Learning Paths » 5A Interacting
Read the poem and identify the setting in stanzas 1-3 and in stanza 4.
The setting in stanzas 1-3 is a natural landscape, as a matter of fact the speaking voice is looking to the daffodils, which are sited "beside the lake, beneath the trees".
The setting in the 4th stanza is the poet's house, where in an unspecified moment of the day the poet remembers the "crowd" of daffodils he saw.
2.Using the technical skills you learnt in Section 2(Language and writing skills, pg.117), write a brief analysis of the poem. Your teacher will provide you with some contextual information (collection, date ,etc...). Share your analysis with your class.
PLUS 3. Look at the following essay title and concentrate on the three key Words.
The poem written approximately between 1803 and 1804 is often referred to as a romanticism poem. The term romanticism however, can have a wide range of meanings and interpretation. In the following essay I intend to define the main topics and themes of romanticism, in order to understand it better.
Considering the title the reader understands that someone is wandering (The verb to wander means to go somewhere without a precise destination), so the reader is curios to understand why the speaking voice wanderers lonely. The poem is set in the countryside, the reader can infer it from some words: "vales/hills/daffodils/lake/trees". The poet starts speaking of daffodils, referring them as if they were people, so the reader can notice that this is a personification (that is a figure of speech in which things or ideas are treated as if they were human beings with human attributes and feelings). The reader understands that daffodils are so many("crowd/host"), but the speaking voice is alone! Daffodils are so precious too for the speaking voice, because he connotes them with the adjective "golden". In addition to this daffodils are free, because they can follow the rhythm of the wind.
The poem is arranged into four stanzas of six lines each. In every stanza, the first line rhymes with the third and the second with the fourth. The stanza then ends with a rhyming couplet.
Wordsworth unifies the content of the poem by focusing the first three stanzas on the experience at the lake and the last stanza on the memory of that experience.
In the first line, Wordsworth says "I wandered lonely as a cloud." This is a simile comparing the wondering of a man to a cloud drifting through the sky. The cloud is not bound by any obstacle, but can go wherever the wind takes it. Later in the poem Wordsworth uses another simile, saying that the dancing of daffodils in the wind is "continuous as the stars that shine and twinkle on the milky way." This line creates the image of the wind blowing the tops of random daffodils up and down in a haphazard matter, so they appear to glint momentarily as their faces catch the sun. This goes along with the next metaphor of the daffodils "tossing their heads in sprightly dance." As far as syntax, the reader notices that the subject pronoun "I" is repeated twice in the first stanza, so all the situation is conveyed from a subjective point of view(=the speaking voice). The speaking voice tells thing filtered through the subjective speaker of the "I speaking". The second stanza underlines that daffodils are so many, while the poet is lonely.
These information can make us reflect about some Key-Words of Romanticism:
· Nature' s beauty uplifts the human spirit. Lines 15, 23, and 24 specifically refer to this theme
· Relationship poet-nature (=relationship men-nature)
· Solitude of the poet (= solitude of men )
· Subjective and emotional reaction
· Central position of the "I"/eye (sight plus hearing)
· Nature thrives unattended, the daffodils proliferate in splendor along the shore of the lake without the need for human attention.
In the first two stanzas the last line ends with a verb in the progressive aspect, it is used to add movement to the scene.
Daffodils become carries of happiness.
In the last stanza the reader can infer that poetry, in romanticism, is the record of a memory. Poetry is the result of an Emotion recollected in tranquillity, therefore the poem is the result of an experience that has been filtered by the emotional reaction of the speaking voice , which is generally a subjective "I". in romantic poetry the rational aspect is less important than the emotional aspect. So in the 4th stanza is thinking, in the present, of his past experience
.It is also interesting how the first image of the wandering cloud contrasts sharply with the second image of the dancing daffodils. The cloud drifts in solitude slowly and placidly across the sky, whereas the daffodils hurry to and fro in an energetic, lively scramble. This contrast seems to show that looking at the daffodils made the author feel better than he did before, that they cheered him up. This idea is supported by the last line of poem, where he says his heart "with pleasure fills, and dances with the daffodils" whenever he thinks of them.