![]() I never saw daffodils so beautiful they grew among the mossy stones about & about them, some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness & the rest tossed and reeled and danced & seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the Lake, they looked so gay ever dancing ever changing.’ The influence of this passage from Dorothy’s journal can be seen in Wordsworth’s poem, which we’ve analysed here. As Dorothy wrote, ‘we saw a few daffodils close to the water side, we fancied that the lake had floated the seed ashore & that the little colony had so sprung up – But as we went along there were more & yet more & 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. ![]() On 15 April 1802, Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy were walking (there’s a surprise) around Glencoyne Bay in Ullswater when they encountered, in the words of Dorothy’s journal, a ‘long belt’ of daffodils. It didn’t appear in the famous Lyrical Ballads – it was written a few years after that volume had been published. It is often referred to (erroneously, if we’re being pedantic) as ‘The Daffodils’ or ‘Daffodils’, but in fact it had no title and is technically known only by its first line, ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’. To the right is a picture of the manuscript for Wordsworth’s best-known poem.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |