I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

“I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” was written at a time of great uncertainty, both social and political. Factories drew people to the big cities, but the human cost was obvious. A lot of people were poor, hungry, and exploited, and children were forced into labor.

Against this backdrop, Wordworth’s poem seems naïve, even untouched by the reality of the newly industrialized country. But it demonstrates how we depend on the natural world for clean air, freedom of movement, and inspiration.

Like other Romantics writers, Wordsworth revered nature for its beauty and its ability to renew itself. He believed that human beings are sustained by nature, both physically and emotionally. This short lyric poem sets out his thoughts about the importance of nature, which we frequently take for granted.

The choice of the lyric is significant, since this formal yet spontaneous vehicle not only exploited the melodic potential of language; it also allowed the poet to speak freely, enthusiastically, and directly to an assumed reader.

The initial tone of the poem is rather solemn. In the first stanza of the poem, the speaker—who could be the poet himself, as he speaks in the first person—expresses his somewhat melancholy mood as he strolls across a landscape. However, the tone changes abruptly when he comes across a host of “golden daffodils” (Line 4), quite by chance.

The semi-colon at the end of the fourth line indicates a pause as the speaker comes to a halt, arrested by the sheer number of daffodils, which are not just yellow but “golden” (Line 4). This suggests something precious, which relates to the speaker’s mention of “wealth” in Line 18, in the third stanza.

“Golden” implies radiant light, but instead of comparing the daffodils to the sun, the speaker says that they are more like stars, because there are so many of them: “a crowd, / [a] host” (Lines 3-4). If he has been like a cloud, floating “on high” (Line 2) above the landscape, the daffodils are both closer to earth and closer to the heavens, both strikingly beautiful “[a]long the margin of the bay” (Line 10) and in “the milky way” (Line 8). The rhyme underlines the comparison, since the speaker initially imagines them lining the heavens, then remarks that their “never-ending line” (Line 9) is an earthly phenomenon.

As he approaches the daffodils, he is struck by the pantheistic sense of the daffodils, like the stars in the heavens, expressing a universal energy (as are the waves in the bay). It is possible that the speaker views this divine dance as an expression of God’s creation, although there is no overt spiritual reference in the poem.

In the second stanza, the poet makes liberal use of alliteration to express the ecstatic unity found in nature. The plosive ‘t’ has a forceful quality—the “[t]en thousand” (Line 11) daffodils are “[t]ossing their heads” (Line 12); they also “twinkle” yet are “[c]ontinuous” (Lines 8 and 7). The speaker draws attention to their great number and vibrant energy.

At the same time, the sibilant “[c]ontinuous as the stars that shine” (Line 7) provides a sense of expansiveness, while “stretched” (Line 9), “tossing,” and “sprightly” (Line 12) provide a satisfying sense of continuity: The entire stanza is lit up with the radiance of the daffodils, which appear infinite. This extends into the third stanza, with “sparkling” (Line 13), which suggests the joyfulness in nature overflows.

The sight of gleeful nature transforms the speaker’s emotional state. “I gazed—and gazed” he says in Line 17, the repetition indicating his inability to look away from something so mesmerizing. Yet he has “little thought” (Line 17) about how his attention to nature will be repaid later on; he will be surprised, in the third stanza, to learn how the sight of the daffodils has imprinted itself on his “inward eye” (Line 21).

The golden daffodils confer “wealth” in Line 18, but there is irony in the line, since the poet would have been aware that nature was little valued by industrialists. For the speaker, everything needed for happiness can be found in the landscape before him, rather than capital, which lured people to the cities. Finding wealth in nature indicates the interdependent relationship between nature and humanity that is not often acknowledged.

The fourth stanza is somewhat subdued as the speaker states that he often lies on his couch “[i]n vacant or in pensive mood” (Line 20). This is reminiscent of the first line of the poem, when the speaker is lost in thought, his solitude unbroken—here, he has little to inspire him, until the daffodils “flash” upon “that inward eye” (Line 21). This suggests a flash of inspiration and clearly refers to the speaker’s ability to recollect the scene he found so moving.

The imagination was a source of inner freedom to the Romantics, and Wordsworth is no exception: He called the imagination “the means of deep insight and sympathy, the power to conceive and express images removed from normal objective reality.”