Literary Elements

Literary Elements

Literary Elements

I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

Characterization

This simple poem, one of the loveliest and most famous in the Wordsworth canon, revisits the familiar subjects of nature and memory, this time with a particularly (simple) spare, musical eloquence. The plot is extremely simple, depicting the poet's wandering and his discovery of a field of daffodils by a lake, the memory of which pleases him and comforts him when he is lonely, bored, or restless. The characterization of the sudden occurrence of a memory—the daffodils “flash upon the inward eye / Which is the bliss of solitude”—is psychologically acute, but the poem's main brilliance lies in the reverse personification of its early stanzas. The speaker is metaphorically compared to a natural object, a cloud—“I wandered lonely as a cloud / that floats on high...”, and the daffodils are continually personified as human beings, dancing and “tossing their heads” in “a crowd, a host”. This technique implies an inherent unity between man and nature, making it one of Wordsworth's most basic and effective methods for instilling in the reader the feeling the poet so often describes himself as experiencing.

Symbolism

In William Wordsworth's “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”, the daffodils become much more than mere flowers. They are a symbol of natural beauty and, more importantly, symbolize living a life as rich in experience and sensation as would make a life worth living. They represent, in their light-hearted dance, the joy, and happiness of living an adoring and fulfilling life, embracing it for every drop of nectar it could so bring. Romanticism, a poetic philosophy that Wordsworth himself engendered, finds much virtue in this meaning; the daffodils reaching out and catching the eye of Wordsworth's narrator, or perhaps Wordsworth himself, and inspiring him so much emotionally, that he was left with little choice than to express them poetically. Wordsworth's narrator of “Lines Written in Early Spring” struggles with his own innate human predisposition towards melancholy in a world where contemporary human society and civilization has destroyed our connection to nature, and incidentally our own nature as well, but Wordsworth's narrator in “Daffodils” has taken from the moment the sweet nourishment of spiritual manna that was necessary to keep a quiet instance of introspection from turning to depression and, instead, becoming an exuberant reverie of a setting in memory; “They flash upon that inward eye / Which is the bliss of solitude; / And then my heart with pleasure fills, / And dances with the daffodils.” (21-24). William Wordsworth's “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” or “Daffodils” is a deep and moving work of poetry that under a deceivingly simple exterior could possibly be, under energetic dissection, argued as one of Wordsworth's greatest works of Romanticism. By staying true to Romanticism's philosophy of embracing not only nature but the careful expression of the poet's emotions through art and how nature can so deeply affect it, Wordsworth, in four simple stanzas if imagery, could, perhaps, not better described in verse the Romantic ...