And heart to answering heart can beat
Where grows the simple Meadow-Sweet.

Embosomed in some cool retreat
The long seed grasses bend to meet
The stream that murmurs as it flows
Songs of forget-me-not and rose;
The filmy haze of noon-tide heat
Is faint with scents of Meadow-Sweet.

Ah, Love! do you know Meadow-Sweet?
Does some pale ghost of passion fleet
Adown this dreary lapse of years,
So void of love, so full of fears?
Some ancient far-off echo greet
The once loved name of Meadow-Sweet.
— William Leonard Courtney, English author and poet, Meadow-Sweet

This is the meadow remembered through the lens of passing time—its sweetness haunting, its perfume tinged with loss.

Yet even melancholy cannot erase its music.

So today, as we honor the meadows of England and beyond, let us think of the humble Meadow-Sweet, the freckled Buttercup, and the quiet grace of unmanicured fields.

Let us preserve these places not just as habitats, but as living poetry—where the past still hums underfoot, and the future can take root in freedom and bloom.