'And Balmy Spirits Thro’ Thy Foliage Play'

One of the daunting tasks facing a lexicographer is identifying the proliferation of senses possessed by even the most common words. Imagine starting from scratch with a and the, and tracking down each nuance. English is profligate with meanings. Take spirit, from the Latin spiritus – breathing and later, breath. The OED gives twenty-six principal definitions of the noun form and another seven for the verb, with dozens of nuanced sub-definitions and compound usages. 

The first of the nineteen definitions identified by Dr. Johnson in his Dictionary (1755) is characteristically matter-of-fact: “breath; wind.” Its first two citations are from Bacon. The third goes to that prolific wordsmith Anon.: “The balmy spirit of the western breeze.” Jack Lynch in his edition of Johnson’s Dictionary (2002) adds a note:

 

“The ‘anonymous’ quotation is apparently from one of Johnson’s earliest poem, ‘On a Daffodil,’ probably quoted from memory: ‘May lambent zephyrs gently wave thy head, /  And balmy spirits thro’ thy foliage play.’”

 

No wonder Johnson kept the citation anonymous. It is the earliest poem known to have been his work. He wrote it at the age of fourteen or fifteen, in the then-popular manner of Matthew Prior. W. Jackson Bate writes in his biography:

 

“When we think of the later Johnson, the very title is hilarious: ‘On a Daffodil, the First Flower the Author Had Seen That Year.’”

 

The poem survives because a school friend of Johnson’s, Edmund Hector, had saved a copy and gave it to Boswell after Johnson’s death. Bate suggests contrasting Johnson’s Prior-influenced poem with Robert Herrick’s “To Daffodils.” Johnson’s poem, Bate says, “is at once more stylized—almost frozenly so—sedate, self-conscious, semi-Latinate, and yet redundant (almost every noun has its adjective).”

 

Some twenty years later, Johnson would write one of the poetic glories of the English language: “The Vanity of Human Wishes.”