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William Wordsworth (1807, revised 1815) · Eduqas Poetry Anthology
Eduqasby William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth (1770-1850) was born in Cockermouth, in Cumberland, and lived in the Lake District for most of his life. With Samuel Taylor Coleridge he published Lyrical Ballads (1798), a founding book of English Romantic poetry, and he became Poet Laureate in 1843.
On 15 April 1802 Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy, walking by Ullswater near Gowbarrow Park, came upon a great mass of daffodils stretching along the shore of the lake, and Dorothy described them in her journal. Wordsworth wrote the poem two years later, in 1804, at Town End in Grasmere, where they lived, and it was published in Poems, in Two Volumes (1807). In 1815 he added the second stanza and changed several words. Eduqas prints that later version.
In a note he dictated late in life, Wordsworth said "The two best lines in it are by Mary": his wife, Mary Hutchinson, whom he married in 1802. His editor William Knight identified them as lines 21 and 22, "They flash upon that inward eye / Which is the bliss of solitude".
“I wandered lonely as a cloud”
The opening simile makes the speaker solitary and aimless, drifting above the world like a cloud. It sets up the change the poem will make: by the end, being alone is no longer lonely.
“A host, of golden daffodils”
"host" suggests a great crowd, even an army or a host of angels, so the flowers seem to arrive all at once and in force. "golden" makes them precious, and looks ahead to the "wealth" of stanza 3.
“Ten thousand saw I at a glance”
Hyperbole: no one counts ten thousand flowers at a glance. The number gives the size of the experience, not the size of the field, and the inverted order ("saw I") puts it first.
“A poet could not but be gay, / In such a jocund company”
In its older sense "gay" means merry. The lonely wanderer of line 1 is now in "company", and the personified flowers are good company: "jocund" means cheerful. The joy is caught from nature, almost against his will ("could not but").
“What wealth the show to me had brought”
The "wealth" is not money but a memory that pays out for years. At the time he "little thought" what he had been given; only later does he understand its value.
“They flash upon that inward eye / Which is the bliss of solitude”
The "inward eye" is memory and imagination. The verb "flash" makes the daffodils return suddenly and brightly, and solitude, which began the poem as loneliness, becomes "bliss". Wordsworth said these were the poem’s best lines, and that his wife Mary wrote them.
“And then my heart with pleasure fills, / And dances with the daffodils”
The poem ends with the speaker joining the dance. In stanza 1 the flowers danced while he watched; now his heart "dances with" them. Memory lets him take part in what he once only saw.
“I wandered lonely as a cloud”
The speaker is drifting and alone, high above the world. The simile sets up the poem’s change: from loneliness to "the bliss of solitude".
“Fluttering and dancing in the breeze”
The daffodils dance, toss their heads and keep "jocund company": they are presented as a joyful crowd of people. The stressed first syllable of "Fluttering" makes the rhythm dance with them.
“Continuous as the stars that shine / And twinkle on the milky way”
Comparing the flowers to the stars of the Milky Way makes the scene endless and almost heavenly. This stanza was added in 1815, as if the memory had grown larger with time.
“Ten thousand saw I at a glance”
The impossible number expresses how overwhelming the sight was. The inverted word order puts "Ten thousand" first, where it strikes the reader at once, as the flowers struck the speaker.
“I gazed—and gazed—but little thought”
The dashes and the repeated "gazed" slow the line and hold the moment, as the speaker stands absorbed. "but little thought" then admits that he did not yet know what he was being given.
“For oft, when on my couch I lie”
After three stanzas in the past, the present tense ("I lie", "They flash", "fills", "dances") shows the memory returning again and again. The walk happened once; its effect goes on.
“They flash upon that inward eye”
Memory becomes an "inward eye" that can see the daffodils again whenever they "flash" upon it. The metaphor puts nature inside the mind, where solitude can enjoy it.