Shall I Compare Thee to a Daffodil?

I dwell in possibility, not rules,
Where beetles talk and teacups hum with light.
My thoughts wear hats and dance through dreams at night,
Unbothered by the ticking clocks of schools.
I hear in colours, swim in silent pools,
Where daffodils recite their own delight,
The sun composes verses out of spite
For rigid minds and symmetry-bound fools.

But hush! The world would press me into form,
Demand I walk their line, not skip or spin.
Yet I, like Frost, choose paths that twist and storm—
Where wildness blooms and true revolt begins.
I am not broken, odd, or out of norm:
I am the fire they tried to cage within.

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From Whimsy to Defiance

I have not written a poem in some time. So I ripped off some dead poets to write a poem about neurodivergence.

I started with William Wordsworth because Wandering Lonely as a Cloud is pretty much how my mind wanders. That line is no longer in the poem, though the way it flits from subject to subject has that as its inspiration. The word dafodils did make the poem, as a nod to its inspiration. That’s the ADHD side.

But I wanted something darker, “Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,” provided that and “Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,” describes my light sensitivity in sunny weather. Both quotes are from Sonnet 18: Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day by William Shakespeare. Thanks, Bill.

But the sonnet form suggested itself, the Elizabethan/Shakespearean sonnet has a similar rhyming pattern to both the Wordsworth and Shakekepear poems, so I tried to hide it with a Petrarchan sonnet, the original Italian form.

The content is in two parts: What it was like to be neurodiverse in school, and how the ADHD part of me fights against my autism. Synesthesia is also there, I hear music as colours, E major is yellow. Other mixings of senses in the poem are not mine, but exist in others. I have light sensitivity too; I think that bit is obvious. The symmetry-bound fools are my autistic side fighting back.

But whether it is my school or present struggles in any particular line, I can’t work out; they got pretty mixed up at the composing stage.

There are two deliberate grammatical mistakes. Both to get the lines to scan. My poetic licence may be removed if I’m not careful.

Snippets of other poems I remember from school were also used without attribution because I can’t remember who wrote them, or much of the poems. Most of the joining phrases are things I have already heard.

In the poem, autism wins the battle. The poem moves from whimsy to defiance. The pivot is the line containing daffodils.

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The Thorn

Just for your amusement, Wordsworth wrote a great poem called The Thorn. Brilliant, that is, except for this couplet describing a pond:

I’ve measured it from side to side:
‘Tis three feet long, and two feet wide.

Proof that even the best poets sometimes come up with bad poetry.