I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud


"I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" is a lyric poem by William Wordsworth. It is Wordsworth's best-known work.
The poem was inspired by an event on 15 April 1802 in which Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy came across a "long belt" of daffodils. Written some time between 1804 and 1807, it was first published in 1807 in Poems, in Two Volumes, and a revised version was published in 1815.
In a poll conducted in 1995 by the BBC Radio 4 Bookworm programme to determine the nation's favourite poems, I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud came fifth. Often anthologised, the poem is commonly seen as a classic of English Romantic poetry, although Poems, in Two Volumes, in which it first appeared, was poorly reviewed by Wordsworth's contemporaries.

Background

The inspiration for the poem came from a walk Wordsworth took with his sister Dorothy around Glencoyne Bay, Ullswater, in the Lake District. He would draw on this to compose "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" in 1804, inspired by Dorothy's journal entry describing the walk:
in the English Lake District. Ullswater from Gobarrow Park, J.M.W. Turner, watercolor, 1819
At the time he wrote the poem, Wordsworth was living with his wife, Mary Hutchinson, and sister Dorothy at Town End, in Grasmere in the Lake District. Mary contributed what Wordsworth later said were the two best lines in the poem, recalling the "tranquil restoration" of Tintern Abbey,
Wordsworth was aware of the appropriateness of the idea of daffodils which “flash upon that inward eye” because in his 1815 version he added a note commenting on the "flash" as an "ocular spectrum". Coleridge in Biographia Literaria of 1817, while acknowledging the concept of "visual spectrum" as being "well known", described Wordsworth's lines, among others, as "mental bombast". Fred Blick has shown that the idea of flashing flowers was derived from the "Elizabeth Linnaeus Phenomenon", so called because of the discovery of flashing flowers by Elizabeth Linnaeus in 1762. Wordsworth described it as "rather an elementary feeling and simple impression upon the imaginative faculty, rather than an exertion of it..." The phenomenon was reported upon in 1789 and 1794 by Erasmus Darwin, whose work Wordsworth certainly read.
The entire household thus contributed to the poem. Nevertheless, Wordsworth's biographer Mary Moorman notes that Dorothy was excluded from the poem, even though she had seen the daffodils together with Wordsworth. The poem itself was placed in a section of Poems in Two Volumes entitled "Moods of my Mind" in which he grouped together his most deeply felt lyrics. Others included "To a Butterfly", a childhood recollection of chasing butterflies with Dorothy, and "The Sparrow's Nest", in which he says of Dorothy "She gave me eyes, she gave me ears".
The earlier Lyrical Ballads, a collection of poems by both Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, had been first published in 1798 and had started the romantic movement in England. It had brought Wordsworth and the other Lake poets into the poetic limelight. Wordsworth had published nothing new since the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads, and a new publication was eagerly awaited. Wordsworth had, however, gained some financial security by the 1805 publication of the fourth edition of Lyrical Ballads; it was the first from which he enjoyed the profits of copyright ownership. He decided to turn away from the long poem he was working on and devote more attention to publishing Poems in Two Volumes, in which "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" first appeared.

Revised version

Wordsworth revised the poem in 1815. He replaced "dancing" with "golden"; "along" with "beside"; and "ten thousand" with "fluttering and". He then added a stanza between the first and second, and changed "laughing" to "jocund". The last stanza was left untouched.
Pamela Woof notes "The permanence of stars as compared with flowers emphasises the permanence of memory for the poet."
Andrew Motion notes that the final verse replicates in the minds of its readers the very experience it describes.

Reception

Contemporary

Poems, in Two Volumes was poorly reviewed by Wordsworth's contemporaries, including Lord Byron, whom Wordsworth came to despise. Byron said of the volume, in one of its first reviews, "Mr. W ceases to please,... clothing in language not simple, but puerile". Wordsworth himself wrote ahead to soften the thoughts of The Critical Review, hoping his friend Francis Wrangham would push for a softer approach. He succeeded in preventing a known enemy from writing the review, but it did not help; as Wordsworth himself said, it was a case of, "Out of the frying pan, into the fire". Of any positives within Poems, in Two Volumes, the perceived masculinity in "The Happy Warrior", written on the death of Nelson and unlikely to be the subject of attack, was one such. Poems like "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" could not have been further from it. Wordsworth took the reviews stoically.
Even Wordsworth's close friend Coleridge said that the poems contained "mental bombast". Two years later, however, many were more positive about the collection. Samuel Rogers said that he had "dwelt particularly on the beautiful idea of the 'Dancing Daffodils'", and this was echoed by Henry Crabb Robinson. Critics were rebutted by public opinion, and the work gained in popularity and recognition, as did Wordsworth.
Poems, in Two Volumes was savagely reviewed by Francis Jeffrey in the Edinburgh Review, but the Review was well known for its dislike of the Lake Poets. As Sir Walter Scott put it at the time of the poem's publication, "Wordsworth is harshly treated in the Edinburgh Review, but Jeffrey gives... as much praise as he usually does", and indeed Jeffrey praised the sonnets.
Upon the author's death in 1850, The Westminster Review called "I wandered lonely as a Cloud" "very exquisite".

Modern usage

The poem is presented and taught in many schools in the English-speaking world: these include the English Literature GCSE course in some examination boards in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland; and in the current Higher School Certificate syllabus topic, Inner Journeys, New South Wales, Australia. It is also frequently used as a part of the Junior Certificate English Course in Ireland as part of the Poetry Section. The poem is also included in the syllabus for the Grade X ICSE examination, India.
In The Middle Passage, V. S. Naipaul refers to a campaign in Trinidad against the use of the poem as a set text because daffodils do not grow in the tropics.
Because it is one of the best-known poems in the English language, it has frequently been the subject of parody and satire.
The English prog rock band Genesis parodies the poem in the opening lyrics to the song "The Colony of Slippermen", from their 1974 album The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway.
It was the subject of a 1985 Heineken beer TV advertisement, which depicts a poet having difficulties with his opening lines, only able to come up with "I walked about a bit on my own" or "I strolled around without anyone else" until downing a Heineken and reaching the immortal "I wandered lonely as a cloud". The assertion that Wordsworth originally hit on "I wandered lonely as a cow" until Dorothy told him "William, you can't put that" occasionally finds its way into print.

Daffodil tourism

The daffodils Wordsworth saw would have been wild daffodils. However, the National Gardens Scheme runs a Daffodil Day every year, allowing visitors to view daffodils in Cumbrian gardens including Dora's Field, which was planted by Wordsworth. In 2013, the event was held in March, when unusually cold weather meant that relatively few of the plants were in flower. April, the month that Wordsworth saw the daffodils at Ullswater, is usually a good time to view them, although the Lake District climate has changed since the poem was written.
Anniversaries
In 2004, in celebration of the 200th anniversary of the writing of the poem, it was also read aloud by 150,000 British schoolchildren, aimed both at improving recognition of poetry, and in support of Marie Curie Cancer Care.
In 2007, Cumbria Tourism released a rap version of the poem, featuring MC Nuts, a Lake District red squirrel, in an attempt to capture the "YouTube generation" and attract tourists to the Lake District. Published on the two-hundredth anniversary of the original, it attracted wide media attention. It was welcomed by the Wordsworth Trust, but attracted the disapproval of some commentators.
In 2015, events marking the 200th anniversary of the publication of the revised version were celebrated at Rydal Mount.

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