William Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” is as famous as a poem can be. From the middle of the 19th century to the end of the 20th, every anthology of English poetry printed the 1804 poem. Every schoolmarm’s textbook included it. It was gentle, beautiful, perfectly constructed. And there’s an end to it: Though poetry reading has much declined in the present age, the poem still exists in the realm of the comfortable, universal, and completely understood.Except here’s the thing: We do not read the great works of art. The great works of art read us. They are tests of our ability to recognize that there can exist several different ways to sense and understand a poem, and more than one may be right — without somehow surrendering to the civilization-damaging distinction between facts and values, or the cultural destruction of pure relativism.Consider, for example, the possibility that Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” is a poem about banking and the effects of compound interest. Oh, yes, it’s about flowers, so Wordsworthian that it the archetype of the easy poetic turns about nature for which he was mocked early in his career. And it’s a poem about (in Wordsworth’s famous phrase) a “spot of time”: “past, present and future time coming together in a single but durable golden moment,” as a later poet laureate, Andrew Motion, would put it.But consider what the poet does with the idea of those daffodils as something “golden.” He loved them — “but little thought / What wealth the show to me had brought.” Any why wealth? Because later, lying on his couch and far from spring’s display along the margins of a lake, he can spend the interest of that banked memory: as the daffodils “flash upon that inward eye / Which is the bliss of solitude.”I Wandered Lonely as a Cloudby William WordsworthI wandered lonely as a cloudThat 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 shineAnd twinkle on the milky way,They stretched in never-ending lineAlong the margin of a bay:Ten thousand saw I at a glance,Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.The waves beside them danced; but theyOut-did the sparkling waves in glee:A poet could not but be gay,In such a jocund company:I gazed — and gazed — but little thoughtWhat wealth the show to me had brought:For oft, when on my couch I lieIn vacant or in pensive mood,They flash upon that inward eyeWhich is the bliss of solitude;And then my heart with pleasure fills,And dances with the daffodils.___________________________________________ With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.
