I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud

1333 Words6 Pages
Jing-yu Huang Professor Wu Approaches to Literature 9 May 2010 Analysis of William Wordsworth’s I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud is a poem written by William Wordsworth (7 April 1770 – 23 April 1850), who was a major English Romantic poet who, “with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature. Wordsworth was England's Poet Laureate from 1843 until his death in 1850.” (Wordswroth) “The poem was written in period of a time, the Romantic era, when people had become fascinated by the inner workings of the mind and by nature and the effect that nature has upon the state of mind.” (Harris 1) The Romantics viewed nature as a deity, Godlike, with which they could develop a relationship. It is a poem filled with imagery about nature and solitude and the language is very simple and easily understood. The inspiration for the poem came from a walk Wordswroth took with his sister Dorothy around Glencoyne Bay, Ullswater, in the Lake District on April 15, 1802, and they came across a “long belt” of daffodils. I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud was written on the base of Dorothy's writing in reference to this walk: When we were in the woods beyond Gowbarrow Park, we saw a few daffodils close to the water side. We fancied that the lake had floated the seed ashore and that the little colony had so sprung up. But as we went along there were more and more and at last under the boughs of the trees, we saw that there was a long belt of them along the shore, about the breadth of a country turnpike road. I never saw daffodils so beautiful they grew among the mossy stones about and about them, some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness and the rest tossed and reeled and danced and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the lake, they looked so gay
Open Document