“To a Daisy” appeared in Alice Meynell’s first collection, Preludes (Henry S. King & Co., 1875). In “‘The Tides of the Mind’: Alice Meynell’s Poetry of Perception,” Maria Frawley, chair of the department of English at George Washington University, writes that “the speaker of ‘To a Daisy,’ an early sonnet, sees in the flower a kind of secrecy akin to the solitude so often represented in poems about individuals, but the poem progresses to foreground the perspective of the poet, who stands, according to the poem, ‘upon the hither side.’ [. . .] Asking first ‘when shall I . . . then look back,’ and later ‘what will it be to look,’ the poem juxtaposes the relativity of the poet’s temporal perspective to the spatial (through its references to the daisy standing ‘between me and the world’ and the promise that the poet will ‘drink from in beneath a spring’). Ultimately the temporal and spatial are united through reference to the ‘hither side,’ the ‘poet’s side,’ and ‘God’s side,’ which cumulatively enable Maynell to underscore variations of perspective within the poem more generally.”