( 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.
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