I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud was published in 1815 by William Wordsworth, an English poet known as one of the founders of Romanticism in poetry. The poem is about experiencing the joy of connecting with nature, based on when Woodsworth went for a walk and saw a strip of thousands of 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.
Summary & Meaning
The poem starts with the writer telling a story of how he wandered alone, just like a cloud floating over a vast landscape. He saw thousands of daffodils beneath the trees next to a lake. He described them as “fluttering and dancing” along with the wind.
He compared the daffodils along the bay to the stars in the Milky Way, continuously stretching in a long line. While he watched them happily move in the wind, he estimated that there were about ten thousand of them.
The waves in the lake appeared to be dancing as well, but the daffodils seemed to dance more joyfully than them. The sight of it made him happy, and as he stared at them, he didn’t realize how much that moment would mean to him in the future.
The last verse in the poem is the only one written in present tense. Whenever the writer is lying on his couch, whether he is deep in thought or not, he thinks about the daffodils. It fills him with happiness as he remembers the sight of the daffodils swaying in the wind.
