Reading William Wordsworth (II)

“I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud” continues the theme of what nature has to teach us. (The title is the first line, so you might see variations on what someone might title the poem.) That first line is so curious and provocative that you’ll hear people quote it as the meaning is layered. Sometimes it’s hard to shake off pondering its meaning. Is it a literal man who compares himself to a cloud? Or is he a literal cloud? What does it mean to be a cloud? Why is the cloud lonely? (Visually solitary, perhaps far from others.) He both is and is not a cloud. Perhaps his thoughts were elsewhere or maybe is surveying the scene below as a cloud: “high o’er hills and vales.” He’s playing this ambiguity up.

In reality, Wordsworth wasn’t alone but with his sister, but the line works for the poem. The loneliness is brought into contrast with a “crowd” or “host” of daffodils. Those words indicate a large number, but they also indicate grouping as well as meaning. At first the daffodils are a crowd, which people often feel left out of, but they soon become a “host” so that the speaker feels invited to join as a guest, which serves the poem. The daffodils dance in a manner that remains with him—long afterwards as he recalls as “wealth the show to had brought” since it transforms melancholy into joy at the recollection.

“My Heart Leaps up” not only aids “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” which borrows the last three lines but also his long narrative poem, “Ruth.” The opening of “My Heart Leaps up” mirrors “I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud” except at the wonder of rainbows this time. On this occasion, though, he is pointing out how the rainbow had an effect on him as a child (the effect he calls “natural piety” – a kind of religion or respect or reverence of nature—see also Genesis 9. Note the contrast of Nature combined with human intellectual practice of faith as if they belonged together as “natural”). It still affects him as a man and hopefully, as an elderly man, which begets the famous line “The Child is father of the Man.”

“Nuns Fret Not” is one Wordsworth’s best. He details how people can be happy living and working in small rooms at small jobs:

The Hermits are contented with their Cells....

the prison, unto which we doom

Ourselves, no prison is

The only problem—if it is a problem—is that it concludes upon itself: the sonnet. That there is solace in small things. It recommends itself and the form through looking at these other people, things and occasions. As if the sonnet or poetic form were a greater jar. Most would not claim a poem has greater worth than people. But of course a poem can attempt to contain people and this small poem stood in rebellion against previous ideas of what poetry should be. Or maybe it can be reversed or re-versed to suggest the opposite: that the sonnet can be satisfying as small, so can we be.