Daffodils -- William Wordsworth

(Poem #63) Daffodils I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o'er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host, of golden daffodils; Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze. Continuous as the stars that shine And twinkle on the milky way, They stretched in never-ending line Along the margin of a bay: Ten thousand saw I at a glance, Tossing their heads in sprightly dance. The waves beside them danced; but they Out-did the sparkling waves in glee: A poet could not but be gay, In such a jocund company: I gazed--and gazed--but little thought What wealth the show to me had brought: For oft, when on my couch I lie In vacant or in pensive mood, They flash upon that inward eye Which is the bliss of solitude; And then my heart with pleasure fills, And dances with the daffodils. -- William Wordsworth

Well, it was only a matter of time before this one showed up <g>. It's
certainly one of the most famous poems around[1] - however, there is a
distressingly common attitude that anything so simple, accessible and
popular can't have much poetic merit.

[1] in fact, it topped a recent British poll of best-loved poems - see the
comment to The Listeners (Poem #2)

Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth - in fact, Wordsworth
himself said it best:

  The majority of the following poems are to be considered as experiments.
  They were written chiefly with a view to ascertain how far the language
  of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to
  the purposes of poetic pleasure. Readers accustomed to the gaudiness and
  inane phraseology of many modern writers, if they persist in reading this
  book to its conclusion, will perhaps frequently have to struggle with
  feelings of strangeness and aukwardness: they will look round for poetry,
  and will be induced to enquire by what species of courtesy these attempts
  can be permitted to assume that title. It is desirable that such readers,
  for their own sakes, should not suffer the solitary word Poetry, a word of
  very disputed meaning, to stand in the way of their gratification ...

        -- Preface To Lyrical Ballads (1798)
        <http://library.utoronto.ca/www/utel/rp/criticism/lyrb1_il.html>

Notes:
1. Wordsworth made use of the description in his sister's diary, as well as
   of his memory of the daffodils in Gowbarrow Park, by Ullswater. Cf. Dorothy
   Wordsworth's Journal, April 15, 1802: "I never saw daffodils so beautiful.
   They grew among the mossy stones . . .; 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, ever glancing, ever changing."

2. 'They flash upon that inward eye... ': Wordsworth said that these were
   the two best lines in the poem and that they were composed by his wife.

        -- Representative Poetry Online

Biography and Assessment:

  Wordsworth was born in the Lake District of northern England[...]The
  natural scenery of the English lakes could terrify as well as nurture, as
  Wordsworth would later testify in the line "I grew up fostered alike by
  beauty and by fear," but its generally benign aspect gave the growing boy
  the confidence he articulated in one of his first important poems, "Lines
  Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey . . . ," namely, "that Nature
  never did betray the heart that loved her."
  [...]
  Wordsworth moved on in 1787 to St. John's College, Cambridge. Repelled by
  the competitive pressures there, he elected to idle his way through the
  university, persuaded that he "was not for that hour, nor for that place."
  The most important thing he did in his college years was to devote his
  summer vacation in 1790 to a long walking tour through revolutionary
  France. There he was caught up in the passionate enthusiasm that followed
  the fall of the Bastille, and became an ardent republican sympathizer.
  [...]
  The three or four years that followed his return to England were the
  darkest of Wordsworth's life. Unprepared for any profession, rootless,
  virtually penniless, bitterly hostile to his own country's opposition to
  the French, he knocked about London in the company of radicals like
  William Godwin and learned to feel a profound sympathy for the abandoned
  mothers, beggars, children, vagrants, and victims of England's wars who
  began to march through the sombre poems he began writing at this time.
  This dark period ended in 1795, when a friend's legacy made possible
  Wordsworth's reunion with his beloved sister Dorothy--the two were never
  again to live apart--and their move in 1797 to Alfoxden House, near
  Bristol. There Wordsworth became friends with a fellow poet, Samuel Taylor
  Coleridge, and they formed a partnership that would change both poets'
  lives and alter the course of English poetry.

  [...]

  Through all these years Wordsworth was assailed by vicious and tireless
  critical attacks by contemptuous reviewers; no great poet has ever had to
  endure worse. But finally, with the publication of The River Duddon in
  1820, the tide began to turn, and by the mid-1830s his reputation had been
  established with both critics and the reading public.

  Wordsworth's last years were given over partly to "tinkering" his poems,
  as the family called his compulsive and persistent habit of revising his
  earlier poems through edition after edition. The Prelude, for instance,
  went through four distinct manuscript versions (1798-99, 1805-06, 1818-20,
  and 1832-39) and was published only after the poet's death in 1850. Most
  readers find the earliest versions of The Prelude and other heavily
  revised poems to be the best, but flashes of brilliance can appear in
  revisions added when the poet was in his seventies.

  Wordsworth succeeded his friend Robert Southey as Britain's poet laureate
  in 1843 and held that post until his own death in 1850. Thereafter his
  influence was felt throughout the rest of the 19th century, though he was
  honoured more for his smaller poems, as singled out by the Victorian
  critic Matthew Arnold, than for his masterpiece, The Prelude. In the 20th
  century his reputation was strengthened both by recognition of his
  importance in the Romantic movement and by an appreciation of the darker
  elements in his personality and verse.

  William Wordsworth was the central figure in the English Romantic
  revolution in poetry. His contribution to it was threefold. First, he
  formulated in his poems and his essays a new attitude toward nature. This
  was more than a matter of introducing nature imagery into his verse; it
  amounted to a fresh view of the organic relation between man and the
  natural world, and it culminated in metaphors of a wedding between nature
  and the human mind, and beyond that, in the sweeping metaphor of nature as
  emblematic of the mind of God, a mind that "feeds upon infinity" and
  "broods over the dark abyss." Second, Wordsworth probed deeply into his
  own sensibility as he traced, in his finest poem, The Prelude, the "growth
  of a poet's mind." The Prelude was in fact the first long autobiographical
  poem. Writing it in a drawn-out process of self-exploration, Wordsworth
  worked his way toward a modern psychological understanding of his own
  nature, and thus more broadly of human nature. Third, Wordsworth placed
  poetry at the centre of human experience; in impassioned rhetoric he
  pronounced poetry to be nothing less than "the first and last of all
  knowledge--it is as immortal as the heart of man," and he then went on to
  create some of the greatest English poetry of his century. It is probably
  safe to say that by the late 20th century he stood in critical estimation
  where Coleridge and Arnold had originally placed him, next to John
  Milton--who stands, of course, next to William Shakespeare.

        -- EB

m.