All these alienated him from the world and from life at large. As if it was not enough loss for one, three of his children were taken away by the hand of Fate during his own lifetime. He had lost both of his parents by the age of thirteen. Wordsworth was not without his share of loss. The daffodils seemed to have become his “ bliss of solitude”, something that gives him the luxury to bask in his estrangement from the world and comforts him when he drowns in the imminent sorrows of life. Not only had he captured the image of the golden flowers but also the feelings that they evoked in him. He says that since that day, whenever he lies upon his couch in a vacant or pensive (meditative) mood, the vision flashes upon his “ inward-eye”, i.e. Initially, the narrator fails to fathom what wealth the show of these lively flowers had endowed him with but goes on to answer it himself in the following stanza.īy beginning with “ for” he presents the reason for his holding that chanced vision as a prized possession. However ordinary a daffodil may be in reality, the poet has painted them in such magical verses and blended in to such transcendental romanticism, that they leave an everlasting impression on the mind of the readers. The use of “ gazed-and –gazed” shows that he was so mesmerized by the beautiful image of the dancing daffodils that he forgot all about his surrounding. The cheerful companionship of the flowers lifted his spirits. They seemed to be in a frenzy of delight. It seemed as though the sparkling gleeful waves of the lake with the breeze drawing patterns on them were dancing in tandem with these flowers but their gleeful dance was in no way comparable to the euphoric and gaiety of the daffodils that The joy that filled the narrator’s soul seemed to find expression in the way he perceived the swaying movement of the flowers. At a single glance, he could see a myriad of daffodils “ tossing their heads in sprightly dance” in the breeze, as if they were rejoicing in ecstasy. This poetic exaggeration suggests that never before had he sighted so many daffodils all at once. He uses a hyperbole while describing the number of flowers that he saw, accounting it as “ ten thousand”. It could also imply the undying everglow that these flowers gave the narrator. The flowers seemed to border “ the margin of the bay” as far as he could see. To him this scene seemed like a breath of fresh air in which his soul, a long-cramped scroll, seemed to flutter.Īkin to innumerable shining golden stars that are studded in the Milky Way-the golden daffodils that were as ethereal as the stars. It was on one such gloomy afternoon that he was strolling near a lake in Grasmere in England with his sister, Dorothy, when they chanced upon some daffodils close to a waterside. On an autobiographical note, the loneliness that the poet talks about was a result of his brother’s death. Now the poet’s mind seems to soar higher and higher like a cloud as he looks at the daffodils. The narrator seems to glide into a Utopian world, where these daffodils seem to be “ fluttering and dancing” in the breeze ( personification). The use of the word “ golden” is significant as it bestows a sense richness to a wild flower. The discomfort that he feels in the human multitude (which in turn, leads to his solitude) is curiously absent when he is in the company of the infinities of nature. His depiction of the daffodils as “ a crowd” is contrary to his previous portrayal of solitude. It is after this that the poem shifts to a euphoric mood as he comes across The narrator much like a lonesome cloud that aimlessly drifts “ high o’er vales and hills”, meanders down the mountains in the Lake District of England. Which sets in the mood of seclusion that trails through the entire poem. This lyrical poem starts with the melancholic diction of With each of the lines of the four six-line stanzas metered in an iambic tetrameter, the poem follows a quatrain-couplet style with the rhyming scheme ababcc. And what inspires mankind more than nature? Not only is it a visual treat, but also a source of joy to the mind and the soul. It shows that a poet is not a man in an ivory tower but a man among men, writing about all that interests and inspires mankind. Romanticism talks about going back to nature as only nature has the narrative power to save people from the mechanical humdrum of city life. Daffodils, which is a representative of Romanticism in English Literature, is one that can be called a “real poem”, which is “ a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings arising from emotions recollected in tranquility. Here the poet dips his mysticism, minimalism and spontaneity in his imagination, with Nature herself acting as the inspiration. A eulogy to the restorative powers of Nature, Daffodils is perhaps the simplest and yet most celebrated lyric poem of the entire Wordsworth canon.
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