Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud"

William Wordsworth's famous poem may speak to us these days.

A quintessential English Romantic poem:
Nature, vivid description, musical patterning, individual subjectivity for the sake of universal feeling, memory and its healing power when harnessed with nature, and art for the sake of the soul.

(I disliked the poem as an undergraduate, but have come to appreciate its artful simplicity and application. I have a greater appreciation for thousands of flowers dancing in the sun and breeze too.)


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.

--William Wordsworth

Step Sideways Towards A Truth

I have always preferred Herodotus to Thucydides and Byron to Wordsworth.

That meant, that means, according to grad school criteria (don't you know), I am damned to frivolity, to the frivolous.

At least by association.

(Or, so they say.)

Terrible that I let old school judgments color my own thinking, my own self, now.
Hard to resist, I think.

My other response is to give in, to agree, via an essential insight:
ham-bone connected to the brain-bone.

Wordsworth and Byron: "The After-Vacancy"

Action is transitory,--a step, a blow,
The motion of a muscle--this way or that--
'Tis done, and in the after-vacancy
We wonder at ourselves like men betrayed:
Suffering is permanent, obscure, and dark,
And shares the nature of infinity.

--William Wordsworth,
headnote to "The White Doe of Rhylstone"
(originally a bit of speech
from the suppressed drama The Borderers)


The world is full of orphans: firstly, those
Who are so in the strict sense of the phrase
(But many a lonely tree the loftier grows
Than others crowded in the forest's maze);
The next are such as are not doomed to lose
There tender parents in their budding days,
But merely their parental tenderness,
Which leaves them orphans of the heart no less.

--Lord Byron,
the opening stanza to the final -- and unfinished -- canto of Don Juan


I am not sure why I am putting these two passages together, but they rise up in my mind that way, often.  Of course, both pieces concern emotional loss and absence, concern consequence: "after-vacancy" As an exercise in grad school, I'd often ponder how one poet would speak another poet's words, how one poet would cast the same thought into different words, but I must said that I always felt that Lord Byron would have ended up with phrasing quite close to Wordsworth's original "Action is transitory" and so forth;  that was an invigorating insight since I'd mostly approached these two poets as poles in an agon, as antagonists in the Romantic Battle-Royal.  Much of Cantos III and IV of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage reveals Wordsworthian themes, Byronized (of course) . . . .

Coffee Break . . . Outside

How Romantic?