i wander lonely as a cloud by william wordsworth

#I wander lonely as a cloud by william wordsworth how to

In vacant or in pensive mood = sometimes staring at the wall, sometimes deep in thought.oft = often (just shorter than “often” - poets sometimes hack parts off words).shew = old British spelling of “show” - Wordsworth was British - go figure.jocund = means about the same as “sprightly” and “gay” in this poem - it’s pretty much a daffodil party.gay = at the time, this meant a combination of happy and excited.sprightly = energetically (think Riverdance).milky way = Milky Way (can’t believe he missed an opportunity to capitalize something, right?).Lake = the story goes that Wordsworth was inspired to write this poem when he and his sister were taking a walk in the Lake District in England - so maybe the capitalization here is OK.Vales = valleys (and that capitalization thing again), pronounced just like “veils”.Cloud = cloud (so they liked to capitalize a few things back in the day that we don’t capitalize now).Just make sure you know what all the words mean, and you’ll communicate that meaning to others as you perform the poem. Some of the words in this poem are a little old school. “Daffodils” is a lot shorter than “I wandered lonely as a Cloud.” And the poem’s really about daffodils anyway, not clouds, even if the description of the daffodils is kind of like what a cloud might see when looking down. Same is true for “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” But with poems, it’s typical not to capitalize all the words when using the first line like a title.īut this poem has become known as “The Daffodils,” or just “Daffodils,” so you might see it with that title. “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing,” for instance, is really just the first line of the song. It’s the same way with a lot of well-known Christmas songs. And since “Untitled” is a pretty ugly thing to put at the top of a poem, the normal thing to do is just refer to the poem by the first line. Sometimes poets don’t put titles on things. More on the capitalization below, but the question about the title is a trick question: this poem doesn’t have a title.

#I wander lonely as a cloud by william wordsworth how to

So what’s with the title? Is it “I wandered lonely as a Cloud,” or is it “The Daffodils”? And didn’t Wordsworth know how to capitalize? That floats on high o’er Vales and Hills,Īnd dances with the Daffodils. “I wandered lonely as a Cloud” (or “The Daffodils”) by William Wordsworth William Wordsworth paints such a picture in his poem “I wandered lonely as a Cloud” (or “The Daffodils”). Sometimes you encounter something that you don’t fully process until you have a minute alone with your thoughts. But other times, they bring a reminder of something greater, something higher, which can sometimes still be glimpsed. Sometimes they may cast the shadow of regret.

Life contains these unremarkable moments which nonetheless keep surfacing from time to time. I am not entirely sure it was in my childhood at all-perhaps it was later, into my teenage years, or even later (when, after all, childhood comes round again for one final excursion before the onset of adulting).īut it is a memory that, despite its relative obscurity in the catalog of my life, I have found myself coming back to now and again over the years, often in a momentary flicker.Īnd I feel something when I reflect on it: something about freedom, about vigor and vitality, about being where the action was, and staying until the lights went out. It is not one of the chief events of my life. My memory of that evening hangs vaguely at the edge of recollection. I was stung through my sock once-a story for another time.īut that evening, I mashed my naked feet into the cooling carpet of a lush day’s closure-dodging, rolling, likely as not. Later into my childhood, I kept my shoes on. We played on an open space of grass, running-playing tag, throwing a ball, some other energetic endeavor I cannot recall. It was evening, and the summer air was folding into dusk.