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.
◆
Comments
Loading comments…
📖 About this poem
Wordsworth remembers a walk that turned, without warning, into something like a vision: a hillside crowded with daffodils moving in the wind. The poem is built on that plain event but slowly reveals its real subject, which is memory itself, and how a single bright moment can become a resource we return to later, in quieter or lower times.
The music helps carry that idea. Simple rhymed quatrains and a closing couplet in each stanza give the poem a gentle, walking rhythm, easy to hold in the mind, almost like something you could recite while pacing. The comparison of the flowers to stars scattered along the milky way is the poem's boldest image, stretching a small roadside scene into something cosmic.
What keeps it alive today isn't the flowers themselves but the final turn: the recognition that noticing fully, in the moment, pays us back later, unbidden, when we most need lifting.
Comments