“I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, William Wordsworth”
The “Perrine’s-based” primary approach to thoroughly reading any poem is via asking questions among which the following four have the utmost importance; “who is the speaker?”, “what is the occasion?”, “what is the central purpose of the poem?”, and “by what means is that purpose achieved?” Thus, henceforth these questions are to be answered based on the poem “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” by William Wordsworth.
The narrator of this poem is obviously first person singular but to who and how old this narrator might be we shall later on refer. The poem starts with a simile, claiming a similarity between the narrator and a cloud on their both being lonely and wandering over lands of nature and freedom. Here, it is to the readers’ benefit to consider the difference between alone and lonely and see why the poet decided to choose one and not the other. “Lonely”, based on Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, 8th edition, PC Version, means “unhappy because you have no friends or people to talk to” and “alone” means “without any other people”. There are two key points in the poet’s preferring lonely over alone: the first one is that naturally a cloud is a collection of inseparable tinier elements which visually are capable of forming many clouds if driven away from each other or just one if left undisturbed, so a cloud can never be a good example of being alone while it is possibly among the best similes for feeling lonely among a dozen many since a cloud is never out of society; the second point reveals the juvenile secret that the narrator tries to conceal from the audience. By calling himself lonely [l. 1] the narrator exhibits how sad and friendless he is while he pretends to be the free, happy character that has life and movement in his hands. Whereby in line 22, as he is mature and experienced both loneliness and being among friends, he calls the same situation “solitude” and is aware how ignorant he has been to the potential pleasure of years ago when he was much younger and in want of company of any nature [ll. 4, 7, 16] but mostly unsuccessful in getting into any and lonely. The poem looks like a coming-of-age narration of a man, starting at his teens and ending at his middle ages; presumably not a woman’s because beck Wordsworth’s time women could not be that free even in their imagination. The narrator is either relating to himself or some immature juvenile his life.
The narrator tells the story of how freely he wandered about valleys and hills like a lonely cloud when suddenly he notices a host of carefree daffodils by the lake under the trees, dancing and fluttering, continuous like shining and twinkling endless stars of the milky way. The daffodils surpassed the waves in the jollity of their dance and existence. He then says were he the poet that he is now by then he could not but be happy although being immature and mesmerized by the enchantments of nature back then let him gaze and only gaze vacantly at the jocund beauty. Afterwards, he tells something of his contemporary life in which he often has times of being lonely, thoughtless and mesmerized by his own memories of his pleasant passionate past resembling the dance of daffodils.
At this point the theme of the poem is still under a shady cloud itself, thus it is right to be pointed out here. The central purpose of this poem is that by age, bitter concepts of life such as loneliness change into sweet pleasant repose such as solitude.
Let the magnifier be used to further on elaborate on some of the literary devices the poet took advantage of in order for the poem to serve the purpose. [l. 4] The word “host” has been professionally used here to raise an ambiguity as whether the word refers to the number of the flowers or it refers to host in relation with guest so the daffodils as in the famous nursery rhyme and also “Daffodowndilly” by A. A. Milne are the first host of spring and its passion and joy. So there is also personification here if host is looked at as a host to the carefree nature of youth. There are many lines that benefit from imagery created by the precise description of the poet [ll. 2, 4-6, 7-13].This descriptive poem is structured in four rhymed sestets and the rhyming scheme is ABABCC, DEDEFF, GHGHII, JKJKLL.
