`Daffodils Again'

Shakespeare used it ninety-five times but we can go a lifetime without hearing the word: thither. It sounds like a lisping scissor, orphaned cousin of hither and whither, also lost to the modern tongue. A dithering adverb, more gesture than word, it means “there,” “to that place,” a pointed index finger. In Henry IV, Part I, Hotspur tells his wife: “Whither I go, thither shall you go too.” One of literature’s reclamation specialists, Samuel Beckett, wrote “Thither” in English in 1976:

“thither
a far cry
for one
so little
fair daffodils
march then

“then there
then there

“then thence
daffodils
again
march then
again
a far cry
again
for one
so little”

“Thither” is a thicket of multiple meanings, suggesting tenderness for the small and distressed. The twice repeated “march” is at once movement and month, flowers on the march in March -- “a far cry” from dancing with the daffodils. “A far cry,” idiomatically, is something different or distant, as thither is a far cry from hither (and yon).