I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud by William Wordsworth
“I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” by William Wordsworth, a poem that discloses the relationship between nature and human beings: how nature can affect one’s emotion and behavior with its motion and sound. The words the author adopted in this poem are interconnected and related to each other. They are simple yet profound, letting us understand how much William Wordsworth related his works to nature and the universe. It also explained to us why William Wordsworth is one of the greatest and the most influential English romantic poets in history. As Robert DiYanni says in his book, “with much of Wordsworth’s poetry, this lyric reflects his deep love of nature, his vision of a unified world, and his celebration of the power of memory and imagination.”
In “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” William Wordsworth uses various natural phenomena, such as clouds, daffodils and waves, as devices to characterize his speaker’s different stages of emotion and feeling. The first few lines of the poem showed us the speaker’s initial emotion. His mind is directionless, but also alienated and isolated in the universe. “I wandered lonely as a cloud, that floats on high o’er vales and hills,” the speaker is described as a “cloud,” lonely, aimless, and cruising quickly and lightly through “vales” and “hills.” A vision of the daffodils moved him to a state of being connected to something, as the poet wrote, “When all at once I saw a crowd, a host, of golden daffodils.” The concord and harmony of the “dancing daffodils” replaced his feeling of loneliness; he is no longer a “lonely cloud.” As the twinkling stars in the milky way, and the sparkling dancing waves appeared in the second stanz...
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... Lonely as a Cloud” is a masterpiece of work from William Wordsworth. He implicated nature with human actions and feelings, bringing the daffodils, the waves and other aspects of nature to life. “The emphasis on the happiness of the daffodils and their large number serves to point up sharply the isolation and dispiritedness of the speaker,” as Robert DiYanni quoted. The various words together with the other elements that William Wordsworth constructed in the poem not only reflected joy, but also nature’s harmony with human beings and their coexistence on earth.
Bibliography:
DiYanni, Robert. Literature: Reading fiction, Poetry, and Drama. Compact Ed. The United States of America. McGraw-Hill. 2000. P.1444
DiYanni, Robert. Literature: Reading fiction, Poetry, and Drama. Compact Ed. The United States of America. McGraw-Hill. 2000. P.424
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Percy Bysse Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind is a dramatization of man’s useless and “dead thoughts” (63) and Shelley’s desire from the Autumn wind to drive these “over the universe” (65) so that not only he but man can start anew. The thoughts are first compared to the leaves of trees but as the poem progresses the thoughts are paralleled with the clouds and finally the “sapless foliage of the ocean” (40). Shelley personifies himself with the seasons of the Earth and begs the West Wind to drive him away thus allowing him to lost and become the very seasons. In the end Shelley’s metamorphosis is realized and he becomes the very wind and the power with which he humanized throughout the poem.
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I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud – An Analysis I chose the poem "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" by William Wordsworth because I like the imagery in it of dancing daffodils. Upon closer examination, I realized that most of this imagery is created by the many metaphors and similes Wordsworth uses. In the first line, Wordsworth says "I wandered lonely like a cloud. " This is a simile comparing the wonder of a man to a cloud drifting through the sky. I suppose the wandering cloud is lonely because there is nothing up there that high in the sky besides it.
In “I wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” William Wordsworth accomplishes his ideal of nature by using personification, alliteration, and simile within his poem to convey to the reader how nature’s beauty uplifts his spirits and takes him away from his boring daily routine. Wordsworth relates himself in solidarity to that of a cloud wandering alone, “I wandered lonely as a cloud” (line 1). Comparing the cloud and himself to that of a lonely human in low spirits of isolation, simultaneously the author compares the daffodils he comes across as he “floats on high o’er vales and hills” (line 2) to that of a crowd of people dancing (lines 3-6 and again in 12). Watching and admiring the dancing daffodils as he floats on by relating them to various beauties of
In William Wordsworth’s poems, the role of nature plays a more reassuring and pivotal r ole within them. To Wordsworth’s poetry, interacting with nature represents the forces of the natural world. Throughout the three poems, Resolution and Independence, Tintern Abbey, and Michael, which will be discussed in this essay, nature is seen prominently as an everlasting- individual figure, which gives his audience as well as Wordsworth, himself, a sense of console. In all three poems, Wordsworth views nature and human beings as complementary elements of a sum of a whole, recognizing that humans are a sum of nature. Therefore, looking at the world as a soothing being of which he is a part of, Wordsworth looks at nature and sees the benevolence of the divinity aspects behind them.
The poem “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” by William Wordsworth is about the poet’s mental journey in nature where he remembers the daffodils that give him joy when he is lonely and bored. The poet is overwhelmed by nature’s beauty where he thought of it while lying alone on his couch. The poem shows the relationship between nature and the poet, and how nature’s motion and beauty influences the poet’s feelings and behaviors for the good. Moreover, the process that the speaker goes through is recollected that shows that he isolated from society, and is mentally in nature while he is physically lying on his couch. Therefore, William Wordsworth uses figurative language and syntax and form throughout the poem to express to the readers the peace and beauty of nature, and to symbolize the adventures that occurred in his mental journey.
Nature as imagery is a largely spread idea in most of Frosts poems. However he is not telling us about nature or trying to explain nature to us, rather, he is using it as a source of narrative to metaphorically position something else. This, we can deduce,...