From a post-Darwinian vantage, a poet’s devotion to Dionysian energies is a kind of devotion to what we contemporaries might think of as the Darwinian (nature red in tooth and claw etc.).Īs for Wordsworth, I didn’t know that he had visited Annette in the 1800s, so that lends strength to your interpretation. Wordsworth might well have understood his poem in Dionysian terms-and MIGHT have been conscious of an undercurrent of the Dionysian energy in it. You can read the Bible or Shakespeare in Freudian terms (for example) even though both the Bible and Shakespeare predate Freud. I didn’t mean to imply that Wordsworth would have understood his poem in Darwinian terms-only that I like the idea of reading it in Darwinian terms. And how often he thought of Annette after he married, who can say? Yet even in his solitude, he finds himself stumbling on, and being startled by, a multiplying host of flowery babes! Multiplying children (including his French daughter, Caroline) might have been somewhere in his mind, and lurking subliminally in this poem. If anything, the poet might be relieved to be out of the house, away from his growing brood of wailing babes and toddlers, alone for a moment of quiet mental contemplation (he had, with his wife, five kids between 1803-1810). Wordsworth thus might be dropping personal history, and is using loneliness here as a conceit of the poem.
Also, his sister Dorothy was probably on the walk with him (that inspired the poem). But Wordsworth’s poem is written in the first decade of the 1800s, at a time when Wordsworth has married, and started having children with, another woman. If written in the 1790s, that would strengthen your reading. I like your notion that the loneliness is connected to missing Annette and Caroline, but there might be a timing issue here. Even as Wordsworth seems to move (in the poem) from airy singularity to an engagement with multiplicity, so the dancing daffodils seem to have taken the return trip, metamorphosing from a host of selfish genes into a singular and long chiming human mental meme. On hitting lines three and four, Wordsworth has abruptly transported us from the singularity and solitude of his one cloud Apollonian heaven to the reproductive multiplicity and communal messiness of our Dionysian vegetable Earth, where no man is an island, and the flowers have spread,Īre these lines meant to be unironically embraced as conventionally beautiful-for daffodils in profusion are certainly pleasing to the eye-or is there an undercurrent of maenad-like seduction here-a subliminal menace just beneath the poet’s surface denotations? What’s really going on here with all this dancing vegetable matter and its pestilential invasion of both the land and the poet’s consciousness? Are these daffodils, in short, not just beautiful-but sternly beautiful-demanding their own replication-not just over the land, but even in the dissemination of Wordsworth’s poem, which has now invaded us with his description of them in pretty words? The next two lines might well suggest this latter tone, for they announce the sudden arrest of the poet’s attention, and give him a decided jolt: That floats on high o’er Vales and Hills. I’m actually moving slowly, even sluggishly, and my head is, as it were, in the clouds.” And so: Is this meant to be ecstatic-as in “I was high as a cloud and surveying a verdant land!”-or does the poet mean for us to read these lines in a more subdued manner-and even with ambivalence? Perhaps the poet, far from ecstatic, is suggesting to us something like this: “I am out of sympathetic touch with my earthly surroundings, and detached from the land by my wandering airy thoughts.
What I like about the opening two lines of this stanza are their ambiguity in tone:
That floats on high o’er Vales and Hills, Today’s lines of poetry come from William Wordworth’s “I wandered lonely as a Cloud” (1807), and they make up the poem’s first stanza:
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