Critical Analysis- “I WANDERED LONELY AS A CLOUD“ By William Wordsworth

“I WANDERED LONELY AS A CLOUD“
Written at Town-end, Grasmere. The Daffodils grew and still grow on the
margin of Ullswater and probably may be seen to this day as beautiful in the
month of March, nodding their golden heads beside the dancing and foaming
waves. – William Wordsworth, 1804
I WANDERED lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees, 5
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay: 10
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay, 15
In such a jocund company:
I gazed - and gazed - but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood, 20
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
- William Wordsworth, 1804
William Wordsworth’s “I Wandered as Lonely as a Cloud” opens with the
narrator describing his action of walking in a state of worldly detachment; his
wandering “As lonely as a cloud / That floats on high o'er vales and hills,” (1-2).
What he is thinking of we never really uncover, but his description leaves us to
analyze his words as a sort of “head in the clouds” daydream-like state where his
thoughts are far away, unconcerned with the immediate circumstances in which he
finds himself. Wordsworth, ever the Romanticist, perhaps uses these two
introductory lines to describe the disconnected and dispassionate ways that we all
live our lives; walking through life in a haze of daily ritual and monotonous
distractions in a pointless and spiritually disinterested state where we fail as
emotional creatures to appreciate the quiet beauties of life that we as human beings
need for spiritual sustenance. William Wordsworth’s “lonely cloud” is our own
private impersonal perception of the world, floating miles above it and missing the
quiet virtues of nature, beauty, and other sources of emotional nourishment.
As William Wordsworth’s narrator is walking, he notices “A host, of golden
daffodils;... Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.” (4 and 6). Wordsworth goes on
to describe these “golden daffodils” as a vast plot of swaying flowers around the
fringes of a bay, outdoing the beauty of the ocean’s waves with their own golden
oscillation. Describing the daffodils for the next several lines, Wordsworth helps
us to visualize what he himself has seen and was so moved by; “Tossing their
heads in sprightly dance. / The waves beside them danced; but they / Out-did the
sparkling waves in glee” (12-14). These light-hearted daffodils, weaving in unison
with each other in the wind, have romantically touched Wordsworth, their natural
beauty reaching him in ways that he describes as not fully understanding until
later: “A poet could not but be gay, / In such a jocund company: / I gazed - and
gazed - but little thought / What wealth the show to me had brought:” (15-18).
It is here that your humble writer can not help but remember one of William
Wordsworth’s earlier poems that he had written six years earlier. William
Wordsworth’s “Lines Written in Early Spring” (1798) serves the reader in much
the same way as Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”, in that his
narrator draws inspiration from nature’s beauty to experience a deep and
meaningful emotion within himself as a philosopher and a poet. The great
difference, however, between Wordsworth’s “Lines Written in Early Spring” and
“I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” is that in “Lines Written in Early Spring” natures
beauty induces in Wordsworth a deep and powerful mourning for how mankind
has perverted his own nature in his then modern society, whereas “Lines Written in
Early Spring” invigorates Wordsworth’s narrator with the mental imagery of the
daffodils.
Most importantly, in both poems Wordsworth describes his narrator as having a
moment of quiet introspection. In much the same way that most readers can
relate, Wordsworth’s narrator in “Lines Written in Early Spring”, upon having a
few moments to think to himself, lapses into a depressed state from his own quiet
thoughts: “While in a grove I sate reclined, / In that sweet mood when pleasant
thoughts / Bring sad thoughts to the mind.” (William Wordsworth’s “Lines Written
in Early Spring”, 1798, lines 2-4.). In Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a
Cloud” his narrator reciprocally, upon relaxing on a couch in quiet contemplation,
is elated and pleasantly entertained by the thoughts of the daffodils dancing in his
memory: “when on my couch I lie / In vacant or in pensive mood, / They flash
upon that inward eye / Which is the bliss of solitude; / And then my heart with
pleasure fills, / And dances with the daffodils.” (19-24). Wordsworth’s narrator in
“I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” is not grieved by “What man has made of man”
(William Wordsworth’s “Lines Written in Early Spring”, 1798, line 8.) but
contented and near-tickled by his reminiscence of the golden, light-hearted beauty
of the daffodils.
A message can be so drawn from this contrast, whether William Wordsworth
intended it or not, in a Post-Modern dissection and personal interpretation of a
theme that holds as much true to the cannon of Romanticism as to Wordsworth’s
own personal philosophy. Perhaps the popular title for Wordsworth’s “I Wandered
Lonely as a Cloud”, “Daffodils”, finds, in itself, the virtue of the poem and its
interpretive meaning. The daffodils are, as well as what Wordsworth would have
intended, natural beauty; the tranquil occurrences of lucky happenstance that we
experience and carry with us in our proverbial hearts as cherished moments and
treasured memories. Likely, many readers skimmed Wordsworth’s description of
the daffodils and quickly spurned it as a “Romantic blubber” of sorts. Needless to
say, however, Wordsworth believes, as does your humble writer, that any human
being possessing a soul and beating heart would find themselves deeply touched
by the scene of a thousand-fold host of yellow daffodils swaying in the breeze
against the backdrop of waves breaking against the rocks of a bay. This mental
image, otherwise missed by those caught up in their daily bustle and contemporary
distractions, their “wandering lonely as clouds” so to speak, is what we draw from
nature and experience when we cease our self-destructive pace. If we slow down,
just enough, we may catch by the wayside of our wanderings a spiritual creature
that could serve us as a pleasant mental image or perhaps even as a meaning or
purpose in life.
In William Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”, the daffodils
become much more than mere flowers. They are a symbol of natural beauty and,
more importantly, symbolize living a life as rich in experience and sensation as
would make a life worth living. They represent, in their light-hearted dance, the
joy and happiness of living an adoring and fulfilling life, embracing it for every
drop of nectar it could so bring. Romanticism, a poetic philosophy that
Wordsworth himself engendered, finds much virtue in this meaning; the daffodils
reaching out and catching the eye of Wordsworth’s narrator, or perhaps
Wordsworth himself, and inspiring him so much emotionally, that he was left with
little choice than to express them poetically. Wordsworth’s narrator of “Lines
Written in Early Spring” struggles with his own innate human predisposition
towards melancholy in a world where contemporary human society and
civilization has destroyed our connection to nature, and incidentally our own
nature as well, but Wordsworth’s narrator in “Daffodils” has taken from the
moment the sweet nourishment of spiritual manna that was necessary to keep a
quiet instance of introspection from turning to depression and, instead, becoming
an exuberant reverie of a setting in memory; “They flash upon that inward eye /
Which is the bliss of solitude; / And then my heart with pleasure fills, / And dances
with the daffodils.” (21-24).
William Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” or “Daffodils” is a
deep and moving work of poetry that under a deceivingly simple exterior could
possibly be, under energetic dissection, argued as one of Wordsworth’s greatest
works of Romanticism. By staying true to Romanticism’s philosophy of
embracing not only nature but the careful expression of the poet’s emotions
through art and how nature can so deeply affect it, Wordsworth, in four simple
stanzas if imagery, could, perhaps, not better described in verse the Romantic
ideology. The popular title for Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”,
“Daffodils”, has in a single word summed an entire literary philosophy.


