Chaucer says that to him it is ever fresh, that he will cherish
it till his heart dies; and then he describes himself resting on
the grass, gazing on the daisy:

"Adowne full softly I gan to sink,
And leaning on my elbow and my side,
The long day I shope me for to abide,
For nothing els, and I shall nat lie,
But for to looke upon the daisie,
That well by reason men it call may
The daisie, or els the eye of day."

Chaucer gives us the true etymology of the word in the last line.
Ben Jonson, to confirm it, writes with more force than elegance,

"Days-eyes, and the lippes of cows;"

that is, cowslips; a "disentanglement of compounds,"--Leigh Hunt
says, in the style of the parodists:

"Puddings of the plum
And fingers of the lady."

The poets abound in allusions to the daisy. It serves both for
a moral and for an epithet. The morality is adduced more by
our later poets, who have written whole poems in its honor. The
earlier poets content themselves generally with the daisy
in description, and leave the daisy in ethics to such a
philosophico-poetical Titan as Wordsworth. Douglas (1471), in his
description of the month of May, writes: