"I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" Viewed in Various Perspectives

Frederick Pottle’s Reflections on “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud“

One difference between a gardener’s comments on daffodils over the neighbour’s fence and

Wordsworth's description of these flowers in "I wandered lonely as a cloud" resides in the fact

that the poem is part of a literary tradition and therefore invites comparison with other poems

addressed to the same theme. Frederick A. Pottle considers this poem in the light of tradition in

an article entitled "The Eye and the Object in the Poetry of Wordsworth." 1He notes with

reference to "I wandered lonely as a cloud":

Ever since 1807, when Wordsworth published this poem, daffodils have danced and laughed,

but there is nothing inevitable about it. The Greek myth of Narcissus is not exactly hilarious; and

even Herrick, when he looked at daffodils saw something far from jocund.

Even after 1807 a reference to daffodils in poetry may still retain an element of solemnity

admixed with religious mysticism, as the final strophe of A. E. Housman's "The Lent Lily"

makes clear:

Bring baskets now, and sally

Upon the spring's array,

And bear from hill and valley

The daffodil away

That dies on Easter day.

The daffodils described in "I wandered lonely as a cloud", whatever their mythical and

traditional associations, recall a real event in Wordsworth's life and personal experience.

Pottle ponders whether a recognition of this fact can contribute to an evaluation of

Wordsworth's poem, thus broaching one of the most contentious issues in literary criticism:

1 Frederick A. Pottle, "The Eye and the Object in the Poetry of Wordsworth"

in Romanticism and Consciousness, ed. Harold Bloom (New York, 1970), pp. 273-287.

Originally in Yale Review. Vol. (Autumn 1951).

2

What is the relationship between poetry and "external" factors in the domains of a poet's

biography and historical setting? Wishing to clarify the nature of this relationship, Pottle cites

the entry in Dorothy's Journal telling of the occasion when she and her brother suddenly came

across the daffodils, the abiding impression of which is captured in "I wandered lonely as a

cloud." Pottle attaches great importance to divergences between the description of the

daffodils recorded in the Journal and Wordsworth's poetic vision of the flowers, for these,

according to Pottle, enable a critic to ascertain the scope of the imagination’s particular sphere

of operation in treating material drawn from sense data and experienced events.

Pottle notes two highly significant divergences between Dorothy's and her brother's

descriptions of daffodils in "I wandered lonely as a cloud." First, the poem conveys the point

of view of a solitary speaker beside a lake. The discrepancy between the descriptions of

daffodils in poem and Journal entails a polarity between the "solitariness" of the speaker and

the "sociability" imputed to the crowd of daffodils, endowed as they are both in poem and

Journal with the human attributes of joy and the ability to laugh and dance. A further

discrepancy between poem and Journal concerns implications of word choice. While in

Dorothy's account there is a reference to a "wind" that animated the scene she described, the

poem assigns vital power to a "breeze." Dorothy's Journal leaves no doubt that the April day

on which she and her brother were impressed by the sight of daffodils was overcast and far

from spring-like in any positive sense.

Despite certain misgivings about Wordsworth's choice of the word "breeze", Pottle

concedes that the mildness it implies is fully consistent with the positive, indeed triumphant,

mood engendered by the poem. According to Pottle the "simple" joy evinced by the daffodils

reveals the workings of the imagination as it transmutes raw experience and the emotions it

arouses into one "simple emotion." Adducing evidence from "The Leech Gatherer" and other

poems, Pottle argues that Wordsworth's imagery rarely incorporates an exact record of

particular memories. Indeed, he calls into question whether the poem owes any intrinsic

quality to the memory of an actual incident. For him the poem is essentially the product of the

simplifying and unifying operation of the imagination, and as such poses "a very simple

poem."

Is “I wandered lonely as a cloud“ as simple as Pottle suggests? I find grounds for the view

that the poem is far from simple in any unqualified sense. For reasons I shall now adduce, one

may trace a certain ambiguity in the "simple" joy attributed to the daffodil encountered by the

speaker during his walk besides a lake.

