I wandered lonely as a cloud . . . Clouds are not lonely. Especially in the Lake District where Wordsworth wrote that line. In the Lake District clouds are remarkably sociable creatures that bring their friends and relatives and stay for weeks. But nobody even notices that the comparison is all wrong because the mind always skips to the second connection which is that clouds do wander aimlessly. It’s not that Wordsworth didn’t know about meteorology, it’s that he did know about metaphor.
