the ruined maid I wandered lonely as a cloud

Nevertheless, Wordsworth's biographer Mary Moorman notes that Dorothy was excluded from the poem, even though she had seen the daffodils together with Wordsworth. The entire household thus contributed to the poem. Wordsworth described it as 'rather an elementary feeling and simple impression (approaching to the nature of an ocular spectrum) upon the imaginative faculty, rather than an exertion of it.' The phenomenon was reported upon in 17 by Erasmus Darwin, whose work Wordsworth certainly read. Fred Blick has shown that the idea of flashing flowers was derived from the ' Elizabeth Linnaeus phenomenon', so called because of the discovery of flashing flowers by Elizabeth Linnaeus in 1762. Coleridge in Biographia Literaria of 1817, while acknowledging the concept of 'visual spectrum' as being 'well known', described Wordsworth's (and Mary's) lines, among others, as 'mental bombast'.

Wordsworth was aware of the appropriateness of the idea of daffodils which 'flash upon that inward eye' because in his 1815 version he added a note commenting on the 'flash' as an 'ocular spectrum'. Mary contributed what Wordsworth later said were the two best lines in the poem, recalling the 'tranquil restoration' of Tintern Abbey, 'They flash upon that inward eye Which is the bliss of solitude'

Dorothy Wordsworth, The Grasmere Journal Thursday, 15 April 1802Īt the time he wrote the poem, Wordsworth was living with his wife, Mary Hutchinson, and sister Dorothy at Town End, in Grasmere in the Lake District. The Bays were stormy and we heard the waves at different distances and in the middle of the water like the Sea.

There was here and there a little knot and a few stragglers a few yards higher up but they were so few as not to disturb the simplicity and unity and life of that one busy highway – We rested again and again. This wind blew directly over the lake to them.

I never saw daffodils so beautiful they grew among the mossy stones about and about them, some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness and the rest tossed and reeled and danced and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the Lake, they looked so gay ever glancing ever changing. When we were in the woods beyond Gowbarrow park we saw a few daffodils close to the water side, we fancied that the lake had floated the seed ashore and that the little colony had so sprung up – But as we went along there were more and yet more and at last under the boughs of the trees, we saw that there was a long belt of them along the shore, about the breadth of a country turnpike road. Gobarrow Park is on the north side of Ullswater, so Wordsworth’s daffodils would have been on the nearer shore – near the cows perhaps? He would draw on this to compose 'I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud' in 1804, inspired by Dorothy's journal entry describing the walk near a lake at Grasmere in England: Ullswater in the English Lake District. The inspiration for the poem came from a walk Wordsworth took with his sister Dorothy around Glencoyne Bay, Ullswater, in the Lake District. Often anthologised, it is now seen as a classic of English Romantic poetry, although Poems, in Two Volumes was poorly reviewed by Wordsworth's contemporaries. In a poll conducted in 1995 by the BBC Radio 4 Bookworm programme to determine the nation's favourite poems, I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud came fifth. Written in 1804, it was first published in 1807 in Poems, in Two Volumes, and as a revision in 1815. It is one of his most popular, and was inspired by a forest encounter on 15 April 1802 that included himself, his younger sister Dorothy and a 'long belt' of daffodils. ' I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud' (also commonly known as ' Daffodils' ) is a lyric poem by William Wordsworth. That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

The ruined maid I wandered lonely as a cloud