William Wordsworth is able to provoke emotion and new ideas throughout his poem, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”. The speaker experiences a connection with nature to express these emotions. The central idea of the poem is how the author uses personification to show the speaker’s different moods. Through these specific literary terms, Wordsworth is able to speak about nature in a way that presents the idea that loneliness is a positive experience and that an individual cannot fully experience all that nature has to offer if they are not alone. The clouds explain the narrator wandering lonely, the daffodils are personified as a crowd of people who cheer him up when he is feeling lonely, and the waves dance with excitement and life.
The beginning of the poem starts with the speaker drifting on a cloud of solitude. The speaker feels distant and separated from the world below. The sky can easily be perceived as a lonely unreachable place, and if you have a cloud drifting away by then that connection to human loneliness can be present. No matter what the size, a cloud will never stay, hence a cloud will eventually leave. The wind will blow the cloud to a new place. Looking around at neature, all of the beautiful things are on the ground, leaving the cloud, again, lonely drifting up there. This personification can relate to the saying if the glass is half empty or half full. It depends on how one chooses to view it. In this case, the speaker chooses to see it as half empty. Of course the clouds cannot be lonely, but it is easy to identify with clouds or sky as being a lonely untouchable place.
The poet finds that the memory of the sight of the daffodils stays with him, giving him joy when he is in a vacant mood. They are not just flowers in this poem, they can dance and flutter in the wind. The daffodils are not just a piece of nature, they are meant to represent happiness. While Wordsworth does not come out and say that the daffodils are a representation of happiness, he does say that, “A poet can not help but be gay, in such a jocund company”(15-16). This means that he cannot help but be happy when seeing these flowers. The daffodils can also, “toss their heads in a sprightly dance” (12). This creates an image of dancers performing around him, causing great happiness. One can not be lonely when there are things surrounding them for their entertainment.
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The importance of the poem was the emotion shown through the literary devices and how it connects to the beauty of nature. The author writes about how nature provides more to a person than just beauty. He does this with literary terms such as personification, imagery, allegory and allusions. The larger picture is how he uses nature to prove that solitude does not mean you are alone, and that you need to be alone in order to grasp all that nature has to offer.
