April 15th, 1802″ from the Journal Written at Grasmere
by Dorothy Wordsworth

Thursday, 15th.

It was a threatening, misty morning, but mild. We set off after dinner from Eusemere. Mrs. Clarkson went a short way with us, but turned back. The wind was furious, and we thought we must have returned. We first rested in the large boathouse, then under a furze bush opposite Mr. Clarkson’s. Saw the plough going in the field. The wind seized our breath. The lake was rough. There was a boat by itself floating in the middle of the bay below Water Millock. We rested again in the Water Millock Lane. The hawthorns are black and green, the birches here and there greenish, but there is yet more of purple to be seen on the twigs. We got over into a field to avoid some cows—people working. A few primroses by the roadside—woodsorrel flower, the anemone, scentless violets, strawberries, and that starry, yellow flower which Mrs. C. calls pile wort. When we were in the woods beyond Gowbarrow Park we saw a few daffodils close to the water-side. We fancied that the sea had floated the seeds ashore, and that the little colony had so sprung up. But as we went along there were more and yet more; and at last, under the boughs of the trees, we saw that there was a long belt of them along the shore, about the breadth of a country turnpike road. I never saw daffodils so beautiful. They grew among the mossy stones about and above them; some rested their heads upon these stones, as on a pillow, for weariness; and the rest tossed and reeled and danced, and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind, that blew upon them over the lake; they looked so gay, ever glancing, ever changing. This wind blew directly over the lake to them. There was here and there a little knot, and a few stragglers higher up; but they were so few as not to disturb the simplicity, unity, and life of that one busy highway. We rested again and again. The bays were stormy, and we heard the waves at different distances, and in the middle of the water, like the sea…. All was cheerless and gloomy, so we faced the storm. At Dobson’s I was very kindly treated by a young woman. The landlady looked sour, but it is her way…. William was sitting by a good fire when I came downstairs. He soon made his way to the library, piled up in a corner of the window. He brought out a volume of Enfield’s Speaker, another miscellany, and an odd volume of Congreve’s plays. We had a glass of warm rum and water. We enjoyed ourselves, and wished for Mary. It rained and blew, when we went to bed.

Source: From “Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journal Written at Grasmere (From 1st January 1802 to 8th July 1802)” in Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, Vol. I (of 2), by Dorothy Wordsworth, edited by William Knight, London: Macmillian and Co., Ltd., 1897.
This page titled 3.11: Wordsworth, Dorothy “Daffodils” entry from Grasmere journal (1802) is shared under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Heather Ringo & Athena Kashyap (ASCCC Open Educational Resources Initiative) .

This journal entry by Dorothy Wordsworth was written during an 1802 trip to the Lake District with her brother, the famed poet William Wordsworth. Wordsworth would use this journal entry as inspiration for his poem called “Daffodils” or “I wandered lonely as a cloud” (1807). While William Wordsworth achieved fame and eventually became the Poet Laureate of England, Dorothy Wordsworth is often relegated to footnotes and only recognized as Wordsworth’s sister. Some scholars question whether Wordsworth’s poem constitutes plagiarism. Compare this journal entry to Wordsworth’s poem and see what you think. : : : : Notes for April 15th, 1802 from the Journal Written at Grasmere : Dorothy Wordsworth : : Pending visit this post again later on to enjoy the appreciation of the Poetic Writeup By Dorothy Wordsworth : : : :

I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud : : By William Wordsworth : : “Daffodils” ( 1807 ) : : : :

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,
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:
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,
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,
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 (1802)

In a poll conducted in 1995 by the BBC Radio 4 Bookworm programme to determine the nation’s favourite poems, I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud came fifth. Often anthologised, it is now seen as a classic of English Romantic poetry, although Poems, in Two Volumes was poorly reviewed by Wordsworth’s contemporaries. The poem is presented and taught in many schools in the English-speaking world.

“I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” (also commonly known as “Daffodils” is a lyric poem by William Wordsworth. It is one of his most popular, and was inspired by a forest encounter on 15 April 1802 between he, his younger sister Dorothy and a “long belt” of daffodils. Written in 1804, it was first published in 1807 in Poems, in Two Volumes, and as a revision in 1815

At the time he wrote the poem, Wordsworth was living with his wife, Mary Hutchinson, and sister Dorothy at Town End,in Grasmere in the Lake District. Mary contributed what Wordsworth later said were the two best lines in the poem, recalling the “tranquil restoration” of Tintern Abbey,

“They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude”
Wordsworth was aware of the appropriateness of the idea of daffodils which “flash upon that inward eye” because in his 1815 version he added a note commenting on the “flash” as an “ocular spectrum”. Coleridge in Biographia Literaria of 1817, while acknowledging the concept of “visual spectrum” as being “well known”, described Wordsworth’s (and Mary’s) lines, among others, as “mental bombast”. Fred Blick has shown that the idea of flashing flowers was derived from the “Elizabeth Linnaeus phenomenon”, so called because of the discovery of flashing flowers by Elizabeth Linnaeus in 1762. Wordsworth described it as “rather an elementary feeling and simple impression (approaching to the nature of an ocular spectrum) upon the imaginative faculty, rather than an exertion of it…” The phenomenon was reported upon in 1789 and 1794 by Erasmus Darwin, whose work Wordsworth certainly read.

The entire household thus contributed to the poem. Nevertheless, Wordsworth’s biographer Mary Moorman notes that Dorothy was excluded from the poem, even though she had seen the daffodils together with Wordsworth. The poem itself was placed in a section of Poems in Two Volumes entitled “Moods of my Mind” in which he grouped together his most deeply felt lyrics. Others included “To a Butterfly”, a childhood recollection of chasing butterflies with Dorothy, and “The Sparrow’s Nest”, in which he says of Dorothy “She gave me eyes, she gave me ears”.

The earlier Lyrical Ballads, a collection of poems by both Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, had been first published in 1798 and had started the romantic movement in England. It had brought Wordsworth and the other Lake poets into the poetic limelight. Wordsworth had published nothing new since the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads, and a new publication was eagerly awaited. Wordsworth had gained some financial security by the 1805 publication of the fourth edition of Lyrical Ballads; it was the first from which he enjoyed the profits of copyright ownership. He decided to turn away from the long poem he was working on (The Recluse) and devote more attention to publishing Poems in Two Volumes, in which “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” first appeared.

Wordsworth revised the poem in 1815. He replaced “dancing” with “golden”; “along” with “beside”; and “ten thousand” with “fluttering and”. He then added a stanza between the first and second, and changed “laughing” to “jocund”. The last stanza was left untouched.

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,
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:
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,
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,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

Pamela Wolfe wrote that “The permanence of stars as compared with flowers emphasises the permanence of memory for the poet.” Andrew Motion, in a piece about the enduring appeal of the poem, wrote that “the final verse … replicates in the minds of its readers the very experience it describes”.

The poem has been set to music, for example by Eric Thiman in the 20th century. In 2007, Cumbria Tourism released a rap version of the poem, featuring MC Nuts, a Lake District red squirrel, in an attempt to capture the “YouTube generation” and attract tourists to the Lake District. Published on the two-hundredth anniversary of the original, it attracted wide media attention. It was welcomed by the Wordsworth Trust, but attracted the disapproval of some commentators.

In 2019 Cumbria Rural Choirs with help from the Leche Trust commissioned a setting by Tamsin Jones, which was to have been performed in March 2020 at Carlisle Cathedral with British Sinfonietta, but because of COVID restrictions in the UK the premiere was delayed until 2022.