Page 163 - DENG103_English - I

English–I

Notes Along the margin of a bay: 10

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, 15
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, 20

They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

Like the maiden’s song in “The Solitary Reaper,” the memory of the daffodils is etched in the
speaker’s mind and soul to be cherished forever. When he’s feeling lonely, dull or depressed,
he thinks of the daffodils and cheers up. The full impact of the daffodils’ beauty (symbolizing
the beauty of nature) did not strike him at the moment of seeing them, when he stared blankly
at them but much later when he sat alone, sad and lonely and remembered them.
Personification is used within the poem, particularly with regards to the flowers themselves,
and the whole passage consists of images appearing within the mind of the poet.
William Wordsworth’s “I Wandered as Lonely as a Cloud” opens with the narrator describing
his action of walking in a state of worldly detachment; his wandering “As lonely as a cloud
/ That floats on high o’er vales and hills,” (1-2). What he is thinking of we never really
uncover, but his description leaves us to analyze his words as a sort of “head in the clouds”
daydream-like state where his thoughts are far away, unconcerned with the immediate circumstances
in which he finds himself. Wordsworth, ever the Romanticist, perhaps uses these two introductory
lines to describe the disconnected and dispassionate ways that we all live our lives; walking
through life in a haze of daily ritual and monotonous distractions in a pointless and spiritually
disinterested state where we fail as emotional creatures to appreciate the quiet beauties of life
that we as human beings need for spiritual sustenance. William Wordsworth’s “lonely cloud”
is our own private impersonal perception of the world, floating miles above it and missing the
quiet virtues of nature, beauty, and other sources of emotional nourishment.
As William Wordsworth’s narrator is walking, he notices “A host, of golden daffodils;…
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.” (4 and 6). Wordsworth goes on to describe these “golden
daffodils” as a vast plot of swaying flowers around the fringes of a bay, outdoing the beauty
of the ocean’s waves with their own golden oscillation. Describing the daffodils for the next
several lines, Wordsworth helps us to visualize what he himself has seen and was so moved
by; “Tossing their heads in sprightly dance./The waves beside them danced; but they/Out-
did the sparkling waves in glee” (12-14). These light-hearted daffodils, weaving in unison
with each other in the wind, have romantically touched Wordsworth, their natural beauty
reaching him in ways that he describes as not fully understanding until later: “A poet could

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