I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
A lyric poem by William Wordsworth, first published in 1807, in which a field of daffodils becomes a lasting source of joy through memory.
Romanticism: An artistic and intellectual movement emphasizing imagination, emotion, nature, and individual experience. The poem’s solitary speaker and emotionally charged landscape exemplify Romantic poetry.
Personification: A figure of speech that gives human traits or actions to nonhuman things. The flowers are described as dancing, making the field seem animated and companionable.
William Wordsworth: An English Romantic poet whose works include The Prelude and Lyrical Ballads. Wordsworth wrote the poem and shaped its account of emotion recalled in tranquility.
Recollection in Tranquillity: A poetic principle in which emotion is recalled and shaped through reflection after an experience has passed. The final stanza makes remembered feeling, rather than the original sight alone, the poem’s resolution.
The Daffodils: The common title for Wordsworth’s poem “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.” This familiar title foregrounds the flowers that organize the poem’s remembered scene.
Nature poetry: Poetry in which the natural world is a central subject, setting, or source of reflection. Daffodils and the changing lake landscape anchor the poem’s emotional meaning.
Simile: A figure of speech that compares unlike things explicitly, often using “like” or “as.” The opening compares the speaker to a lonely cloud drifting over the landscape.
Dorothy Wordsworth: An English diarist and writer whose journals record everyday life and landscapes shared with her brother William. Her journal entry about seeing daffodils with William is associated with the poem’s remembered scene.
Aesthetic experience: An attentive encounter with an artwork or natural scene that produces perception and feeling. The speaker’s first sight of the flowers becomes the experience later revived by memory.
Wordsworth's 1815 edition of Poems: A revised edition of William Wordsworth’s Poems, published in 1815. Wordsworth added the poem’s epigraph about the “inward eye” in this edition.