i wondered lonely as a cloud william wordsworth

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. 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). This reflects his famous talk of ‘ emotion recollected in tranquillity’, and is worth considering in light of this poem. He has the benefit of hindsight when he writes the poem and reflects how the daffodils looked to him. Remember that Wordsworth is recalling this encounter after the fact, much later on.

I wondered lonely as a cloud william wordsworth