Robert Herrick’s Daffodils, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Flower and Abdulla Goran’s Ivy Flower: A Comparative Study

This paper intends to highlight the similarities in three poems by three different poets coming from different times and places - Robert Herrick’s poem, “To Daffodils”, Percy Bysshe Shelly’s poem, “The flower that smiles today” (mutability), and Abdulla Goran’s poem, “To the Ivy Flowers”. It endeavours to depict the influence that Shelly and Herricks’ poems had on the Kurdish poet Goran in composing his poem. Herrick’s poem was first published in the 17th century in English Language, although Shelley’s Poem was published in the 19th century in England, yet its language is English, too. The influence of the English language and English writers generally and the influence of Shelly and Herrick, particularly is clearly seen in Goran’s poem. This study for the first time points out that there is the high possibility of the influence of two poems on Goran in composing his poem, “To the Ivy Flowers”, which shows the novelty of this study as no scholar so far has said two English Writers influenced him in writing this poem. This is a comparative study relying on the French school of comparative literature. The Kurdish poet, Goran was influenced by both Shelley and Herrick. The paper intends to see to which degree is Goran influenced by the two poems, and why particularly by those two English poets. The study relies on comparative, descriptive and textual analysis approaches to examine meaning, content and style of the three poems to demonstrate the aesthetics of the three poems