William Wordsworth

I wandered lonely as a cloud

Pun on host; careful attention to host shows how Wordsworth has brought together
a numer of meanings that help us understands how deeply the daffodils affect the
poets mind. In the first stanza, the comma after host serves as emphasis, making us
reconsider how Wordsworth intends its meaning. The most apparent needs only brief
mention: The host is a crowd of flowers, a multitude, a large number. In the
penultimate stanza Wordsworth describes himself gazing at the daffodils. The
repetition of gazed indicates an intense activity, almost as if the poet were in a
trance. The final stanza emphasizes much the same experience, only this time it occurs
through memory. The daffodils, therefore, affect the poet directly and indirectly
through his eyes and his mind.
On one level, the flowers simply bring psychological ease. But on another level, the
event moves through a transposition into a spiritual experience. Wordsworth
experiences a transcendental moment similar, at least in kind, to the one in Tintern
Abbey, when the temporal gives way to the eternal. The poem dramatizes an
experience of the sublime in its first three stanzas, which the poet recollects and reexperiences as a spot of time in the last stanza. The daffodils embody the sublime
idea of vastness. The host of flowers appears infinite.
Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tinern Abbey
Though part of The Lyrical Balads, it is a reflective poem very different in mood and
pattern from the ballad-like ones. Though its vocabulary still includes a high number of
concrete and basic words, the diction is more abstract and literary and it is written in
blank verse.
The poem is intensely personal, uniting two threads of feeling and thought. One was
the poet's return to his native land away from France and the Revolution. The other
was his sister Dorothy for whom he felt a close life-long emotional attachment and
who was a deep personal and literary influence on him throughout their life together.
Consider the first lines (1-22) and mark the ever present I - "Again I hear ...", "I
behold...", "I repose ...", "I see ..." - that introduces us to a landscape mediated
through the poet's experience, mainly through his eyes. Inmediately (22-58) what we
are given is the same personal experience now from another angle, from the memory
of the many moments and circumstances in which the poet has felt the beneficial
healing effects of Nature.
Images of quietness, silence and seclusion recur, and the only figure in the landscape,

the typical Wordsworthian figures of low people, solitary and humble, such as the
vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods" or the "hermit" (20, 23) are not actual
people but appear to be only in the poet's mind or imagination.
The final part of the poem includes another human figure: his sister Dorothy. Time
shifts now from past to future, and after a moment of visionary confidence, the poet
roots his security in human affection.
The ability to recreate nature through memory and imagination and to enable the
reader to feel the same mood of exaltation, to share the same sensations through his
own experience of a similar kind, is one of Wordsworth's most important literary gifts.
And by bringing to light this nursing restoring action of Nature, together with its
capacity to teach man fortitude and a moral sense, he has been one of the most lasting
influences on English literature.