Most poems about growing old turn toward loss: fading light, thinning time, the body's complaints. Daniel Whitehead Hicky's "Daisies" does something gentler and stranger. Its speaker doesn't mourn youth so much as envy a flower's way of looking. What he wants back is not years but astonishment, the ability to meet the world as though no one had ever shown it to him before.
The poem is built around a single repeated wish. "Always in summertime I wish that I / Might stare astonished as a daisy's eye" opens the first stanza and returns, word for word, to open the last. That repetition works like a frame, and it also works like a habit of mind: the wish is not a passing whim but something the speaker returns to every summer. Between the two identical openings, the middle stanza does the work of explaining why a daisy's eye is worth envying. Everything in it is new to the flower. The butterfly's "fleeting blue," the bee's "sudden golden drone," even the ordinary rhythm of sunset and dark arrive as fresh events, because the daisy has no memory to dull them. Even "the repeated sight / Of daylight going, and the coming night" is repeated only from our point of view; to the daisy, each evening is a first.
That is the poem's central idea, and it quietly overturns a common assumption: that experience is purely a gain. The speaker has "seen before" everything the daisy sees, and the poem suggests that this familiarity has cost him something. What he longs to find in the old sights is "a newness and a brightness that would blind / Me to my way of thinking." The word "blind" is startling and well chosen. Ordinarily blindness is a loss, but here it is a rescue. His settled habits of thought are what stand between him and the world, and he would gladly be dazzled out of them. The same goes for the line's next phrase, "and hold my tongue": wonder, in this poem, is a kind of silence, the pause before commentary begins.
The imagery supports this idea by making the daisy's day feel like a series of small spectacles. In the first stanza dawn is "the eastern sky's first lanterned traveler," a lovely personification that turns sunrise into a lone figure carrying a light, while the noon sun becomes "burning molten-bright," as though metal were being poured across the sky. Notice that the poem pairs these as if they were each unique, "first" and "last." The sunrise is the first traveler, the noon sun "the earth's last show of light." The flower, in other words, treats every moment as a beginning or an ending, never as the middle of something routine. The new moon's "first crust," with its homely, bread-like word, adds a touch of tactile humor, and the flower is "alerted" and "held fast," verbs that suggest attention being captured rather than chosen.
Formally, the poem is made of rhyming couplets, and the choice suits the subject. Each pair of lines closes neatly, like a small satisfaction, and the rhymes are simple and audible: "I" and "eye," "were" and "traveler," "blue" and "new." The lines run in a steady, easy rhythm that reads aloud almost like a nursery song, which fits a poem about recovering a child's way of seeing. The first rhyme, "I / eye," is also a quiet pun the whole poem rests on: the speaker's self and the daisy's gaze are joined in a single sound, as if the wish were already half granted.
The final line delivers the conclusion with unfussy confidence: "A daisy's eye might keep an old man young." Note the modest "might." The speaker does not claim that wonder can cure age, only that it could keep something alive in him. That restraint keeps the poem from sentimentality, and it is what makes the ending moving rather than merely sweet.
Its significance lies in this small, usable lesson. The poem suggests that attention is a form of youth, and that we can lose the world not by leaving it but by getting used to it. After reading it, a familiar blue butterfly may be worth a second look.