The other stories in Bates's 1955 collection The Daffodil Sky provide perhaps the best context for the story itself. They also serve as examples of Bates's mature work as an author of short fiction.

Bates's 1951 collection Colonel Julian and Other Stories, like "The Daffodil Sky," offers examinations of characters who are disappointed, lonely, and despairing.

Look Back in Anger, a play by John Osborne which was first performed in 1956 and published in 1957, examines the marital woes of Jimmy and Alison Porter, a socially incompatible couple who struggle to get by in a town in the Midlands of England.

Alan Sked's Britain's Decline: Problems and Perspectives (Basil Blackwell, 1987) offers a useful introduction to problems associated with defining the social, moral, and economic changes in England since World War II.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson's Maud (1855) is a poem in sections of different meters which...