Neil Bowen on
We wandered lonely as two clouds
On 15th April 1802, Wordsworth went on a walk with his sister
Dorothy in the Lake District. It was the experience of this walk, and reading his sister’s subsequent journal entry about it, that moved the poet to write I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud. ‘I never saw daffodils so beautiful,’ Dorothy wrote in her journal, ‘they grew among the mossy stones about and above them; some rested their heads upon these stones, as on a pillow, for weariness; and the rest tossed and reeled and danced’. This sentiment is echoed in the poem’s opening stanza, as the speaker sees a ‘host of golden daffodils… Fluttering and dancing in the breeze’. That same personification, ‘danced’, used in both Dorothy’s diary entry and throughout the poem, conveys the joy evoked by the sudden, unexpected sight of the daffodils. The use of present participle verbs, ‘fluttering’ and ‘dancing’, suggests that the delight that the speaker experienced continues long after the walk came to an end and, hence, the ongoing benefits of being immersed in natural landscapes.
I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud is written in iambic tetrameter, a rhythm that mirrors the ‘fluttering’ and ‘dancing’ of the daffodils themselves, as well as the energy that the speaker felt upon seeing them. Nature continues to ‘dance’ through every stanza, a repetition that suggests continuity in the joy and inspiration sparked by the sight of the flowers. What we would now call the mental health benefits of being immersed in natural landscapes, this extended personification suggests, are profound and long-lasting. Asserting the enduring value of the natural world was particularly important to Wordsworth and to other Romantics, because nature was coming increasingly under threat in a society that was rapidly industrialising. Although his readership may have been largely metropolitan, throughout his poetry, Wordsworth celebrated and championed the countryside.
Significantly, the opening of the poem does not describe the daffodils themselves, however, but the speaker’s own apparent solitude. He ‘wandered lonely as a cloud’, a famous opening line that conveys feelings of isolation and detachment. Interestingly deleting Dorothy’s presence from the poem, the simile suggests that inspiration comes to the isolated, but also receptive individual. Wordsworth doesn’t have to set off to find inspiration or doggedly to track it down, rather, he drifts like a cloud, without any clear sense of direction. To wander means the freedom to go where you will, untethered by obligations or plans. Indeed ‘wandering’ is the archetypal means of locomotion for Romantic poets – see, for example, William Blake’s London or W. B. Yeats’ The Song of Wandering Aengus. While the verb suggests freedom, it also contains the potential to lose oneself. In Wordsworth’s case, it seems to have resulted rather in the loss of any acknowledgement