3

Pottle himself establishes that the poem contains a juxtaposition of contrasting elements in

noting the polarity of "solitariness" and "sociability." With reference to a similarity in the

appearance of the daffodils and the nebulous aspect of the Milky Way, Pottle intimates a

further contrast or polarity associating the earthbound and the celestial or, on the temporal

plane, day and night. Our sense of the poem's complexity may be much enhanced if we reflect

on the effects produced by the set of contrasts that inform the poem. Let us consider these

interlocking contrasts in greater detail. An antithetic relationship between the earthbound

wanderer and the cloud to which he compares his motion poses the first intimation of the

opposition between the earthly and celestial.

The cloud establishes a reference to things of nebulous appearance, and hence a

classification that subsequently embraces the visual effects of the daffodils, specks of light

reflected by the lake, and the Milky Way. The strophe containing the reference to the Milky

Way poses a later addition to the poem's original three strophes. However, this addition

reinforces a contrast implicit in the poem as it originally stood, a contrast rooted in the

distinction between two modes of consciousness, that of the mind exposed to the intrusion of

sensations from the external world, and that of the mind creating its own images in dreams

and dreamlike conditions. In other words, we are dealing here with modes of interaction

between the conscious and unconscious. The wanderer experiences two visions of daffodils,

those seen in a natural environment, and those perceived by his mind in "pensive mood."

Only the daffodils independently created in the poet's mind should fully express "pure joy"

according to the logic of Pottle's arguments, as only they have undergone the full process of

ingestion effected by the simplifying and unifying power of the imagination. If this is not the

case, why should the speaker distinguish between the vision of daffodils perceived by the

inward eye and the daffodils which the speaker saw when out walking? A number of

Wordsworth's works contain lines implying that immediate visual perception entail a sense of

discomfort at a time before the mind is able to assimilate new sense impressions. Even in "I

wandered" Wordsworth's choice of words suggests that the speaker suffers the intrusion of an

invincible, albeit joyful, invasion appearing as a "host" in the (military) formation of ten

thousand. While an element of threat is at most implied in "I wandered lonely as a cloud", the

military connotation of "host" in Biblical English is fully explicit in the opening of another of

Wordsworth's poems, "To the Clouds":

Army of Clouds! Ye winged Host in troops.

4

Frederick Pottle's discussion of "I wandered lonely as a cloud" reveals a high degree of

sensitivity to the implication of particular words found in the poem, notably "breeze", "dance"

and "daffodil" with the latter’s power of evoking the myth of Narcissus. It is in some ways

odd that Pottle makes no reference to the verb "wandered" despite its strategic position in the

first line of the poem. We noted earlier the near invisibility of verbs in comparison to

substantives. A linguist might explain this phenomenon as the result of the verb's diffuse

influence on the stream of discourse. Be that as it may, in the process of considering the

occurrence of "wandered" in the light of its position, meaning and structural function, I now

hope to complement and amplify Pottle's arguments and insights respecting "I wandered

lonely as a cloud." Taking a leaf from Dante's four-level approach to interpreting a text,let us

consider the word at four levels of significance, namely .

First, what does "wandered" mean in the light of its immediately recognizable

context?

Second, how does the word function as an element in the poem viewed as an aesthetic

construct?

Third, what is the word's significance as an index of Wordsworth's development both

as a private individual and a poet?

Fourth, how does the word relate to poetic tradition and the "allegorical" aspect of

the poem?

In the following four sections (1-4), these questions will be addressed in the order given

above.

1

Romantic poets occasionally chose the verb "to wander" in statements which made

disparaging reference to the works of their contemporaries, though they themselves accorded

the word high significance in their own works. In Don Juan there is a reference to Juan as a

youth who "wandered by glassy brooks, / Thinking unutterable things." These words, found in

the 19th stanza of the first Canto, are followed in the next stanza by a reference to

Wordsworth:

He, Juan (and not Wordsworth), so pursued

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His self-communion with his own high soul.

I can imagine that Byron, when writing these lines, had "I wandered lonely as a cloud" in

mind, as they point to two essential aspects of "wandering" in that poem: namely physical

movement and the heightened state of consciousness that attends such movement. Some

proponents of literary theory see poetry as the product of a purely mental process, which leads

them to deny with the zeal of the ancient Gnostics any living and reciprocal ties between

poetry and physical, historical or biographical reality, but if we ignore or belittle the physical

nature of the motion referred to in the poem, we will make little sense of the essential contrast

that lies at the heart of the poem, namely that which emerges when we compare the effects of

physical perception with the power of the mind to produce its own images autonomously.

For all his mockery of Wordsworth "wandering," Byron's use of the verb "to wander"

betrays his concern with the same fundamental relationship between the inner world of

thought and imagination and the outer world that intrudes into a traveller's consciousness

through the channel of sensory perception. As the poetry of both Byron and Wordsworth

shows, the experience of unexpected sights or other sensations could induce feelings of

vulnerability, which in turn prompted the quest for a countervailing influence, some process

of the mind capable of ingesting elements of extraneous origin. The experience of physical

motion and travel, as we know, will always tend to enhance a person's awareness of the

exterior environment. This normal enhancement was heightened further in the Romantic

period. As M. M. Bahktin has pointed out, the poetry of Byron was subject to the process of

"novelisation." 2The novel is that genre which in its nature thwarts any attempt to impose a

hierarchical structure upon it, even when influencing that most traditional of genres, poetry.

The typical proclivity of Wordsworth and Byron to grasp some apparently unimportant object

or incident and invest this with universal significance finds a precedent in Jean-Jacques

Rousseau’s Les Reveries du Promeneur Solitaire and Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental

Journey, in both cases the author’s final work. It would seem from this that we are dealing

here with a general literary rather than a purely poetical phenomenon in Romantic verse and

its immediate precursor, the literature of sensibility.

2

2 M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin Tx., 1981).

6

We may understand "wandering" in terms of structure and principles of organisation that

govern the development of the poem. Set at the beginning of the poem, the words "I

wandered" function as a leitmotif introducing both the poem's theme i.e. subject matter, and

the "wandering" process that emerges from a study of the poem's aesthetic achievements as

revealed in its images in their immediate verbal environment. In the German poetry of the

same period this leitmotif is announced officially in the titles of celebrated poems. One of

these lends itself to comparison with "I wandered lonely as a cloud" with particular regard to

the implications of the initial position of words referring to "wandering": Wilhelm Müller's

poem "Das Wandern ist des Müllers Lust" ("Wandering is the Miller’s Joy") - a poem that will

be considered at the end of this chapter. According to its immediately comprehensible

meaning, "Wandern" refers to the act of roaming in a rural setting, just as "wandered" does in

Wordsworth's poem. However, from the first line on, it gains ever wider references and

associations with movements in objects and natural phenomena exemplified by the turning of

millstones and the flowing stream that causes their turning, with the final effect that

"wandering" emerges as the vital principle in all nature. This widening of associations is

reinforced by a repetition of "Wandern" (formally justified by the use of a refrain).

In "I wandered lonely as a cloud” the verb "to wander" also accumulates ever wider

meaning, but not as a result of any verbal repetition. Its widening of meaning is produced by

the poet's use of similes with all their effects and structural repercussions. In the first Simile

(located in the words "as a cloud"), the speaker likens himself to a cloud, as he and this object

are both solitary and in motion. We may infer from this comparison that just as the cloud is

moved by a "breeze", some correspondent breeze impels the speaker's wandering. This breeze

then assumes the aspect of a universal dynamic principle of the mind and poetic imagination.

Hence the parallel between the daffodils "fluttering in the breeze" and the poet's heart, which

"dances with the daffodils."

The second simile in the poem compares the appearance of the daffodils encountered by

the speaker to the stars of the milky way. How - in view of the fact that the stanza containing

this simile was added to the original poem of three stanzas - can this poem pose an integral

element of the entire poem? The objection I anticipate is surmountable if the simile can be

shown to enhance and develop motifs and characteristics of the poem in its original form. The

reference to the Milky Way adds strength to the motif established by words evoking the image

of something nebulous: (cf. "cloud," "host" and dancing "waves"). The reference to the stars

of night points to a duality, already implicit in the original poem, that inheres in the contrast of

daylight vision and the images produced by the mind at times of repose. Though the speaker

7

does not sleep when experiencing the vision of daffodils that flash before his inner mind, his

state of consciousness resembles that of the dreamer. The motif of the "night-wanderer" can

be found in both English and German poetic traditions. We recall the words of Puck in A

Midsummer-Night's Dream. "I am that merry wanderer of the night."

Let us now return to Frederick Pottle's assertion that "I wandered lonely" is "a very simple

poem." It may appear to be very simple. The similes it contains apparently conform to the

typical use of language in non-literary usage, yet, at a deeper level they imply contrasts and

antitheses rooted in the unconscious and the imagination. Similarly, the reference to” a poet"

in the third strophe might be taken as a commonly encountered expression like "If only an

artist could paint this landscape." At a deeper level, however, it points to Wordsworth's

fundamental concern with the operation and nature of the poet's imagination.

3

From the following lines in The Borderers (1795) it is apparent that the associations

of the verb "to wander" were not always positive and evocative of joy:

No prayers, no tears, but hear my doom in silence

I will go forth a wanderer on the earth,

A shadowy thing, and as I wander on

No human ear shall ever hear my voice

As contradictory as the verb's associations with death and joy in the exercise of the

imagination may seem, its range of significance does manifest a certain logic (a matter that

will be looked into at a later stage in thus study). In Wordsworth's case the positive or

negative valorisation of the verb "to wander" corresponds to the general state of mind in

which he found himself at different stages of his life and artistic development.

At the time of his writing The Borderers, he was still experiencing a dark night of the soul

precipitated by his disillusionment with the course of the French Revolution. At that time he

was subject to the influence of Friederich Schiller's Die Räuber ("The Bandits"), a drama that

portrays a world torn apart by the titanic fury of those exercising the wrong kind of freedom.

The play reflects the spirit of Sturm und Drang ("Storm and Stress"), through which both

8

Goethe and Schiller passed in the early phase of literary development. In Goethe's highly

influential novel Die Leiden des Jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther) Werther's

reference to himself as a "Wanderer" ominously points forward to his social isolation and

ultimate death.

"I wandered lonely as a cloud" marks the apogee of Wordsworth's poetic achievement. At

the time of its composition Wordsworth had overcome the weaknesses of his early works and

the lugubrious mentality that they evince. In the same period we find no anticipation of the

diminution in poetic powers and final atrophy of the imagination that later overcame

Wordsworth. "I wandered lonely as a cloud" marks the attainment of a balance and harmony

of mind wrested from the tension between daytime awareness and the influences of

subconscious proclivities. The attainment of this harmony involves the ingestion of images

originating in the involuntary reception of what is perceived by the senses. The equilibrium

we perceive in poem was preceded by - perhaps predicated on - a period when Wordsworth

became familiar with contemporary German literature and philosophy as this was mediated to

him by T. S. Coleridge. According to Jonathan Wordsworth, the poet was deeply impressed by

a translation of Goethe's poetic dialogue entitled "Der Wanderer", which he read no later than

1798.3 Professor L. A. Willoughby notes in his article "The Image of the 'Wanderer' and the

'Hut' in Goethe's Poetry" that "Der Wanderer" (1771), though posing one of Goethe's earliest

treatments of the "Wanderer" image, attests to his ability to objectify the image without

suppressing every trace of his individual personality.4

4

It has been noted earlier in this discussion that Frederick Pottle contrasts the elegiac

undertones of Herrick's description of daffodils with the triumphant and joyful emotions

evoked by Wordsworth's description of these flowers. Daffodils recall a tradition that includes

the story of Narcissus in Greek mythology. We have also seen that Housman intertwines the

Greek classical myth with Christian folklore in his image of the daffodil that dies on Easter

Day (in common usage daffodils are called "Osterglocken" ("Easter Bells") in countries where

German is spoken). I will argue in this section that the very use of the verb "to wander"

likewise implies and reflects a confluence of biblical and classical traditions. I also hope to

3 Jonathan Wordsworth, The Music of Humanity, (New York and Evanston, 1969).

4 L. A. Willoughby, "The Image of the 'Wanderer' and the 'Hut' in Goethe's Poetry," Etudes

Germaniques, 1951, 3, Autumn 1951.

9

establish that the word is coloured - to use a term that is much favoured by the Russian

Formalist linguist and critic J. Tynjanov 5- by a contemporary influence stemming from

Goethe and a diachronically mediated influence stemming from Milton, that poet who

consciously merged classical and biblical or Hebraic elements in his Epic poetry. A close

analysis of certain passages in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained shows that the verb "to

wander" is contextually associated to both the classical motif of the "wandering" Muse and to

the biblical motif of the wanderings of Israel described in the book of Exodus and the cognate

period of Christ's wandering in the Judean wilderness, events commemorated by the festivals

of Passover and Lent. This nexus of associations is implicit in the opening lines of Paradise

Lost, in which the collocation of the words "Muse" and "Horeb" (Sinai) knit together

references to the Muse, the Holy Spirit and the immediate sequel of the flight of the Israelites

from Egypt (commemorated by the Jewish Festival of Pentecost).6 In Paradise

Regained Milton mirrors the traditional view, upheld by Dante and inscribed in the Church

calendar at Lent, that the wanderings of Israel allegorically represent the earthly life and

ministry of Christ,7 the forty days of temptation recalling the forty years of Israel's wandering

in the wilderness of Sinai (The title of Housman's "The Lent Lily” conflates the associated

symbolism of Lent, Easter and daffodils). Alluding to a passage in Paradise Regained, Keats

taps the same traditional sources when uniting the theme of vernal renewal and that of a

pilgrimage leading through a wilderness:

And now at once, adventuresome, I send

My herald thought into a wilderness -

There let its trumpet blow, and quickly dress

My uncertain path with glee.

Endymion 1, 58-61.

5 Jurij Tynjanov, "The Meaning of the Word in Verse," Translated into English by M. E.

Suino, Readings in Russian Poetics, ed. Ladislav Matejka and Krystina Pomorska, (Ann

Arbor, 1978).

6 The Festival of Weeks (Hebr.: Shavuot) or Pentecost marks the end of the counting of

omer (cuttings of harvest crops in the spring harvest), and became linked by tradition with

the Giving of the Law at Mount Sinai. Philo of Alexandria closely associated this event

with a manifestation of divine inspiration symbolised by the finger of fire that inscribed the

tablets of the Law. The Christian sequel to Pentecost reflects the Christian belief that the

Holy Spirit supersedes the literal stipulations of the Law.

7 Both in "Il Convivio" (The Banquet) and the letter to Can Grande della Scala, Dante

referred to the "allegorical" level of the story of the biblical exodus at which Dante

discerned a prophecy concerning Christ's life and work of redemption.

10

Here is an echo of Milton's line "And Eden raised m the wilderness" in

Paradise Regained 1,7.The association of vernal renewal and pilgrimage occurs a little later

in Endymion in an allusion to the evocation of spring in the Prologue of The

Canterbury Tales.

We now consider a further instance of Milton's influence on a work by a Romantic poet,

and one that is directly relevant to a discussion of "I wandered lonely as a cloud." Again we

consider a poetic evocation of spring combined with an allusion to the story of the flight of

the Israelites from Egypt. The opening lines of the first book of Wordsworth's The Prelude

refer to a flight from "a house of bondage" and a "wandering cloud" that should guide the poet

on his future journey. Here we discover obvious allusions to the flight from Egypt in the Bible

and the pillar of cloud guiding the Israelites by day.

