Recollection — Summary

Edward Shanks describes a remembered moment in spring. The speaker notices hawthorn overhead, so pale it almost disappears against the fading sky, while white water-daisies shine up from the dark surface of a pool. Walking closer, he sees the water scattered with small bright flowers and briefly believes the may blossom has drifted down from the hedge to float on the pool’s edge. It is a quiet, slightly dreamy confusion—two kinds of whiteness, one above and one below, briefly seeming to be the same. The mood is hushed and delicate, full of the cool light of early evening. The memory feels less like a dramatic event than a private, fleeting impression: a moment when the ordinary landscape seemed to overlap with itself and became strange and lovely for a second.