肃杀我好似一朵孤独的流云I wondered lonely as a cloud评析

2021年1月15日发(作者：刁沼芬)

William Wordsworth’s “I Wandered as Lonely as a Cloud” opens with the narrator describing his action of walking
in a state of worldly detachment; his wandering “As lonely as a cloud / That floats on high o'er vales and hills,” (1-
2). What he is thinking of we never really uncover, but his description leaves us to analyze his words as a sort of
“head in the clouds” daydream-like state where his thoughts are far away, unconcerned with the immediate
circumstances in which he finds himself. Wordsworth, ever the Romanticist, perhaps uses these two introductory
lines to describe the disconnected and dispassionate ways that we all live our lives; walking through life in a haze
of daily ritual and monotonous distractions in a pointless and spiritually disinterested state where we fail as
emotional creatures to appreciate the quiet beauties of life that we as human beings need for spiritual
sustenance. William Wordsworth’s “lonely cloud” is our own private impersonal perception of the world, floating
miles above it and missing the quiet virtues of nature, beauty, and other sources of emotional nourishment.
As William Wordsworth’s narrator is walking, he notices “A host, of golden daffodils;… Fluttering and dancing in
the breeze.” (4 and 6). Wordsworth goes on to describe these “golden daffodils” as a vast plot of swaying flowers
around the fringes of a bay, outdoing the beauty of the ocean’s waves with their own golden oscillation. Describing
the daffodils for the next several lines, Wordsworth helps us to visualize what he himself has seen and was so
moved by; “Tossing their heads in sprightly dance. / The waves beside them danced; but they / Out-did the
sparkling waves in glee” (12-14). These light-hearted daffodils, weaving in unison with each other in the wind,
have romantically touched Wordsworth, their natural beauty reaching him in ways that he describes as not fully
understanding until later: “A poet could not but be gay, / In such a jocund company: / I gazed - and gazed - but
little thought / What wealth the show to me had brought:” (15-18).
It is here that your humble writer can not help but remember one of William Wordsworth’s earlier poems that he
had written six years earlier. William Wordsworth’s “Lines Written in Early Spring” (1798) serves the reader in
much the same way as Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”, in that his narrator draws inspiration from
nature’s beauty to experience a deep and meaningful emotion within himself as a philosopher and a poet. The
great difference, however, between Wordsworth’s “Lines Written in Early Spring” and “I Wandered Lonely as a
Cloud” is that in “Lines Written in Early Spring” natures beauty induces in Wordsworth a deep and powerful
mourning for how mankind has perverted his own nature in his then modern society, whereas “Lines Written in
Early Spring” invigorates Wordsworth’s narrator with the mental imagery of the daffodils.
Most importantly, in both poems Wordsworth describes his narrator as having a moment of quiet
introspection. In much the same way that most readers can relate, Wordsworth’s narrator in “Lines Written in
Early Spring”, upon having a few moments to think to himself, lapses into a depressed state from his own quiet
thoughts: “While in a grove I sate reclined, / In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts / Bring sad thoughts to
the mind.” (William Wordsworth’s “Lines Written in Early Spring”, 1798, lines 2-4.). In Wordsworth’s “I Wandered
Lonely as a Cloud” his narrator reciprocally, upon relaxing on a couch in quiet contemplation, is elated and
pleasantly entertained by the thoughts of the daffodils dancing in his memory: “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.” (19-24). Wordsworth’s narrator in “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”
is not grieved by “What man has made of man” (William Wordsworth’s “Lines Written in Early Spring”, 1798, line 8.)
but contented and near-tickled by his reminiscence of the golden, light-hearted beauty of the daffodils.