![]() ![]() In the third stanza, the ‘waves’ of the sea also ‘danced’ beside the daffodils, putting different aspects of nature in communion (to use that word again) with each other. The same goes for the second stanza, where the daffodils are described as ‘Tossing their heads in sprightly dance’, which reinforces the personification of the daffodils which the word ‘dancing’ had already suggested (again, this is subtle and unforced: flowers have heads, just as human beings do). But the association changes through the course of the poem: ‘Fluttering and dancing in the breeze’ refers solely to the daffodils which the speaker of the poem notices. ![]() ![]() The word that is associated with the daffodils in each of the poem’s four stanzas is ‘dance’. This is glimpsed through analysis of carefully chosen words that achieve subtle double meanings, such as ‘host’ in the first stanza, which resonates with religious connotations (the wafer used in Holy Communion) as well as its more everyday meaning of ‘crowd’ (a ‘whole host’ of something). ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’ neatly reflects Romanticism and its core ideas: the relationship between man and the natural world, the solitariness of the individual, the almost religious awe that nature inspires. In some ways, it’s not difficult to analyse why. But the daffodils poem has in many ways become Wordsworth’s defining work. ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’ first appeared in print in 1807 in Wordsworth’s Poems in Two Volumes, which received largely negative reviews. There is no evidence to support the oft-repeated claim that Wordsworth originally had ‘I wandered lonely as a cow’ until Dorothy advised him to alter it to ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’, though it’s a nice story: the myth may have originated in Conrad Aiken’s 1952 novel Ushant. Indeed, the lines from Wordsworth’s poem that read, ‘They flash upon that inward eye / Which is the bliss of solitude’ were actually written by Wordsworth’s wife Mary Hutchinson (William Wordsworth himself acknowledged this). The influence of this passage from Dorothy’s journal can be seen in Wordsworth’s poem, which he did not write until at least two years after this, in 1804 (the poem was published in 1807, but whether Wordsworth wrote the poem in 1804 or 1807 or at some point in between we cannot say for sure). I never saw daffodils so beautiful they grew among the mossy stones about & about them, some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness & the rest tossed and reeled and danced & seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the Lake, they looked so gay ever dancing ever changing. Dorothy Wordsworth wrote of the encounter with the daffodils:Į saw a few daffodils close to the water side, we fancied that the lake had floated the seed ashore & that the little colony had so sprung up – But as we went along there were more & yet more & at last under the boughs of the trees, we saw that there was a long belt of them along the shore, about the breadth of a country turnpike road. On 15 April 1802, Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy were walking around Glencoyne Bay in Ullswater when they came upon a ‘long belt’ of daffodils, as Dorothy put it memorably in her journal. 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.Ī brief summary of the circumstances of the poem’s composition might be useful, by way of introduction. 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. (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. 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. ![]()
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