Wordsworth: 'Daffodils' and Other Poems

by William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth is chiefly remembered as one of the "Lake Poets." Yet he was also one of the founders of English Romanticism, a writer whose early revolutionary fervor imbued his verse and his ideals. This pocket-sized collection "I wandered lonely as a cloud" ("Daffodils"), "Ode. Intimations of Immortality," "Character of the Happy Warrior," "The Solitary Reaper," "To a Sky-Lark," "Tintern Abbey," and extracts from "The Prelude."

Genres: Poetry

128 pages, Paperback

Published October 1, 2017

About the author

William Wordsworth (1770-1850) was a major English romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their 1798 joint publication, Lyrical Ballads.

Wordsworth's masterpiece is generally considered to be The Prelude, an autobiographical poem of his early years, which the poet revised and expanded a number of times. The work was posthumously titled and published, prior to which, it was generally known as the poem "to Coleridge". Wordsworth was England's Poet Laureate from 1843 until his death in 1850.

Reviews

[John Yelverton · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great and elegant poem to daffodils. I won't spoil anything, but major kudos for using the word "jocund" in a sentence.

[Flarne]

The whimsicality entrenched in these lines is so much like in a disney movie – when the big bad wolf starts to sing and waddle with his voice a little deep but while keeping the playful, festive and childish spirit of disney..

Just by reading certain lines, the poet does not have to put the commas that you are forced to read these lines with a mini-pause at exactly every two words: your head is bound to bounce from left to right from such a jocund company!

The final stanza seeks to share the sense of involuntary consolation the poet receives from thinking of the lighthearted (mis)adventures of the daffoldis (those recounted throughout the very poem we just read) during these moments of solitude. ("I wandered lonely as a cloud"- wow, the use of cloud is so fitting; they are silent, idle, and lack solid feature; they are empty. loneliness is so well encompassed by that sole word.)

By reading this conclusion, we realize that it was important -in order to merge with the narrative aims- to craft this work so that it would produce phonetically the cartoonish and dancing effect which brightens the spirit of the writer during the frequent sorrows of his life..

[Callum Rhys-Williams · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5/5

Aside from a few snippets, this was pretty much my introduction to Wordsworth. As I feel the nature is of poetry collections, this took me quite a while to get to, I liked to be in the right mood to read a few and then come back to it later.

I particularly enjoyed the story driven poems such as ‘We are Seven’, ‘Simon Lee’ & ‘Idiot Boy’, but I also loved a lot the ones about nature- ‘Daffodils’, obviously.

Some of the long form, abstract pieces lost me a bit, and I found some of the extracts hard to follow, but I had a great time overall engaging with the beauty of the natural world!

[Leigh Grant · Rating 3 out of 5]

The poem, Daffodils feels so up-tempo, almost whimsical. Without the need for punctuation, you feel almost forced to take a pause because of the flow. There is comparison of how he is 'lonely as a cloud', to the daffodils he strolls across 'stretching in a never-ending line'. It is easy to get lost in this poem and forget the meanings of each sentence because how we bounce between each line, almost like the daffodils 'tossing their heads in sprightly dance'.

[Aideeeee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Postales en forma de poema, me gustó mucho como evoca sentimientos hablando de paisajes y la naturaleza.