Cummings Study Guide

William Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” is a lyric poem focusing on the poet's response to the beauty of nature. (A lyric poem presents the deep feelings and emotions of the poet rather than telling a story or presenting a witty observation.) The final version of the poem was first published in Collected Poems in 1815. An earlier version was published in Poems in Two Volumes in 1807 as a three-stanza poem. The final version has four stanzas. Wordsworth wrote the earlier version in 1804, two years after seeing the lakeside daffodils that inspired the poem.

Setting and Background Information

The poem recaptures a moment on April 15, 1802, when Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy, were walking near a lake at Grasmere, Cumbria County, England, and came upon a shore lined with daffodils. Grasmere is in northwestern England's Lake District, between Morecambe Bay on the south and Solway Firth on the north. The Lake District extends twenty-five miles east to west and thirty miles north to south. Among its attractions are England’s highest mountain, Scafell Pike (3,210 feet), and Esthwaite Lake and other picturesque meres radiating outward, like the points of a star, from the town of Grasmere. Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy, moved to a cottage at Grasmere in 1799. After Wordsworth married in 1802, his wife resided there also. The family continued to live there until 1813. The Lake District was the haunt of not only Wordsworth but also poets Robert Southey, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Thomas De Quincey. Dorothy, who kept a diary, described what she and her brother saw on that April day in 1802:

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Stanza 1

Alliteration: lonely as a cloud (line 1).
Simile: Comparison (using as) of the speaker's solitariness to that of a cloud (line 1).
Personification: Comparison of the cloud to a lonely human. (line 1)
Alliteration: high o'er vales and Hills (line 2).
Alliteration: When all at once (line 3). (Note that the w and o have the same consonant sound.)
Personification/Metaphor: Comparison of daffodils to a crowd of people (lines 3-4).
Alliteration: Beside the Lake, beneath the trees,
Personification/Metaphor: Comparison of daffodils to dancing humans (lines 4, 6).
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Structure and Rhyme Scheme

The poem contains four stanzas of six lines each. In each stanza, the first line rhymes with the third and the second with the fourth. The stanza then ends with a rhyming couplet. Wordsworth unifies the content of the poem by focusing the first three stanzas on the experience at the lake and the last stanza on the memory of that experience.
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Meter

.......The lines in the poem are in iambic tetrameter, as demonstrated in the third stanza:

Themes

1. Nature' s beauty uplifts the human spirit. Lines 15, 23, and 24 specifically refer to this theme.
2. People sometimes fail to appreciate nature's wonders as they go about their daily routines. Lines 17 and 18 suggest this theme.
3. Nature thrives unattended. The daffodils proliferate in splendor along the shore of the lake without the need for human attention.
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Wordsworth and Romanticism

In English literature, Wordsworth and his friend, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, were pioneers in the development of the Romantic Movement, or romanticism, a movement that championed imagination and emotions as more powerful than reason and systematic thinking. “What I feel about a person or thing,” a romantic poet might have said, “is more important than what scientific investigation, observation, and experience would say about that person or thing.” Intuition–that voice within that makes judgments and decisions without the aid of reason—was a guiding force to the romantic poet. So was nature. Romanticism began in the mid-1700's as a rebellion against the principles of classicism. Whereas classicism espoused the literary ideals of ancient Greece and Rome—objectivity, emotional restraint, and formal rules of composition that writers were expected to follow—romanticism promoted subjectivity, emotional effusiveness, and freedom of expression . “I want to write my way,” the romantic poet might have said, “not the way that writers in ancient times decreed that I should write.”

Study Questions and Writing Topics

1. In the preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800), written by Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Wordsworth presents his definition of poetry:

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