I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud

3 Pages 782 Words

“I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” by William Wordsworth, a poem that discloses the relationship between nature and human beings: how nature can affect one’s emotion and behavior with its motion and sound. The words the author adopted in this poem are interconnected and related to each other. They are simple yet profound, letting us understand how much William Wordsworth related his works to nature and the universe. In the poem, William Wordsworth uses various natural phenomena, such as clouds, daffodils and waves, as devices to characterize his speaker’s different stages of emotion and feeling.
The first few lines of the poem portrays the speaker’s initial emotion. “I wandered lonely as a cloud, that floats on high o’er vales and hills,” the speaker is described as a “cloud,” lonely, aimless, and cruising quickly and lightly through “vales” and “hills.” A vision of the daffodils moved him to a state of being connected to something, as the poet wrote, “When all at once I saw a crowd, a host, of golden daffodils.” The concord and harmony of the “dancing daffodils” replaced his feeling of loneliness; he is no longer a “lonely cloud.” As the twinkling stars in the milky way, and the sparkling dancing waves appeared in the second stanza, they danced along with the “ten thousand” daffodils, a new state emerged for the speaker, he started to realize the world of interconnection and relationship. He sees the universe as a harmonious whole, in which every subject reflects and echoes the other.
The daffodils became the speaker’s companions in the third stanza, and they were describing as “the jocund company” by the poet. He enjoys the company of the dancing daffodils, which brings him happiness and joy. As the poem goes on, the second emotion from the speaker occurs in the last stanza: the state of “solitude.” “For oft, when on my couch I lie, in vacant or in pensive mood, they flash upon t...