The first step of any analysis should
always be some kind of paraphrase. A
paraphrase means putting the text in
your own words. With a longer text, like a
novel, you obviously don't have to
rewrite the whole thing, but it's still
good to look up difficult words and get
a sense of how you would say it -- what it
means to you specifically. In this video
we're going to do a paraphrase of William
Wordsworth's "I wandered lonely as a cloud,"
and this is the second video in a
series that we're doing, and after this
we'll start the actual analysis. So for
now we're just going to put this text
into some kind of language that we can
understand. Fortunately, it's not actually
that hard (there's a lot of words that
you'll recognize) and Wordsworth starts
by saying that he's wandering through
the landscape and he feels lonely as a
cloud. So this is a simile. We
shouldn't take this too literally, but he
seems to have some kind of high
perspective on the landscape. "O'er" -- this is
a little poetic abbreviation or
contraction that means "over," and Wordsworth
contracts this so that he can get his
syllable count right (for the meter of
the poem) "Vales" -- this refers to valleys
... so these are
valleys ... just a poetic word for valleys,
and then we have "hills." So we can sort of
imagine him there floating like a cloud
above the landscape, although that's more
how he feels then necessarily what's
happening. He sees a bunch of daffodils
and he compares them to a crowd, or a
host. "Host" is again another word for
a great number, a great crowd, of
people let's say, and you can see some
personification happening here. These
daffodils --
they are beside the lake, beneath the
trees. There's something kind of funny
about this actually, because if he is
like a cloud floating over the landscape
then how can you see beneath the trees?
And you can see here how he's using his
imagination -- he's doing multiple
things at once.
That's not paraphrasing, by the way ...
that's more analysis, so we better get
back to just summarizing what's
happening.
Okay, so he sees the daffodils. They are
fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
It's definitely a beautiful sight, and
then in the second stanza he really
zooms out a lot and he starts comparing
the daffodils here to stars ("continuous
as the stars that shine and twinkle on
the Milky Way"). The Milky Way is the
galaxy that the earth is in, so you
could say the earth's galaxy. That
really does give it a kind of epic scope
doesn't it? "They stretched in never-ending
line along the margin of a bay" -- so the
bay here is the lake, and the margin is
the edge or the border of the lake. He
sees 10,000 of them. It seems like
there's ... a tremendous number and
this is just a single glance, so it's
possible that there are many more, and
they are "tossing their heads in
sprightly (which means lively) dance." So
these beautiful daffodils are dancing
very lively in the breeze, and he sees
thousands of them beside the lake. Okay,
so [it's] a beautiful sight here, and let's see
what he says about this in the third
stanza. He writes, "the waves beside them
danced, but they outdid the sparkling
waves in glee." Glee means happiness,
cheerfulness, and in fact we have a whole
bunch of words here for happiness (gay
also means happy, jocund means happy or
cheerful), so he's really pulling out all
the stops to show how happy the scene
actually is. The waves and the
daffodils seem to be in a kind of
competition here! They're trying
to see who's going to win the award for
the best dancing, for the most happiness,
and the daffodils definitely win the
prize. They "out-did the sparkling
waves in glee." They are the happiest.
This little word "but" here means
something like "except," so a poet who's
walking through the landscape can't help
but feel happy. I could not except be gay
in such a happy company , And again this
word "gay" is not our sense of "gay."
It's happiness -- that's what we're
talking about here. "I gazed and gazed but
little thought what wealth the show to
me had brought" -- that's kind of like
saying, "well, I looked at the scene, but I
really didn't know how special it was at
the time. It gave me a kind of wealth. It
gave me something special, but I didn't
really recognize how wealthy or how rich
the experience actually was. And then we
get the last stanza, and the last stanza
is more retrospective. It kind of zooms
out again, and now there's a kind of time
difference here. So it's like a time gap
over here between the third and the last
stanza. "For oft" -- that means "often," a little
poetic shorter version. Again, we want to
make sure we have the right meter,
the right rhythm to the line . "For oft
when on my couch I lie in vacant (that
literally means empty; his mind is a
blank, his mind is empty) ... in vacant or in
pensive (in thoughtful you could also
kind of say ... moody ... or
meditative) ... so in empty or in pensive
mood (in thoughtful mood) they flash upon
that inward eye." The inward eye is
the imagination for Wordsworth. You have
your outward eye that looks on the world,
and then your imagination works together
with your memory to bring things back to
to your brain basically. So the memory of
these daffodils ... flashes upon his
imagination or his memory, and that
inward eye in turn is described as the
"bliss of solitude." Solitude is being
by yourself,
bliss is happiness, and you know what? The
imagination is something that gives you
a great deal of happiness when you're by
yourself! Then we have the last two lines,
and these go "and then my heart with
pleasure fills and dances with the
daffodils." Not too hard. When you remember
this beautiful scene, when you
recall how lovely it was, then
you can kind of have this heart that's
full of pleasure and full of enjoyment,
and you too can dance with the daffodils.
So that's paraphrasing the text and
hopefully you found this helped in
clarifying just the basic meaning of the
poem.