William wordsworth poems spark notes

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Often known simply as ‘Daffodils’ or ‘The Daffodils’, William Wordsworth’s lyric poem that begins ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’ is, in many ways, the quintessential English Romantic poem.

Its theme is the relationship between the individual and the natural world, though those daffodils are obviously the most memorable image from the poem.

Here is the poem we should probably correctly call ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’, along with a short analysis of its themes, meaning, and language.

Summary

Let us begin by taking each stanza of the poem and exploring (and summarising) its meaning.

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.

Wordsworth begins by recalling his solitary wandering across the landscape (this is poetic licence: below we will discuss how