Being a typical example of Wordsworth’s nature poem, it reveals how the poetic inspiration consummates into a spontaneous overflow of the poet’s powerful feelings when he/she is in a pensive mood and tranquility “when on my couch I lie/ In vacant or in pensive mood”. The process involves writing a poem, the role of the poet’s real observations of the external world of nature, the spots of time, the role of memory, the power of imagination, and the state of the poet’s mind at the time of poetic creation can be better understood through that poem, at the same time, the poems rightly justify Wordsworth’s claim that “there neither is, nor can be, any essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition” as the language of the poem is marked with its utter simplicity, rejection of the eighteenth-century poetic diction, blind imitation of the classical models and poetry being reserved for the aristocratic class only. He experiments with the stanza form and combines a quatrain and a couplet to make a sestet rhyming ababcc in this poem, as he already says in ‘The Preface to Lyrical Ballads’ that his poems in the 1798 and 1800 collections were “an experiment”.
The wandering of the poet “o’er vales and hills” suggests how almost all romantic poets were on a grand tour to explore the wonders of nature, its virgin forests, its wilderness, its sublimity, and its “jocund company” that gave them a sense of sublime and poetic inspiration. Wordsworth’s exploration of the beauty of the countryside, company of nature, wandering “as a cloud” among the “crowd” or “host” of golden daffodils reminds Rousseau’s slogan “Return to nature” that is the last resort, hermitage or the escape from the industrial, urbanized and ever-growing city like London.
© Dr. Sanjeev Vishwakarma
Literary Latitude 