Today’s Poem: I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

Wordsworth makes a good investment

Claude Monet, Jonquilles, 1885 (Wikimedia Commons)

You know “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” of course: the poem about flowers along the edge of bay — the sight of which was so rich that, years later, the poet remembers them, “And then my heart with pleasure fills, / And dances with the daffodils.”

This poem by William Wordsworth (1770–1850) is (as we all used to have to learn in college literature courses our freshman year) an archetypal, perhaps the archetypal, Romantic poem in English. It turns the human to the natural (the poet is wandering as a cloud, after all), even while it turns the natural to the human (employing active verbs — stretch, dance, flash — for the daffodils). And, most of all, the poem concerns one of the “spots of time” that Sally Thomas and I have been exploring here in Poems Ancient and Modern: “past, present and future time coming together in a single but durable golden moment,” as the poet laureate, Andrew Motion, would later put it.

But how about a mischievous alternative? What if we take “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” not as drawn from the anti-rationalist Romantic tide of culture and ideas in the early 1800s? What if we read it instead as drawn from the other pieces of the Birth of the Modern? What if we understand it as an Adam Smith-like poem about banking and the effects of compound interest?

In the spring of 1802, Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy saw a field of daffodils as they walked near Ullswater in the Lake District. Around 1804, Wordsworth drafted the poem, publishing the the final version of the poem in 1815. In four stanzas, each with six lines of iambic tetrameter rhymed ababcc, the poet takes us from his encounter with the flowers to the rewards he would later reap from the memory.

Vintage postcard of the Lake District (unknown creator)

Perhaps we should take seriously the fact that the first mention of the daffodils is as “golden.” He loved the sight — “but little thought / What wealth the show to me had brought.” Any why wealth? Because later, lying on his couch and far from spring’s display along the margins of a lake, he can appreciate the earned interest of that banked memory, as the daffodils “flash upon that inward eye / Which is the bliss of solitude.”

The point of indulging this financial reading of “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” is not to demand it as the best reading — much less the only reading. It is, instead, to remind us that the great works of art are never completed by interpretation. There’s always more. The great poems read us, more than we read them. They test the capaciousness of our intelligence and imagination.

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I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

by William Wordsworth

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.

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News

• Joseph Bottum will be teaching a class on the sonnet as an art form, reading classic English examples of the form and workshopping the students’ own compositions, at Robert Frost’s old farm in Derry, New Hampshire. The dates are August 16–18, 2024, and the keynote speech will be from our friend A.M. Juster (whose poem “Confused about the Ivy League” was featured recently here on Poems Ancient and Modern). Other workshops will be led by the poets Ned Balbo, Jane Satterfield, Midge Goldberg, and Brian Brodeur. Slots in the workshops are limited, so register soon.

• Meanwhile, with “The Public Auden” in the new edition of the Washington Examiner magazine, Bottum explores a little further his thinking about the public voice in poetry, with a look at the recent critical edition of W.H. Auden’s 1955 volume, The Shield of Achilles. “Whatever that public voice was, it reached something like a peak in the title poem” of the volume. Auden writes, That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third, / Were axioms to him, who’d never heard / Of any world where promises were kept, / Or one could weep because another wept. And “this is as great a moral statement as the second half of the 20th century provided. This is the public voice, spoken with authority.” [paywalled]

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