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SENTENCE... The Way of Expression...

The Structure of a Sentence

Remember that every clause is, in a sense, a miniature sentence. A simple sentences contains only a single clause, while a compound sentence, a complex sentence, or a compound-complex sentence contains at least two clauses.
The Simple Sentence

The most basic type of sentence is the simple sentence, which contains only one clause. A simple sentence can be as short as one word:

Run!

Usually, however, the sentence has a subject as well as a predicate and both the subject and the predicate may have modifiers. All of the following are simple sentences, because each contains only one clause:

Melt!
Ice melts.
The ice melts quickly.
The ice on the river melts quickly under the warm March sun.
Lying exposed without its blanket of snow, the ice on the river melts quickly under the warm March sun.

As you can see, a simple sentence can be quite long -- it is a mistake to think that you can tell a simple sentence from a compound sentence or a complex sentence simply by its length.

The most natural sentence structure is the simple sentence: it is the first kind which children learn to speak, and it remains by far the most common sentence in the spoken language of people of all ages. In written work, simple sentences can be very effective for grabbing a reader's attention or for summing up an argument, but you have to use them with care: too many simple sentences can make your writing seem childish.

When you do use simple sentences, you should add transitional phrases to connect them to the surrounding sentences.
The Compound Sentence

A compound sentence consists of two or more independent clauses (or simple sentences) joined by co-ordinating conjunctions like "and," "but," and "or":

Simple
Canada is a rich country.
Simple
Still, it has many poor people.
Compound
Canada is a rich country, but still it has many poor people.

Compound sentences are very natural for English speakers -- small children learn to use them early on to connect their ideas and to avoid pausing (and allowing an adult to interrupt):

Today at school Mr. Moore brought in his pet rabbit, and he showed it to the class, and I got to pet it, and Kate held it, and we coloured pictures of it, and it ate part of my carrot at lunch, and ...

Of course, this is an extreme example, but if you over-use compound sentences in written work, your writing might seem immature.

