Analysis of I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud Poem
The poem, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” consists of four stanzas, where the first three stanzas introduce the experience at hand only to have experienced justified within the fourth and final stanza. Within these stanzas is a distinct rhyming pattern of the first sentence rhyming with the third and the second rhyming with the fourth. The poem ends with a couplet and the lines of the poem are in an iambic tetrameter. All of this comes together to make the poem a Shakespearean Sonnet.
“I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” brings the tension of Nature’s beauty and its importance. This tension builds steadily within the first three stanzas. Stanza one lays out the scene of the poem from a first person perspective, the first person being the “voice” of the poem. A simile is used to compare this voice to the loneliness of a cloud that hangs very high in the sky away from the world below. After establishing the feeling of lonesomeness the voice brings on the “host of golden daffodils” making them seem bigger than its solitary self and therefor something that needs to be seen.
The second stanza includes the building of nature’s beauty. In actuality the daffodils only stretch the length of the shore, but just like the previous stanza the voice gives them a bigger description by comparing them to that of the Milky Way, a galaxy that contains a trillion stars, including the sun. The voice also uses personification to bring the daffodils to life by saying that they were “tossing their head in sprightly dance.”
Within the third stanza is where the tension rises. Once more the voice glorifies the daffodils by saying that they outshine that of the sparkling waves. Also, the voice states that how could he not be “gay” or lighthearted when it is “in such a jocund company,” jocund also meaning lighthearted. Now confusion devours the voice as it can not distinguish what exactly this experience had brought to him. The author stresses this by using an anastrophe to pronounce the tension. It is this questioning of if this experience was worth anything that leaves the fourth stanza with the hope of resolution.
The final stanza begins with an anastrophe, again a way to stress a point, this point being the start of the solution. Not until the voice later reevaluates his day does it fully appreciate the sight of the daffodils. Once more the voice creates a solemn mood by stating that while upon its couch it is “in vacant or in pensive mood,” and then allows the daffodils to create a contrasting feelings by stating that, “my heart with pleasure fills, and dances with the daffodils,” ending on not only a couplet but another anastrophe to stress the happiness that is created by the thought of those daffodils.