To understand the deep significance of "the gentle breeze," at the beginning

of The Prelude we should consider these words in the light of Milton's dedication to the Holy

Muse that inspired Moses at Mount Horeb (we note the intertwining of both biblical and

classical strands) at an analogous position in Paradise Lost. The verbal triad that consists of

"breeze," "wandering" and "cloud" finds a parallel in the words "wandered", "breeze" and

"cloud" in "I wandered lonely as a cloud." We often note in criticism that verbal patterns recur

and suggest underlying modes of thought influenced by the operations of the unconscious.

Here we may recall that Wordsworth composed "I wandered lonely as a cloud" during a

period of active preparation for The Prelude of 1805. While The Prelude contains a specific

reference to passages in Milton's works, "I wandered lonely as a cloud" contains no literary

allusions at all. Here, the very order of words in the poem implies antitheses that accord with

a mythical-religious frame of comprehension. To make this assumption is to be no bolder that

Frederick Pottle when he discusses the myth of Narcissus in connection with Wordsworth's

description of daffodils in "I wandered lonely as a cloud." Indeed, in their profound

implications “the daffodil” in Housman's "Lent Lily" and the daffodil in folklore share an

affinity with the implications of "to wander" in poetic tradition, for the flower and the verb

pose the meeting-point of classical and Biblical traditions.

The event which prompted the writing of "I wandered lonely as a cloud" occurred on the

eve of Good Friday (Good Friday fell on 16th April, 1802), yet a further reason to suppose

that the sight of daffodils described in the poem was bound up with the thought of Easter in

Wordsworth's mind.

11

If we were to follow Housman's lead and place an ostensibly religious construction on the

daffodils in "I wandered lonely", I think we should emphasise their triumphant, perhaps

"Pentecostal," aspect in view of the all-pervasive influence of the breeze and the almost

flame-like appearance of the flowers. This is not to say that we should place the poem in the

tradition of religious mystical poetry, for, as this discussion of "wandering" has indicated,

words mark an intersection of traditional and contemporary influences. In the case of "I

wandered lonely as a cloud" the traditional influence is predominantly Miltonic, the

contemporary German. Subject to this dual influence Wordsworth combined traditional

religious insight with the then modern insights of psychological and aesthetic philosophy. The

motif of "pilgrimage" is explicit in The Prelude and Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, while it is

but suggested in "I wandered lonely as a cloud.

The poem might also be understood as a quest to overcome the rift between the worlds of

inner and outward reality announced in the Cartesian cogito ergo sum, and its traumatic after-

effect so palpably reflected in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. It is noteworthy that the word

"breeze" signifies the vital powers of the imagination in both "I wandered lonely" and

Coleridge’s ballad The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, however different these poems are in

theme. In Coleridge's narrative a "breeze" fills the sails of the mariner's doomed ship only

when he perceives sea serpents moving by the light of the moon. Like Wordsworth's dancing

daffodils the serpents combine beauty and motion, both of which attributes were seen as

virtuous in their own right by the poets of the age. In fact, these virtues exercise a mutual

benefit. Beauty alone might, as the legend of Narcissus suggests, bring entrapment and a

death-like stasis. Motion without some corrective might lead to frenzy and self-dissipation. It

is "the breeze" which makes the daffodils in Wordsworth's celebrated poem "dance." In poetic

tradition "dancing" is not always positive in connotation. We need only think of the Dance of

Death. However, in Wordsworth’s poem "dancing” motion counteracts the stasis implied by

the daffodil's mythical import. This image implies therefore a balance of beauty and motion.

While it is evident that Romantic poems lie outside the category of "religious poetry," I find

no reason to accept view that they possess no religious message, as Hartman and others argue.

Here, it is relevant to consider the basic implication of poetic "wandering” as a quest to

reconcile apparently irreconcilable opposites and antitheses, a quest based on the assumption

that at a higher level than that at which such opposites appear irreconcilable, harmony and

reconciliation can be achieved. "Wandering" defies the strict separation of internal truth and

external reality. "The way" described in poems about wandering, is part of the life of

12

individual experience. How one can come to any different conclusion when consider

"wandering" in works of Milton, Goethe and Wordsworth - and for Keats, "truth" and "life"

are indivisible in "beauty."

ANNOTATIONS