williams wordsworth i wandered lonely as a cloud

Here, for instance, is Dorothy's journal entry from the excursion with her brother when they saw daffodils by the lake:

Wordsworth is believed to have relied on her diaries when calling up details to write some of his poems. Speaking of Dorothy Wordsworth, she accompanied her brother most everywhere he went, and she was a poet as well as a diligent diarist. But I rather think that those who take the time to read the poem aloud will not think it tame, but will instead take the journey along with Wordsworth from lonely wandering to a happy view of blinding yellow daffodils to an appreciation of the joy the memory must hold. At the time he wrote the poem, he was breaking new ground, although it may seem tame to some now. But the point isn't that he took a walk and saw daffodils it's the emotional journey he took (from loneliness to happiness), and the effect of the memory of the daffodils on his present mood. Wordsworth also looks at psychological aspects of memory here - he relates the actual story of his walk with his sister, Dorothy, and their happenining upon a large swath of daffodils by a lake. Today's poem is one of the best-loved and most well-known in the English language, and that is with good reason: its imagery is lovely, its rhyme and metre make it easy to memorize, and the story it tells (of seeing something beautiful and unexpected in nature and reliving it in memory) is one that resonates with a lot of people. As a result, Wordsworth is widely credited as being one of the first poets in the Romantic era, along with his friend Coleridge, whose poems were included in the 1798 publication Lyrical Ballads, which I referenced in a now-old quoteskimming post. And while references to nature and use of metaphor are common devices in modern poetry, they are used in part because Wordsworth came along and wrote in the way that he did, with a reverence for and appreciation of nature, and with a focus on emotional response to nature and other stimuli. If you go back and read the poem aloud, following the punctuation, you will be able to better hear what Wordsworth is saying. I wandered lonely as a cloud that floats on high o'er vales and hills, Here's the first stanza written out with pauses only where they naturally occur: That floats on high o'er vales and hills,įorm: Each stanza has 6 lines, is written in iambic tetrameter (four iambic feet per line: taDUM taDUM taDUM taDUM), and has a rhyme scheme of ABABCC this form, essentially an open form in 'sixain' (six lines to a stanza), was first developed by Shakespeare in 'Venus and Adonis', and was used by Wordsworth in this poem, written in 1804.ĭiscussion: If you read this one aloud, it is easy to fall into a 'pause-at-the-end-of-each-line' mentality, as a means of emphasizing the rhyme scheme, but this is something you SHOULD NOT DO, because you will be lulled into a false sense of complacency by the rhythm and sing-song rhyme effect you achieve, and you will not truly hear the poem. Some of you may know this poem as 'Daffodils', though that's not its actual name its real name is 'I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud', and it's an extremely popular, much-anthologized poem. No further explanation is needed for today's poem choice - the rest of my post is a reprise from last April. Sometimes the greatest gifts are simply profound.KellyrfinemanOn my way home from this morning's writing session with Angela De Groot ( angeladegroot, who, by the way, just won an award from Writer's Digest for a poem she wrote), I spied daffodils in bloom on a hill. I read the poem over and over as she laid silent with a huge smile - and then she died. I read the entire thing and she didn't speak again.

I printed the whole poem and the next morning (April 1,2009) she was still repeating. I went home to google the words I had captured and to my amazement, my Nana was not becoming a savant, she was remembering.

So I (frantically writing) tried to grasp these wonderful words as they trickled out. AND, after hours of stumbling over and over the first and then second stanza, it appeared (to me) that she was 'creating' and I thought she was having a moment of genius. She was completely immersed in a patient, persistent, struggle with the words - which was not a simple task when actively dying, at 98. I had spent a lot of time with her over my life and had never heard them before. Normally sharp as a tack, today she was like a broken record with no awareness of anybody else or anything, just these words.

My Nana was repeating words over and over the day before she passed away.

Williams wordsworth i wandered lonely as a cloud