Imagination for Loneliness: Wordsworth’s “daffodils”

Adarsha Shrestha

English 110

Chris Dowling

Imagination for Loneliness: Wordsworth’s “Daffodils”

It’s not how much friends you got or, how much you interact with people. It’s how one’s heart feels and determine the Loneliness. The Poem “Daffodils” by William Wordsworth is a poem by a lonely poet in the industrializing era who’s feeling spiritually lonely in front of the fast-growing world. This poem is based on the early-eighteenth century, when all the world is advancing scientifically, new powers are arising as well as people are getting distant from each other. That’s why the poet gets close to the nature to overcome his loneliness and uses his imagination to find happiness. In this poem, Wordsworth uses the poetic/imaginative process to demonstrates the nature’s beauty and its associates, truth, and bliss.

This poem is written from the first-person perspective, which is the poet himself. William Wordsworth was born in England in 1770, showed his affinity for nature with the famous poem “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”. He became England’s poet laureate in 1843, a role he held until his death in 1850. He was writing an epic autobiographical poem “The Prelude”, which he revised throughout his life and during that he produced other poetry like “Lucy”, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” which was written during the war between the England and France. He also wrote a preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads; which described his poetry as being inspired by powerful emotions and would come to be a declaration of Romantic principles. And in the “Daffodils”, the three lines of first stanza “A host, of golden daffodils;/ Beside the lake, beneath the trees, / Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.,” (lines 4-6) makes him sound almost like that of the romantic poet. Wordsworth experienced many different changes during his lifetime and because of that, he wrote poems based on them like the “Daffodils”; the destruction of Nature because of industrialization, “Lyrical Ballads”; a romantic piece inspired by his love affair with Annette Vallon, and other works that mourned deaths of his two children.

The poet has used Daffodil (which is a flower generally white and yellow) as a keyword to represent the power and beauty of the natural world. In line 5-6, Daffodils are shown to be abundant where he lives and they are stretched in a line around the bay of a lake, bordered by the water on one side and trees on the other. The day is windy enough to create waves on the lake and to make the flowers bob up and down in concert (Shmoop). This suggests the hometown of the writer which is some part of the English countryside. Such places are best for a living because of silence, fresh air, fresh water and other things which make you fall in love with Nature’s beauty. The speaker sees the life instead of the valves and hills and feels a connection with Nature. This is evident in the lines where he uses personification, “Ten thousand saw I at a glance, / Tossing their heads in sprightly dance” (11-12). However, despite being close to the nature, he still feels lonely inside. Because of that, he uses his experience and deeper understanding for creative process (the imagination), in which he creates the world where he can enjoy himself to overcome his loneliness. He finds the happiness, but the fake one as “Which is the bliss of solitude;” (22).

Daffodils as Nature, recalls an experience or reflects emotions. Here, the daffodils are more than the nature itself because they are his companion and a source of personal joy. The very simplicity of enjoying nature is perfectly manifested by the austerity of the poem: the four stanzas simply begin with daffodils, describe daffodils, compare daffodils to something else, and end on daffodils, respectively. Wordsworth has subtly put forward more than just an ode to nature here. Every stanza mentions dancing and the third stanza even calls the daffodils as “a show.” Here, Wordsworth is putting forward the idea that nature can offer similar joys and even give you “wealth” instead of taking it from you, undoing the idea that beauty is attached to earthly money and social status.