Page 173 - DENG203_ELECTIVE_ENGLISH_IV

Elective English—IV

Notes Wordsworth received an honorary Doctor of Civil Law degree in 1838 from Durham
University and the same honour from Oxford University the next year. In 1842 the
government awarded him a civil list pension amounting to £300 a year. With the death in
1843 of Robert Southey, Wordsworth became the Poet Laureate.

William Wordsworth died by aggravating a case of pleurisy on 23 April 1850, and was
buried at St. Oswald’s church in Grasmere.

The poem “Daffodils” is also known by the title “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”, a lyrical
poem written by William Wordsworth in 1804. It was published in 1815 in ‘Collected
Poems’ with four stanzas. It portrays a moment on April 15, 1802, when Wordsworth and
his sister Dorothy were walking near a lake at Grasmere, Cumbria County, England, and
came upon a shore lined with daffodils. He is now looking back on how much of an
impression it has had on him.
In the poem, ‘The Daffodils’ the poet William Wordsworth has described how he once
came across numerous daffodils rocking in the breeze. The beauty of the daffodils enthralled
the poet and became a treasured experience for him.

The poem consists of four stanzas, each of them being a sestet. The meter is iambic
tetrameter, it is very even and regular. Each stanza has a cross rhyme in the first 4 lines and
then ends with a rhyming couplet. The rhyme comes at the end of lines, it is exact and
masculine.

In the first line, the poet has used the simile ‘lonely as a cloud’. He has compared himself
to a solitary cloud. Just like a cloud floats over hills and valleys (line 2), the poet too has
been rambling across the countryside.
The four six-line stanzas of this poem follow a quatrain-couplet rhyme scheme: ABABCC.
Each line is metered in iambic tetrameter.

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.
9.7 Keywords

Canon: In fiction, canon is the conceptual material accepted as “official” in a fictional universe’s
fan base.

Crowning: It means ceremonially placing a crown on the head of someone in order to invest
them as a monarch or to declare or acknowledge someone as the best.
Dormant: is someone or something inactive, sleeping or quiet. Having normal physical functions
suspended or slowed down for a period of time; in or as if in a deep sleep is understood as
dormant.

Eloquence: Derived from the Latin word eloquentia, eloquence is fluent, forcible, elegant or
persuasive speaking. It is primarily the power of expressing strong emotions in striking and
appropriate language, thereby producing conviction or persuasion. The term is also used for
writing in a fluent style.
Impression: An impression is an idea, feeling, or opinion about something or someone, especially
one formed without conscious thought or on the basis of little evidence.

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