I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud — Eduqas GCSE English Literature C720
Eduqas GCSE English Literature · C720
I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
The poems
What you need to know
The speaker's memory of a crowd of daffodils beside a lake, and the joy it brings back to him later when he is alone.
How Wordsworth's Romanticism and the walk that inspired the poem shape it, and how its similes, personification, stanzas and rhyme work.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'I wandered lonely as a cloud', 'A host, of golden daffodils', 'Fluttering and dancing in the breeze', 'Continuous as the stars that shine', 'Ten thousand saw I at a glance', 'Tossing their heads in sprightly dance', 'A poet could not but be gay', 'In such a jocund company', 'They flash upon that inward eye / Which is the bliss of solitude', 'And dances with the daffodils'.
Form: four six-line stanzas, each a quatrain and a couplet rhyming ABABCC; the simile of the cloud, the daffodils personified as dancers, and the change to the present tense in the last stanza, where the memory returns.
Context: the walk with his sister Dorothy beside Ullswater in April 1802 that her journal records; written in 1804, published in 1807 and revised in 1815, when Wordsworth added the second stanza that the anthology prints; Mary Wordsworth's two lines; Romanticism.
Compares well with: The Schoolboy on joy in nature; I Shall Return on nature remembered from far away; Blackberry Picking on nature and memory; Drummer Hodge on the stars.
