The Daffodils

Hello everyone, This blog is a part of my thinking activity. In this blog I will discuss about William Wordsworth's poem "The Daffodils"

Introduction

‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’ is one of the best-loved poems of the fountainhead of romanticism William Wordsworth. This poem features how the spontaneous emotions of the poet’s heart sparked by the energetic dance of daffodils help him pen down this sweet little piece. On 15 April 1802, Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy came across a host of daffodils around Glencoyne Bay in the Lake District. This event was the inspiration behind the composition of Wordsworth’s lyric poem.

‘Daffodils’ or ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’ has been dissected methodically for illustrating the poet’s mood, the surrounding location, the allegorical meanings, and the beauty of nature in full motion. The poet’s love and proximity with nature have inspired and moved generations after generations of poetry lovers and young minds.

About Author

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 Cambria 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.

Wordsworth’s themes are nature and the English countryside, the place of the individual within the world, and memory: especially childhood memory. One of his most famous statements is ‘the child is father of the man’, which asserts that our childhood years are so formative that they determine the adult we become. Wordsworth is often looking back to his childhood, and nowhere more so than in his long autobiographical poem The Prelude (1805; revised 1850).

Lyrical Ballads heralded the arrival of English Romanticism in poetry, and Wordsworth added a famous preface to the collection when it was reprinted in 1800. However, he later fell out with Coleridge, and his poetic creativity dried up in his thirties; much of his best work was written before 1807.

He accepted the role of Poet Laureate in 1843 when his fellow Lake Poet, Robert Southey, died, but he never composed a single line of official verse during his seven years in the post. He died in 1850.

Summary

Let us begin by taking each stanza of the poem 

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.

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.

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.

And yet, once he has been brought down to earth by the sight of the daffodils, Wordsworth is keen to invoke their ethereal quality: they are like the constellations in the sky, forming a long ‘continuous’ line or pattern. They seem, like the stars, to go on forever: a ‘never-ending line’. And yet, once again, this is in tension with the idea of a grounded limit, as the reference to ‘the margin of a bay’ in the following line implies.

Wordsworth emphasizes the joyous quality of the daffodils as they are almost personified: they have ‘heads’ that seem to ‘dance’ in the breeze.

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:

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).

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.

The final stanza returns to the idea of emotion recollected in tranquility: 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.

Structure and Form

The poem is composed of four stanzas of six lines each. It is an adherent to the quatrain-couplet rhyme scheme, A-B-A-B-C-C. Every line conforms to iambic tetrameter. The poem ‘Daffodils’ works within the a-b-a-b-c-c rhyme scheme as it uses consistent rhyming to invoke nature at each stanza’s end. Moreover, it helps in creating imagery skillfully as the poet originally intended. The poem flows akin to a planned song in a rhythmic structure. Consonance and alliteration are used to create rhymes.

This poem is written from the first-person point of view. Therefore it is an ideal example of a lyric poem. The poetic persona is none other than Wordsworth himself. This piece contains a regular meter. There are eight syllables per line, and the stress falls on the second syllable of each foot. There are four iambs in each line. Thus the poem is in iambic tetrameter. For example, let’s have a look at the metrical scheme of the first line:

I wan-/dered lone-/ly as/ a cloud