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.

Dear Lord Byron . . . .

I've been teaching some books about specific obsessions, and in order for my students to understand that I was not judging or maligning the authors for their obsessions, I made a bit of a joke about understanding obsession myself, about being obsessed.  I mentioned my nine years in graduate school and detailed how I'd not only read and annotated all that Lord Byron had written, published or not published, but also had read and annotated the thirteen volumes of his letters that we have and had read and annotated the letters sent to him and had even started reading and annotating all that Byron himself had read . . . in chronological order.

(And that's not counting the bookcase or two full of literary scholarship on Lord Byron and English Romanticism and European history and heroism I also read and annotated.)

What started out as a joke became a little more serious: I do understand obsession.

I survived mine, but not everyone does.

Giving Voice To John Keats

Keats! Yesterday I had planned to lecture on John Keats and his poetry,
reading aloud the following poems
in full in the following order:

"To One Who Has Been Long In City Pent" (sonnet)
"On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer" (sonnet)
"La Belle Dame Sans Merci" (ballad)
"Ode on Melancholy" (ode)
"Ode to a Nightingale" (ode)
and
"The Eve of St. Agnes" (narrative verse poem, gothic trappings).

And in the 50 minutes available, well, I almost made it.  I lost a little time when I decided to chart the frame narration of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, our next book, but everything takes a bit longer than I tend to expect.  I had to summarize what I wanted to walk through with "The Eve of St. Agnes"--though I wish I'd had the time to read that long tale aloud.  That's what the poem deserves.

Next time.

Byron: "This Odd Labyrinth"

I won’t describe—that is, if I can help
    Description; and I won’t reflect—that is,
If I can stave off thought, which, as a whelp
    Clings to its teat, sticks to me through the abyss
Of this odd labyrinth; or as the kelp
    Holds by the rock; or as a lover’s kiss
Drains its first draught of lips: --but, as I said,
I won’t philosophize, and will be read.

--Lord Byron
Don Juan: Canto X, #28

Recommended for the Literary Reader

English Literature: 1660-1850

Here are the specific books I'm ordering for the survey course I'll be teaching next term.

Stanley Appelbaum, English Romantic Poetry: An Anthology
Jane Austen, Persuasion
Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders
Alexander Pope, Essay on Man and Other Poems
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels
Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto

Also, I've a rather full Reader of plays, stories, excerpts from novels, poems, and essays: Restoration drama and poetry; Richardson's Pamela (in part); the Graveyard/Elegy school; "A Modest Proposal"; among others.  In addition, I tend to supplement the assigned material with impromptu handouts on an almost weekly basis.

Dover Thrift editions too.

Coffee Break . . . Outside

How Romantic?