Barfield’s Homework

William Wordsworth, ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’.

Wordsworth’s paean to daffodils is written in confidently regular iambic tetrameter, with the rhythm giving Wordsworth’s account of his encounter with the spring flowers an air of deeper Romantic significance which perhaps belies the rather straightforward meaning of the poem. All together, now:

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 …