I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
The Daffodils [“I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” ]
When we were in the woods beyond Gowbarrow park we saw a few daffodils close to the water side, we fancied that the lake had floated the seed ashore & that the little colony had so sprung up — But as we went along there were more & yet more & at last under the boughs of the trees, we saw that there was a long belt of them along the shore, about the breadth of a country turnpike road.
I never saw daffodils so beautiful they grew among the mossy stones about & about them, some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness & the rest tossed and reeled and danced & seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the Lake, they looked so gay ever dancing ever changing. This wind blew directly over the lake to them. There was here & there a little knot & a few stragglers a few yards higher up but they were so few as not to disturb the simplicity & unity & life of that one busy highway — We rested again & again. The Bays were stormy & we heard the waves at different distances & in the middle of the water like the Sea.
—Dorothy Wordsworth, The Grasmere Journal Thursday, 15 April 1802
“I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” [“The Daffodils”] is a lyric poem by William Wordsworth.Wordsworth born in 1770 is considered one of the two fathers of the British Romantic Movement. In 1789 William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote a collection of poems titled “Lyrical Ballads” which emulated the romantic poems that were becoming increasingly popular in Germany and France.
According to the theory, the poetry originated in “emotions recollected in a state of tranquility”; the poet then surrendered to the emotion, so that the tranquility dissolved, and the emotion remained in the poem. Inspired by the beauty of northern England’s Lake District the poems of William Wordsworth attempted to capture human emotions in words. The explicit emphasize on feeling, simplicity, and the pleasure of beauty over rhetoric, ornament, and formally changed the course of English poetry replacing the elaborate yet regimented classical forms of Alexander Pope (1688 – 1744) and John Dryden (1631 – 1700) with a new Romantic sensibility. Wordsworth’s most important legacy, besides his lovely, timeless poems, is his launching of the Romantic era, opening the gates for later writers such as John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelly and Lord Byron in England.
Following the success of Lyrical Ballads and his subsequent poem The Prelude, a massive autobiography in verse form, Wordsworth moved to the stately house at Rydal Mount where he lived, with Dorothy, his wife Mary, and his children, until his death in 1850. Wordsworth became the dominant force in English poetry while still quite a young man, and he lived to be quite old; his later years were marked by an increasing aristocratic temperament and a general alienation from the younger Romantics whose work he had inspired. Byron—the only important poet to become more popular than Wordsworth during Wordsworth’s lifetime—in particular saw him as a kind of sell-out, writing in his sardonic preface to Don Juan that the once-liberal Wordsworth had “turned out a Tory” at last. The last decades of Wordsworth’s life, however, were spent as Poet Laureate of England, and until his death he was widely considered the most important author in England.
The plot of “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” is simple. In the 1815 revision, Wordsworth described it as “rather an elementary feeling and simple impression (approaching to the nature of an ocular spectrum) upon the imaginative faculty, rather than an exertion of it.
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.
Pamela Wolfe notes “The permanence of stars as compared with flowers emphasizes the permanence of memory for the poet.”
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:
Andrew Motion notes that the final verse replicates in the minds of its readers the very experience it describes.
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.
Whenever the poet is in his ‘pensive mood’ and being ‘vacant’, perhaps emotionally and physically, the good memory of the daffodils flash back to him as a ‘bliss’ and ‘pleasure’, which release him for a while out of the loneliness and ‘solitude’ that he is experiencing. Every human yearns for such locations where they could experience such inspirations. The ancient tropical island of Sri Lanka is abound with such natural attractions, well trodden as well as off the beaten track. Nuwara Eliya of Sri Lanka Holidays Health Triangle is such a location, a highland health sanatorium where you could spend few days during your touring holidays in Sri Lanka.
Daffodils at Hakgala Botanical Gardens in Sri Lanka Holidays Nuwara Eliya.
Hakgala Gardens, the highest set Botanical Garden in the world
The Hakgala Botanical Gardens was first established in 1861 under the curatorship of William Nock, JK Nock and JJ Nock. It lies under the Hakgala Peak, between 5000 – 6000 feet in elevation – the highest set Botanical Gardens in the world. It boasts 100 year old Monetary Cypress trees from California, Japanese Cedars, Himalayan Pines and English Oak.
