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 leaves in glee; A poet could not be but 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.
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📖 About this poem
Wordsworth's poem starts as a simple walk and ends as a lesson in memory. He drifts alone, cloud-like, until a shoreline of daffodils stops him — thousands of them tossing in the breeze, compared to stars scattered across the Milky Way, a nice trick of turning something small and earthbound into something vast and cosmic. The waves nearby try to dance too, but the flowers outshine them, and that joy turns out to be the real subject: not the flowers themselves, but what happens later when he's lying at home, half-distracted, and the image resurfaces unbidden, filling him with pleasure all over again. The rhythm is easy and song-like, six-line stanzas that roll forward like the walk itself. What keeps it alive isn't just the pretty picture but the honest observation that a passing moment of beauty can be filed away and spent again later — proof that noticing things properly is its own kind of savings account.
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