Wednesday 12 September 2018

The Daffodils by William Wordsworth



The poem Daffodils composed by William Wordsworth and published in 1807 in Poems in Two Volumes. This poem is composed after a short visit, on the way, a long belt of daffodils along with his sister in 1802. William Wordsworth as a typical nature poet of the romantic age has painted the poem with beautiful natural sceneries. This poem is very relevant today when people are more at mind than to heart though the poem is but by-product of imagination. This poem is a kind of cure for the people who have mental ailments or leading a stressful life. This poem has paved the way to be happy in the atmosphere of unhappiness. He has conveyed the message of the benefits of solitude. The entire poem has been dispersed into four stanzas in a very sequence way.

In the first stanza, the speaker has compared himself with wandering clouds and then he goes on introducing a host of animated daffodils. Resembling the clouds, he is walking here and there, as clouds swim over valley and hills. At once, he saw a crowd of golden daffodils dancing in the mild wind beside the lake and beneath the trees. In the next stanza, he goes on illustrating the daffodils with its peculiarities. He says these daffodils are shining and twinkling like stars in the Milky Way. The length of the belt of daffodils, for the poet, is endless along the bank of a bay. When he sees at a glance, he could have numbered them, ten thousand tossing their heads. In the third stanza, the poet is giving more values to these daffodils than anything else. He compares the wave of the daffodils with the wave of sparkling water, the wealth of beautiful natural sceneries with the wealth of possession, but he outshines all of them and keeps the daffodils above all. He says that company of the daffodils is very joyous and lovable.

In the concluding stanza, the poet has shown a method of living happily in an unfavourable condition. Here the speaker is lying long after the moments of daffodils, in a very pensive mood and in an unhappy environment. At once, the gone moments flashed before his inward eyes and gradually he started dancing with the host of daffodils. Thus, we have learnt that to be happy is a kind of practice, the practice of controlling the mind. To be happy and unhappy is all about mental state.


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Brief Summary of Novels
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About Authors




Shakespearean Drama
The Tempest


Paraphrases of the poems



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