![]() ![]() Wordsworth had been caught up in the French Revolution, had fathered an illegitimate daughter with a young Frenchwoman and returned to England with radical and democratic ideas (although his views became increasingly conservative in middle age). In celebrating nature and human emotions, he was an early leader of the English Romantic movement. He believed that poetry could use the real language of ordinary people in a state of ‘vivid sensation’. He published the influential Lyrical Ballads, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in 1798, rejecting the contrived, self-consciously poetic language that was fashionable at the time. Wordsworth’s early poems transformed the way in which poets came to express themselves. It clearly means a large number but there is also an association with the act of Holy Communion where the “host” is the wafer. Consider also the use of the word “host”. For example, look at the way Wordsworth uses the idea of dancing as a thread running through the poem. ![]() Was Byron being unfair by describing the poem as not simple but childish? Certainly this is not a difficult poem to understand but perhaps it is easy to underestimate its subtlety. ![]() The Romantic idea of the poet being somehow different or a lonely outsider is also prominent. In many ways this is a quintessentially Romantic poem with its obvious love of Nature and preoccupation with the relationship between man, Nature, imagination and memory. What do you think accounts for its very real and enduring popularity? And yet this is a much loved poem memorised by many. There is a thoroughly unreliable story enjoyed by those who like to have fun at the expense of the poem that Wordsworth originally wrote “I wandered lonely as a cow” until persuaded by his sister to change cow to “cloud” and Lord Byron described the poem as “puerile”. The Bays were stormy, and we heard the waves at different distances and in the middle of the water like the sea'.ĭorothy Wordsworth, The Grasmere Journal - Thursday 15 April 1802.“Daffodils” is not only one of Wordsworth’s most well-known and anthologised poems but also one of the most familiar poems in English Literature with its much quoted opening line. 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. 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 dancing ever changing. But as we went along there were more and 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. We fancied that the lake had floated the seed ashore and that the little colony had so sprung up. 'When we were in the woods beyond Gowbarrow Park, we saw a few daffodils close to the water side. It is this visit that gave Wordsworth the inspiration to write this famous poem. On 15th April 1802, they passed the strip of land at Glencoyne Bay, called Ullswater. In 1802 William and Dorothy Wordsworth's visited Glencoyne Park. The top picture is of daffodils at Ullswater. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |