Gender and Nature in Alice Oswald's Daisy Amelie Maurice-Jones 12th Grade

In ‘Daisy’, Alice Oswald uses the evolving imagery of a narrator considering her actions towards a daisy to symbolise the meekness and conformity socially linked to womanhood- and the poem’s progressively aggressive tone mirrors her desire to reject these feminine ideals. Nonetheless, the constant focus on the image of a flower is able to portray the natural world as a beautiful force.

In ‘Daisy’, Oswald uses the extended metaphor of a ‘daisy’ to symbolise social perceptions of femininity which are rejected by the narrator. The poem opens through the imperative ‘I will not meet that quiet child’ to immediately establish the poet’s discordance with social expectations of women to remain voiceless, with the poet’s decision to open through personal pronoun ‘I’ immediately defining the narrator’s sense of self, and the form of monologue can be seen to further reject these stereotypes through actively establishing an independent female voice. In the closing enjambment in which the persona states her desire to ‘make a lovely necklace out of her green bones’, the diction choice ‘lovely necklace’ creates a satyrical tone to mock the public perception of women as obsessed with fashionable accessories, and the adjective ‘green’ perhaps...