Summary
The speaker says that, wandering like a cloud floating
above hills and valleys, he encountered a field of daffodils beside
a lake. The dancing, fluttering flowers stretched endlessly along
the shore, and though the waves of the lake danced beside the flowers,
the daffodils outdid the water in glee. The speaker says that a
poet could not help but be happy in such a joyful company of flowers.
He says that he stared and stared, but did not realize what wealth
the scene would bring him. For now, whenever he feels “vacant” or
“pensive,” the memory flashes upon “that inward eye / That is the
bliss of solitude,” and his heart fills with pleasure, “and dances
with the daffodils.”
Form
The four six-line stanzas of this poem follow a quatrain-couplet
rhyme scheme: ABABCC. Each line is metered in iambic tetrameter.
Commentary
This simple poem, one of the loveliest and most famous
in the Wordsworth canon, revisits the familiar subjects of nature
and memory, this time with a particularly (simple) spare, musical
eloquence. The plot is extremely simple, depicting the poet’s wandering
and his discovery of a field of daffodils by a lake, the memory
of which pleases him and comforts him when he is lonely, bored,
or restless. The characterization of the sudden occurrence of a
memory—the daffodils “flash upon the inward eye / Which is the bliss
of solitude”—is psychologically acute, but the poem’s main brilliance
lies in the reverse personification of its early stanzas. The speaker
is metaphorically compared to a natural object, a cloud—“I wandered
lonely as a cloud / That floats on high...”, and the daffodils are
continually personified as human beings, dancing and “tossing their heads”
in “a crowd, a host.” This technique implies an inherent unity between
man and nature, making it one of Wordsworth’s most basic and effective
methods for instilling in the reader the feeling the poet so often describes
himself as experiencing.
