I think that it’s interesting to find that “I wandered lonely as a cloud” was originally published without the second stanza, only to have that stanza added by Wordsworth eight years later. I’m a creative writing major, so I often face the sometimes daunting task of revising pieces of writing. Many times, when a writer reads through a draft, he can tell that something in a poem is just a little off. The answer is sometimes that there’s one stanza too many or that there needs to be an additional stanza in order to make the poem’s argument work better.
The stanza which Wordsworth adds to the second version of the poem does quite a bit for how the reader experiences the poem (or, rather, how the reader experiences Wordsworth’s experience in the poem). The second stanza gives the reader a much better impression of the grandness of the sight Wordsworth describes. We get in the first stanza that he sees “A host, of golden Daffodils;/Beside the Lake, beneath the trees,” and in the third stanza that they are gleeful and “such a jocund company.” However, by adding in the second stanza the comparison to the milky way in their number and expansiveness, he makes the scene more significant. Without the second stanza, he could just be looking upon a large patch of daffodils, but with the stanza added, the reader can tell that he is viewing something truly significant and worthy of the impact which they have upon Wordsworth.
I agree with your analysis of the second stanza. The imagery in the second stanza reminds me of the sublime. I imagine a grand image when considering "ten thousand I saw at a glance". Seeing ten thousand dancing daffodils is an overwhelming vision, a sensation that I believe Wordsworth likens to the momentous pleasure he experiences in his blissful solitude: "And then my heart with pleasure fills".
ReplyDeleteThere’s definitely a feeling of universality in the lines you highlighted, “Continuous as the stars that shine / And twinkle on the milky way”, an apt comparison if there truly are ten thousand flowers to fill his vision. It also provides an interesting counterpoint to how they “flash upon that inward eye / that is the bliss of solitude”. The daffodils are numerous and universal, yet they occupy a solitary spot in his head as he lies there alone and indoors, physically apart from the rest of the world. Like the previous poster says, this links to the Sublime: the magnificence of nature is given meaning by the presence and experience of man, in this case Wordsworth himself.
ReplyDeletePutting your comments together, does this mean that WW's inward eye is capable of grasping the sublime in a way his outward eye may not be? On the topic of grandeur, I think Jim is quite right--and this is something that Wordsworth was criticized for later in his career (remember the parody by Hartley Coleridge): critics often said that he imbued images with more importance than they merit, puffing out the simple into something too big for its representative capacity. This is an interesting twist of Jim's point: perhaps sometimes revision can overdue the effect of the original, to the point of flipping it over into self-parody?
ReplyDeleteLeveraging Prof. Porter's comments, I think the second stanza does, in fact, make the poem 'grander'. I also, however, don't believe that is necessarily a bad thing because there is, in my opinion, an indirect comparison to the IR. Great Britain's economy was dramatically changing and growing during this time and, as such, nature needs also to be ramped up to remain on par. Thus, as economy expands domestically, regionally and globally, nature counters by expanding to "the stars that shine."
ReplyDelete