"i wandered lonely as a cloud" seems to offer a distilled version of the some of the ideas wordsworth was tossing around in lyrical ballads.
i think he achieves this in a couple of ways.
metrically, i think the use of iambic tetrameter is important. for me, iambic tetrameter has always been a much more fluid meter-- the construction reminds me much less of a sentence or speech, and much more of motion or thought. more importantly, i think iambic tetrameter gives the impression of simplicity and passivity.
"i wandered lonely as a cloud"
"i wandered lonely as a cloud today"
"i wandered lonely as a summer cloud"
also, the reversal of metaphors is interesting, though not exactly subtle. the narrator (man) is the cloud (nature), and the daffodils (nature) "danced" and "tossed their heads." (personified)
the lines "The waves beside them danced; but they/ Out-did the sparkling waves in glee" confused me. I wasn't entirely sure well, why he wrote these lines.
The use of metaphors that your reference is definitely not subtle at all like you mentioned... I wonder if this is consistent throughout the whole poem however, when I say that I mean is nature always being personified and is man always being compared to nature... because at one point, Wordsworth describes the daffodils by using characteristics seen in thestars and the milky way.. which I would categorize as nature. So yes, I agree his metaphor use is interesting with comparisons of man to nature and the other way around, but there is also nature being described as chracteristics found elsewhere in nature.
ReplyDeleteinteresting--iambic pentameter is historically a more formal meter, particularly in England after Dryden and Pope used it to translate Homer and Virgil in the late 17th/early 18th century. tetrameter was used earlier in the century for social satire (Swift's "Beautiful Young Nymph going to Bed" for example), but later in the century it would have been linked to the ballad revival as well as the popular hymn (Amazing Grace is in alternating tetrameter and trimeter, as is Coleridge's Ancyent Marinere"). So, along with simplicity, you have cultural associations with popular literature and evangelical religion. Perhaps this can give us some purchase on WW's use of metaphors?
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