A compound sentence is most effective when you use it to create a sense of balance or contrast between two (or more) equally-important pieces of information:

Montéal has better clubs, but Toronto has better cinemas.

Special Cases of Compound Sentences

There are two special types of compound sentences which you might want to note. First, rather than joining two simple sentences together, a co-ordinating conjunction sometimes joins two complex sentences, or one simple sentence and one complex sentence. In this case, the sentence is called a compound-complex sentence:

compound-complex
The package arrived in the morning, but the courier left before I could check the contents.

The second special case involves punctuation. It is possible to join two originally separate sentences into a compound sentence using a semicolon instead of a co-ordinating conjunction:

Sir John A. Macdonald had a serious drinking problem; when sober, however, he could be a formidable foe in the House of Commons.

Usually, a conjunctive adverb like "however" or "consequently" will appear near the beginning of the second part, but it is not required:

The sun rises in the east; it sets in the west.

The Complex Sentence

A complex sentence contains one independent clause and at least one dependent clause. Unlike a compound sentence, however, a complex sentence contains clauses which are not equal. Consider the following examples:

Simple
My friend invited me to a party. I do not want to go.
Compound
My friend invited me to a party, but I do not want to go.
Complex
Although my friend invited me to a party, I do not want to go.

In the first example, there are two separate simple sentences: "My friend invited me to a party" and "I do not want to go." The second example joins them together into a single sentence with the co-ordinating conjunction "but," but both parts could still stand as independent sentences -- they are entirely equal, and the reader cannot tell which is most important. In the third example, however, the sentence has changed quite a bit: the first clause, "Although my friend invited me to a party," has become incomplete, or a dependent clause.

A complex sentence is very different from a simple sentence or a compound sentence because it makes clear which ideas are most important. When you write

My friend invited me to a party. I do not want to go.

or even

My friend invited me to a party, but I do not want to go.

The reader will have trouble knowing which piece of information is most important to you. When you write the subordinating conjunction "although" at the beginning of the first clause, however, you make it clear that the fact that your friend invited you is less important than, or subordinate, to the fact that you do not want to g

TENSE... It's Easy...

Verb Tenses

There are 12 verb tenses in English. The verb action can take place in the past the present or the future. There are usually word clues that give a guide as to when the verb action occurs. Within each of these times there are four different situations that occur. Simple tenses occur at a point in time, or on a repeated or habitual basis. A progressive or continuous tense indicates that the action takes place over time and these tenses always use part of the verb “be” as the first part of the verb phrase and end with the main verb + ing. A perfect tense always uses part of “have” as the first part of the verb phrase and ends with the past form of the main verb. A perfect progressive tense starts with the relevant part of the verb “have” followed by “been” and ends with the main verb + ing. If you remember these basic rules, you can always identify the verb tense being used, or use the verb tense you need without having to continually refer to a text book or table. Meanwhile, a chart like the one given here, can provide a quick and easy reference until you feel comfortable using the various verb tenses. Also pay attention to the time clues in the following chart; while some of them can be used with more than one verb tense, they do restrict the number of possibilities and help you to understand which verb tense is being used, or which verb tense you should use.
Chart—Active Verb Tenses


HERE IS A FULL CHART OF TENSE


Thank You...

A Critical Analysis of the poem "ULYSSES" by A. Tennyson

Critical Analysis of the poem "ULYSSES" by A. Tennyson

Alfred Tennyson’s “Ulysses” Critical Analysis

Alferd Tennysons’s “Ulysses ”Alfred Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’ is both a lament and an inspiring poem. Even modern readers who are not so familiar with the classics, can visualize the heroic legend of Ulysses, and so is not prepared for what he finds in the poem— not Ulysses the hero but Ulysses the man. Tennyson brings out the agony felt by Ulysses at his old age, The influence of the Industrial age can be seen in Tennyson’s usage of the word ‘profits’ in the very first line. The character calls himself ‘idle’ showing his disillusionment at this ripe stage of life.

