Greatest Poems of William Wordsworth
8. Daffodils, or ‘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.
This poem is by now a bit too famous for its own good. Yet some masterpieces are so great that they will bear endless repetition without losing their effect, and I suspect that the spiritual balm of this poem’s opening lines (particularly the first) will soothe souls for as long as English is understood:
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.
If this occasion which Wordsworth describes seems at first a little slight, he offers what is tantamount to a defence of his enthusiasm in the following stanza, where the daffodils are
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way;
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay’.
But this is not all: if they are as numerous (and so by implication glorious) as the stars, moreover they out-perform the nearby waves in jollity:
The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee.