Daffodils by William Wordsworth and Miracle on St. David's Day by Gillian Clarke

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Daffodils by William Wordsworth and Miracle on St. David's Day by Gillian Clarke

Each of the Wordsworth and Clarke poems show how the poets have been

inspired to write about daffodils. In 'Miracle on St. David's Day',

Gillian Clarke actually refers to Wordsworth's poem within her own.

The poems however differ in structure and their responses to the

daffodils are different. All of the poems use personification but the

poems are written in contrasting style.

William Wordsworth was born in England in 1770, Wordsworth attended

Cambridge University and afterwards went on a walking tour of France

and Switzerland. When war broke out in 1793 he returned to England,

moving in with his sister Dorothy in Dorset. It was during this time

he discovered his calling as a poet with a principal theme of the

common man close to nature. In 1798 he was central figure in the

advent of Romantic Poetry, together with Coleridge writing the Lyrical

Ballads, which began with Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner" and ended with

Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey". He spent a year in Germany, then settled

down in Dove Cottage, Grasmere with his wife Mary Hutchison in 1802,

where he wrote his poetic autobiography The Prelude and two other

books of poems. He was selected poet laureate in 1843 and died in

1850.

Gillian Clarke was born in Cardiff, Wales in 1937. She writes about

landscape and the rural life of Wales, as well as from the point of

view of a mother. She begins her poems with two ideas coming together.

The flash of inspiration is the connection between one thing and

another. She writes at the interface between past and present,

traditional and modern.

The...

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unawareness. I think it shows unawareness as the daffodils are a

"jocund company" as they are "dancing in the breeze", yet "little

thought is given". Daffodils can easily be stood on, squashed and

killed, and this may of happened to his love which the daffodils most

likely represent, it was squashed and killed as he had not appreciated

what he had by thinking nothing of it. The daffodils then become a

memory, and although he looks back on the past, the past linked with

the daffodils - nature, blissfully he may also look back with regret,

as he may seem in "bliss of solitude" but something is now missing, so

the daffodils could represent regret and possibly misery. Yet at the

same time the first thoughts of love and happiness, as these are

remembered in the memory, the regret is the after thought of the

memory.

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