William Wordsworth: The Romantic Poet and Nature Lover

William Wordsworth: “I wandered lonely as a cloud”

He was born in England, 1770. He was a poet who helped to found the Romantic Movement in English Literature. He wrote “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” and worked with Samuel Taylor Coleridge on Lyrical Ballads, 1798. The collection which contained Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey”, introduced romanticism to English poetry. He also showed his affinity for nature through some of his poems and he became England’s poet laureate in 1843, a role that he held until he died in 1850. William Wordsworth visited France in the middle of the French Revolution and was a supporter of the new government and republican ideals. Furthermore, he is considered to belong to the Lake School, the first generation of romantic poets. For him, nature helps to grow up, that means the poet has to be lonely to create. In I Wondered Lonely as a Cloud, a poet’s wandering and his discovery of a field of daffodils by a lake, the memory of which places and comforts him when he is lonely, bored, or restless. The poem focuses on the poet’s response to the beauty of nature. He shows deep feelings and emotions through the poem. The form of the poem reflects four six-line stanzas and it’s a quatrain couplet with a rhyme-scheme ABABCC. In the first stanza, we can appreciate that the speaker is the first person of singular “I”. In the first line, we have a simile: “I wandered lonely as a cloud”. In this stanza, we can also identify alliteration in the second and fifth line: “high...hills” “beside...beneath” and “daffodils” is a key word. The second stanza “daffodils” is the subject because they are important to the author. The author practically humanizes those flowers: “ten thousand saw I at a glance, tossing their heads in sprightly dance”. The third stanza begins with a personification: “the waves beside them danced” and is followed by an enjambment “but they Out-did...” Another repetition can be found in the fifth line of this stanza: “gazed...gazed”. These three stanzas focus on the experience of the poet at the lake. In the last stanza on the memory of that experience, the author has a house near to the Lake District, where his sister Dorothy and him were walking daffodils near a lake at six Grasmere and came upon a shoreline with daffodils. The poem itself tries to show us that nature’s beauty uplifts the human spirit, people sometimes fail to appreciate nature’s wonders as they go about their daily routines and nature thrives unattempted. As a conclusion, William Blake in this poem expresses his joy as he has just married. He is a romantic poet who loves writing in peace.