Essay on the poem i wandered lonely as a cloud 100-150
Answers
William Wordsworth’s poem “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” is often described as a good example of the short Romantic lyric, despite the fact that its first readers were divided about the poem’s merit. Many of Wordsworth’s contemporaries found daffodils too trivial a subject for Wordsworth’s imaginative description (Butler 53). Wordsworth’s friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge even complained about Wordsworth’s “mental bombast” (II, 136), although he did add that only a genius could provide such a lofty treatment of an unworthy subject. While we might wish to defend Wordsworth based on our personal taste, the poem actually provides its own best defense. Not only are the flowers sublime, but so are the human faculties with which we process their beauty. According to Wordsworth, the passionate observer sees with the imagination and feels from the heart.
The poem’s publication history reveals that Wordsworth increasingly strove to express a sublime feeling. The first version, published in 1807, described the beauty of the daffodils, as well as the poet’s resultant happiness. However, in 1815, Wordsworth added the second stanza, in which the speaker compares the daffodils to the stars in the Milky Way:These lines are more epic in scope, and relate the daffodils to the vastness of the universe. They make us think about the concept of infinity (“never-ending”), and turn the landscape into something that is too vast for the human mind to comprehend.
In adding the second stanza, Wordsworth did something controversial: he turned the beautiful into the sublime. Starting with Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), eighteenth-century treatises on aesthetics distinguished between the beautiful and the sublime. Burke, for instance, argued that beautiful objects provide pleasure, but that the sublime was caused by a feeling of terror:
Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible [i.e., terrifying], or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling. I say the strongest emotion, because I am satisfied the ideas of pain are much more powerful than those which enter on the part of pleasure. (36)
For Burke, then, the sublime creates a sense of awe and terror. It is associated with darkness and mystery. It should certainly not be evoked by daffodils.
We can understand, then, why many of Wordsworth’s contemporaries were confused. Wordsworth’s extensive use of personification—the daffodils are a “crowd” (3) or “company” (16), they have “heads” (12), they dance—all of this turns the daffodils into thousands of animate beings. Wordsworth’s use of the word “host” (4) further reminds of the angelic host, and perhaps also of the Catholic rite of communion (Joplin 69). In addition, the third stanza introduces an element of competition (a common feature of epic texts), as the daffodils and the waves strive for the crown of happiness. All of this leads to a moment of sublime ekstasis (literally a standing outside of oneself), as Wordsworth joins the “jocund company” (16) and shares in their “glee” (14). He is left in a trance (“I gazed—and gazed”; 17), and only later regains enough self-consciousness to realize how sublime the experience truly was.