PHELIA:
There ’s  rosemary, that’s for remembrance; pray, love, remember: and there is  pansies, that’s for thoughts
. . . There ’s  fennel for you, and  columbines: there ’s  rue  for you; and here ’s some for me: we may call it herb of grace o’ Sundays: O you must wear your rue with a difference. There ’s a  daisy. I would give you some  violets, but they withered all when my father died: they say he made a good end.
         — Hamlet ( IV, v, 172-9 )

DAISIES    [ Bellis perennis ]

This is the small English daisy, the “day's eye” in whose praise Chaucer wrote:

“Of all the floures in the mede,
Then love I most those floures white and redde;
Such as that men call Daisies in our town.”

Shakespeare mentions it in the song to spring at the end of Love's Labour Lost (V, ii, 904–7):

“When daisies pied and violets blue
And lady-smocks all silver-white
And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue
Do paint the meadows with delight,
The cuckoo then, on every tree,
Mocks married men; for thus sings he,
Cuckoo;
Cuckoo, cuckoo: O, word of fear,
Unpleasing to a married ear!”

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