Essay on "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud"
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Raymond Thai
E. Doggette
English 1302
January 22, 2015
Close Reading Analysis I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
On the surface, William Wordsworth’s famous poem “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” is about a man who had an encounter with nature and was moved by it. However, as with most poems, there is a deeper meaning to it that Wordsworth wanted his audience to find. Using imagery, metaphors, personification, and similes, Wordsworth constructs a poem about a man whose loneliness and solitude is cured after watching daffodils near a lake. Wordsworth’s imagery of the daffodils and his metaphor of being a cloud both add to the central theme that nature is an unreplicable beauty that can lift a human’s spirit.
Right off the bat, Wordsworth provides the reader with information that the speaker is lonely through the title, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.” The speaker compares himself to a cloud, which wanders around aimlessly with no preset direction. Clouds simply go where the wind takes them, so the speaker is saying that he goes wherever life takes him and that he does not go where he wants to go. This could be a huge reason as to why he is lonely. Adding to this, some clouds are isolated, which explains why the speaker uses a cloud to describe his current state at the beginning of the poem.
The first line of the first stanza shares the same words of the title. This means that at the beginning of the poem, the speaker is feeling lonely. Wordsworth, instead of using the words
“walked around”, opted for the word “wandered” which was more powerful in description. The
Thai 2
speaker may have also used a cloud as comparison because he feels superior and above everyone else. The speaker’s isolation is interrupted by a “host, of golden daffodils” which encapture him on the spot. Instead of using the more commonlyused color yellow to describe the daffodils, the speaker uses the color gold to describe them. Gold can
Raymond Thai
E. Doggette
English 1302
January 22, 2015
Close Reading Analysis I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
On the surface, William Wordsworth’s famous poem “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” is about a man who had an encounter with nature and was moved by it. However, as with most poems, there is a deeper meaning to it that Wordsworth wanted his audience to find. Using imagery, metaphors, personification, and similes, Wordsworth constructs a poem about a man whose loneliness and solitude is cured after watching daffodils near a lake. Wordsworth’s imagery of the daffodils and his metaphor of being a cloud both add to the central theme that nature is an unreplicable beauty that can lift a human’s spirit.
Right off the bat, Wordsworth provides the reader with information that the speaker is lonely through the title, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.” The speaker compares himself to a cloud, which wanders around aimlessly with no preset direction. Clouds simply go where the wind takes them, so the speaker is saying that he goes wherever life takes him and that he does not go where he wants to go. This could be a huge reason as to why he is lonely. Adding to this, some clouds are isolated, which explains why the speaker uses a cloud to describe his current state at the beginning of the poem.
The first line of the first stanza shares the same words of the title. This means that at the beginning of the poem, the speaker is feeling lonely. Wordsworth, instead of using the words
“walked around”, opted for the word “wandered” which was more powerful in description. The
Thai 2
speaker may have also used a cloud as comparison because he feels superior and above everyone else. The speaker’s isolation is interrupted by a “host, of golden daffodils” which encapture him on the spot. Instead of using the more commonlyused color yellow to describe the daffodils, the speaker uses the color gold to describe them. Gold can