About William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth (1770-1850) is one of the leading poets of English Romanticism, and, along with Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey, is regarded as one of the ‘Lake Poets’: poets so named because of their associations with the Lake District in Cumbria in northern England.
Curiously, although Wordsworth was born in Cockermouth in Cumbria and would live for many years at Dove Cottage in the Lake District, some of Wordsworth’s most important and influential poems were written in the late 1790s while he was living in southern England and collaborating with Coleridge on their Lyrical Ballads (1798), which would herald a return to older, traditional oral forms of poetry and a privileging of personal sensory experience and individual emotion over the cool rationalism and orderliness of earlier eighteenth-century verse.
I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
A Short Analysis of Wordsworth’s ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’
Often known simply as ‘Daffodils’ or ‘The Daffodils’, William Wordsworth’s lyric poem that begins ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’ is, in many ways, the quintessential English Romantic poem. Its theme is the relationship between the individual and the natural world, though those daffodils are obviously the most memorable image from the poem. Here is the poem we should probably correctly call ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’, followed by a short analysis of its themes, meaning, and language.
Wordsworth begins by recalling his solitary wandering across the landscape (this is poetic licence: below we will discuss how, when the encounter with the daffodils took place, his sister Dorothy was in fact with him). Like the cloud, he is detached somewhat from the landscape: it as if he, too, were floating above the valleys and hills, aimless and ineffectual, rather than within the landscape and fully part of it.
The word ‘floats’ also suggests a loss of purpose, too, that chimes with the word ‘lonely’ in that famous opening line. This is not some languid and leisurely listlessness but rather purposeless drifting. Wordsworth spies the daffodils, with the adjective ‘golden’ suggesting not only their bright yellow colour but also their rarity (daffodils are only around briefly in early spring before withering away) and, for Wordsworth, their value.
Note how ‘crowd’ rhymes with ‘cloud’. This is not just rhyme, for there is a deeper kinship between the two words, as the harsh ‘c’ sound that begins them both helps to reinforce. That cloud was solitary in the opening line, but now it is complemented by not solitariness but togetherness: that ‘crowd’ of golden daffodils. ‘Host’, meanwhile, arguably also carries a glimmer of religious meaning, suggesting not just a group of people or things but also the ‘Host’ used in Holy Communion (the bread that represents the body of Jesus Christ).
Note also how Wordsworth emphasises the grounded and down-to-earth nature of the daffodils, though: whereas he likened himself to a cloud floating over valleys and hills, now the daffodils are beside the lake and beneath the trees, in amongst the nature at ground level. The shift in prepositions highlights this.
Again, the daffodils are both seamlessly part of the surrounding landscape (the waves of the water dance like the daffodils) and yet somehow transcending their surroundings (the dancing of the daffodils is more joyous – both full of joy and inspiring it in the observer – than the dance of the waves).
Remember that Wordsworth is recalling this encounter after the fact, much later on. He has the benefit of hindsight when he writes the poem and reflects how the daffodils looked to him. This reflects his famous talk of ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’, and is worth considering in light of this poem. Wordsworth highlights how joyous the sight of the daffodils was, but then tells us that he didn’t realise quite how important and valuable it would be to him at the time: he ‘little thought / What wealth the show to me had brought’ (‘wealth’ echoes ‘golden’, the adjective used about the daffodils in that first stanza).
The final stanza returns to the idea of emotion recollected in tranquillity: whenever he is lying on his couch at home, Wordsworth tells us, either feeling listlessly empty of thoughts or even in a highly thoughtful and ‘pensive’ mood, he sees, in his mind’s eye, the daffodils again. (We discuss his reference to the inward eye below.) This is ‘the bliss of solitude’: being on one’s own and remembering happy memories and reliving joyous experiences.
We have come a long way from ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’: now Wordsworth is talking not of loneliness but of blissfully happy solitude. His heart fills with pleasure and as his heart race increases at the happy thought of the flowers, it seems to dance with the daffodils that danced along the side of the water.