criticism: Wordsworth’s "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" - by Matthew C. Brennan

Shortly after Poems in Two Volumes (1807) appeared, Wordsworth worried about readers misinterpreting "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" (Letters 174, 194-95). Still concerned in 1815, he attached a note to the poem in his first Collected Works. "The subject of these stanzas," he asserted, "is rather an elementary feeling and simple impression [...] upon the imaginative faculty, than an exertion of it" (qtd. in Stillinger 539). Some critics have basically followed Wordsworth's lead: To Jack Stillinger the mental experience embodied by the poem is simple and ordinary (544), and to John Milstead the first three stanzas exemplify merely "a physical stimulus-and-response mechanism" through which the poet remains "passive" (89).

Nevertheless, in the preface to the 1815 collection Wordsworth not only argues that the imagination is ruled by "sublime consciousness" (Stillinger 486), but he also places "I Wandered" among poems categorized by "Imagination." Indeed, many critics ignore Wordsworth's comments on the poem and instead read it as representing a moment in nature of spiritual insight that recurs during a later imaginative re-creation (Joplin 68-69, Stallknecht 81-82, Hartman 5). More precisely, though, "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" dramatizes an experience of the sublime in its first three stanzas, which the poet recollects and re-experiences as a "spot of time" in the last stanza.

Like other sublime passages in The Prelude and "Tintern Abbey," this one draws on Edmund Burke's as well as Wordsworth's ideas of the sublime. Burke's thoughts in his Philosophical Enquiry are especially recalled in the lines that Wordsworth added for the 1815 republication:

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretch in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in a sprightly dance. (7-12)

For one thing, by stretching in a "never-ending line" the daffodils embody the sublime idea of vastness, in particular "vastness of extent" or length. Compared to the sublimity of the Simplon Pass or Mt. Snowdon, these flowers surely seem simple and ordinary, but that is partly because, as Burke explains, vastness of height and depth are more striking and grand than vastness of extent (72).

Another conventional cause of the sublime this stanza exhibits is infinity. The host of flowers appears infinite, hence Wordsworth's impression of their uncountable profusion, "Ten thousand saw I at a glance." As Burke remarks, when "the eye" cannot "perceive the bounds of" things or when they are "continued to any indefinite number"--as with the daffodils--"they seem to be infinite, and they produce the same effects as if they were really so" (73). Moreover, because Wordsworth stresses that the daffodils are "[c]ontinuous" they also constitute what Burke terms "the artificial infinite." This condition applies, Burke explains, through "succession," in which "parts may be continued so long, and in such a direction, as by their frequent impulses on the sense to impress the imagination with an idea of their progress beyond their actual limits" (74). In other words, the flowers are so numerous and extend so far from the poet's vantage that when he suddenly glimpses them, his "sublime consciousness" imagines them as infinite. Significantly, this numerousness of the daffodils leads Wordsworth to compare them to "stars," which because of their profuse number evoke for Burke yet another cause of sublimity: magnificence. Associating the shining profusion of stars with the flowers clearly lends them a similar magnificence and thus evokes a response from the poet akin to his traveler's in "A Night Piece" where "multitudes of stars" and an instantaneous gleam of the moon trigger a sublime vision.

<!--pagebreak-->Besides illustrating many of Burke's ideas of the sublime, "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" also encompasses Wordsworth's chief elements of the sublime as he defines it in his own unpublished essay "The Sublime and the Beautiful" written in 1811-12. Here Wordsworth divides the sublime into two types: one that is negative and thus similar to Burke's, which hinges on terror; and one that is positive and produces what Wordsworth calls in "Tintern Abbey" "the blessed mood." Both types, Wordsworth emphasizes, create a sense of "intense unity, without a conscious contemplation of parts" ("The Sublime" 354). Clearly, "I Wandered" depicts the positive sublime, which reveals unity by rousing "us to a sympathetic energy" through which the mind participates with the "force which is acting upon it" (354). Through his sublime consciousness the poet perceives the unity of not only the dancing flowers themselves but also the entire scene, which includes both "the waves" dancing "beside them" and himself as he "gazed--and gazed." In this moment of sublime vision, his imagination sympathetically unites him and the scene "in such a jocund company." During the moment itself he does not think; he is "without a conscious contemplation" of the elements unified by his sublime perception. But afterward when he recollects it and re-experiences it as a "flash upon that inward eye"--the agent of sublime consciousness--he recognizes that, like the waves, he too "dances with the daffodils" while part of the interpenetrating "jocund company." This repetition of dance rhetorically enacts the unification of flowers, waves, and poet. The poem opens with the poet lonely, disconnected from his environment, and ends with him connected to it, enjoying "the bliss of solitude" through the unifying flash of sublime consciousness.

Though Milstead interprets the poet's gazing at the daffodils as unimaginatively passive and David Joplin construes it as intensely active because trance-like, the quality of Wordsworth's vision in fact falls somewhere between the purely sensory and the transcendentally spiritual. As we saw, Wordsworth's own note to the poem qualifies the experience as imaginative but one in which he does not exert his imagination. In other words, the poem appears to illustrate what he calls in "Expostulation and Reply .... a wise passiveness." In this passive state he remains receptive to nature's powers, which both "Tintern Abbey" and "The Sublime" testify can produce the sublime; and through "wise passiveness" Wordsworth insists we can feed the mind, even without fully exerting the imagination. Thus, his gazing at the daffodils' dance brings him "wealth" and feeds his "inward eye" despite his unconscious passivity.

Stallknecht's explanation of the various levels of Wordsworth's intuition of "the unity of Being" overlooks the sublime but helps show how the experience of the daffodils evokes sublime consciousness: Although Wordsworth's mystical or intuitive consciousness of "the unity of Being" often followed "robust" imaginative activity, this consciousness "was also sometimes induced by 'wise passiveness'" (9, 12). Because, as Stallknecht writes, this passive state resembles the more active imaginative ones in allowing the "depths of consciousness to manifest themselves" (12), I think we can equate "wise passiveness" with experiences ruled by the sublime consciousness of "intense unity." Wordsworth unfolds just such a sublime experience in the poet's wisely passive vision of the daffodils in "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud." <!--pagebreak-->

WORKS CITED

Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Ed. J. T. Boulton. 1958. Notre Dame: Notre Dame UP, 1968.

Hartman, Geoffrey H. Wordsworth's Poetry, 1787-1814. New Haven: Yale UP, 1964.

Joplin, David. "Wordsworth's 'I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.'" The Explicator 56.2 (1998): 67-70.

Milstead, John. "The Two Selves of Wordsworth's Middle Lyrics." Approaches to Teaching Wordsworth's Poetry. Ed. Spencer Hall and Jonathan Ramsey. New York: MLA, 1986. 89-91.

Stallknecht, Newton P. Strange Seas of Thought: Studies in William Wordsworth's Philosophy of Man and Nature. Durham: Duke UP, 1945.

Stillinger, Jack, ed. Selected Poems and Prefaces by William Wordsworth. Boston: Houghton, 1965.

Wordsworth, William. "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud." Stillinger 191.

-----. The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth. Ed. Ernest de Selincourt. Vol. 2. Rev. ed. Mary Moorman. Oxford: Clarendon, 1969.

-----. "The Sublime and the Beautiful." The Prose Works of William Wordsworth. Ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser. Vol. 2. Oxford: Clarendon, 1974. 349-60.