ipl-logo

I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud Analysis

916 Words4 Pages
Moreover, both poems point to the subjectivity of perceiving nature with this focus on the self. In both poems, the emotional responses of the speakers are brought to the forefront in each poem’s last stanza – the speaker’s feeling of joy in “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” is brought to the foreground in the poem’s last stanza. Likewise, the speaker’s excitement in relation to his desire for a certain kind of future for his baby is foregrounded in the last stanza. Clearly, both have feelings of the self as the central focus as they end the poems. Hence, even though the two poems are about natural landscapes and settings, they eventually turn inward to the self from their contemplation of nature, bringing awareness to the relationship between nature and the self.
One key significance of memory in the two poems is its function as a medium to blend the poet’s imagination and landscapes. With the use of memory, the landscape and settings in the poems are recreated in the mind, romanticised by the speakers’ imagination that is fuelled by their subjective experiences. The landscapes described in the poems do not only reflect the actual landscapes seen by the speakers in the poems – in its recreation in the mind, the landscapes are altered by imagination and emotion. For example, the speaker in “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” views the daffodils as “[stretching] in never-ending line” (Wordsworth 9) – the seeming endless to the span of the daffodils is a feature of the sublime. Edmund
Open Document