The “still hearth” and “the barren crags” symbolize death. He continues complaining about his hapless state and the reader begins to detect the shallowness of character of this otherwise larger than life legend. He is so self-centered and full of self pity that he shows scant respect for those close to him and those that he rules as seen in lines 4-5. His pride keeps him from calling himself old, in that many words ; He has to allude to his wife’s age to let the reader in on his own advanced years. The wisdom and grace of old age seem to elude him completely as he metaphorically claims “I will drink life to the lees.”Tennyson uses vivid imagery in lines 10 - 11, the “rainy Hyades”again bringing out the fear of death in the narrator . The lines “I am become a name”, and “ myself not least , but honored them all” reflects the awareness Ulysses has of his legendry fame . The reader begins to identify with the character as he seems fraught with the same faults that afflict normal men . “A hungry heart’ is a personification used to highlight the character’s insatiable desire to travel and explore “ I am part of all that I met “, portray the swelling pride of one who knows he is a legend. In lines 22-25 the character laments at having to , ‘pause’ and “ to make an end” symbolizing imminent death. He hates his infirm state as can be seen in lines 24- 30.”For some three suns “ is a connotation suggesting he has been in bed for three days, which for him is the most demeaning of all . Ulysses can see death at his doorstep , yet feels every hour can be used for the unending quest for knowledge. Tennyson uses a powerful simile in line 31 equating ‘knowledge ‘ to ‘the sinking star’ which is the most elusive and the most difficult to discern in the sky. In line 32 he uses a hyperbole to dramatize the extent of the character’s desire for the unknown and the unexplored. The second part of the poem, lines 33-43 are devoted to the contrast between father and son, one can feel the heavy sarcasm in the words “ slow prudence” “blamelessness” and “decency” of his son. He is contemptuous of these traits, which maybe harmless and noble, yet are hardly worthy of a great king. Ulysses’ wandering spirit looks upon any kind of softness as a failing. He sneers at the more ‘centered’ personality of his son who governs his people in a mild and orderly manner .In lines 37-38 he reveals his paradoxical personality as he feels soft handling is a form of subjugation that “ subdues them to the useful and the good”. Here the reader can peer into the maverick character of Ulysses and his complete disregard of anything normal and routine. Another character trait that shows through in lines 41- 42 is that of an agnostic or to put it less strongly, he shows a “jovial agnosticism”. (Landow) .The poem is a dramatic representation of a man who has faith neither in the gods nor in the necessity of preserving order in his kingdom and his own life (Landow). Just as the reader is wearing down under the relentless spate of negative traits of Ulysses, Tennyson brings respite in the third stanza reminding one of the past glories of this fabled soldier of the Trojan war. With rich usage of symbols and visual imagery, he manages to finally make a connection between the character and the reader . The last stanza is directed to his mariners as also to the readers who after visiting upon all the negative traits of his character realized that he too was human like them . He calls upon them, “souls that have toiled ,and wrought ,and thought with me”(46),immediately connecting them to his struggle. Tennyson uses symbolism all through this last stanza.” The port” symbolizes the final place(44),the “vessel puffs her sail” symbolizes the soul ready to leave.“ There gloom the dark, broad seas”(45) denote the unknown nature of the final journey. Ulysses calls upon his friends to take up the challenge in the face of death and like a true soldier, to fight till the end. He refuses to give in to the vagaries of old age and extols the readers to join him in the final battle. “this open invitation to join Ulysses in his last heroic attempt seals the bond between reader and speaker” ( Cleverly) .The hero in us rises to the fore as he implores us with his appeal in line 56-57 “come , my friends .’Tis not too late to seek a newer world”. In lines 60 - 65 Ulysses is not certain where death will take him. “Maybe that the gulf will wash us down”(62) symbolizes the possibility of hell but “Happy Isles” (63) stand for heaven where he feels he will be greeted by his old friends like Achilles .In line 67 Tennyson uses the hyperbolic expression “Moved earth and heaven”, to highlight the legendry strength of Ulysses. “That which we are , we are”, indicate the coming to terms with life or maybe it could even mean the final realization that the soul is more powerful that the body . In the end there is a strong message for the reader - more than a message it is a model to base ones life on -“Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will .To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.(66-70).As the last lines unfold a realization far beyond what is apparent starts emerging. In the initial stanzas of the poem was Ulysses lamenting at his sorry state because he couldn’t gracefully accept old age or was it an appeal to those who pod along, “That hoard, and sleep, and feed” to take notice of life. In that light Ulysses seems to be an enlightened soul, who saw far ahead of the normal people. His quest for knowledge like a ‘sinking star’ was unquenchable. Was he seeking the higher truth. Did he know something that the others were not aware of? “Beyond the utmost bound of human thought” (32). He was seeking something beyond death is evident in “for my purpose holds .To sail beyond sunset.” What does he mean by “ seek a newer world”(57). When we see Ulysses in this light we realize that the faults we sought in him in the initial stages of the poem are failings only as perceived by a society “centered in the sphere of common duties”(39). Otherwise they were not faults but relentless endeavors of a restless soul to seek that which is beyond the realms of human thought.

Bibliography
Cleverly , Rachael . “A Hero Among Men, A Man Among Heroes.” Critical Analysis of Tennyson’s ”Ulysses”

Landow, George . “Literature, history and culture in the age of Victoria”