Page 171 - DENG203_ELECTIVE_ENGLISH_IV

Elective English—IV

Notes Here, he uses a phrase ‘that inward eye’ which to him is ‘the bliss of solitude’ (line 22).
Here, ‘the inward eye’, is used to refer to one’s mind and the memories stored in it. Since, it is
much easier for a person to reflect upon and remember old memories when he/she is alone, it
is called ‘the bliss of solitude’.
As soon as the poet remembers, the daffodils, his heart is filled with bliss and it joins the
daffodils in their dance (lines 23 and 24).
In line 24, alliteration has been used by Wordsworth (‘dances’ and ‘daffodils’).

Notes All critics believe when they come to study this poem that Wordsworth is describing
the flowers. Conventional criticism believe that while he was walking, he came to a bunch
of daffodils. They believe that the poem is nothing more than a description. However,
some critics also believe that Wordsworth did not meet the daffodils when he wrote this
poem, a good poet doesn’t need to see the daffodils to write about them.
In his “Preface to Lyrical Ballad” he says that a poet is not in need for external stimulus so
that he could write a poem. This means that whenever we meet a poem, we shouldn’t
understand that the poem is the product of a certain definite occasion. Wordsworth may
have seen but also he could write the poem even if he didn’t see the daffodils. He can write
with or without a stimulus. Seeing the daffodils or not is an external factor and shouldn’t
be considered in evaluating the poem. This has nothing with the evaluation of the poem.
The first impression about the title is that the first lines would be about the daffodils. In
this case it will appear that Wordsworth is describing the daffodils. This is not the function
of poetry because Wordsworth say that poetry is the “Spontaneous overflow of powerful
feelings recollected at tranquility”. So, the lines are not about the daffodils, and even if
they are, the poet is not reproducing nature. The purpose of poetry is never to imitate
nature, because if it is an imitation, then it wouldn’t be poetry according to Wordsworth.
This is what is conveyed in his preface. “Poetry has no purpose, if there is a purpose, it
should be a worthy one”. There are two contradictory cases, either poetry has a purpose or
not. If poetry has a purpose, then Wordsworth would be describing, but as proved in the
lines, he is not describing the flowers. The worthy purpose is not describing the daffodils,
so there is another story behind the title.

Commentary

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 characterisation 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.

Example: Internal rhyming (‘fluttering’ and ‘dancing’) has been used by William
Wordsworth. He has also described the motion of the daffodils by using the two words.

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