William Wordsworth's “i Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”

Bryson Yamamoto

William Wordsworth’s “I Wandered lonely as a Cloud”

Critical analysis

Your memories are your treasures, an accumulated amount of wealth that under extreme conditions remind you of the past and define the present, if it be good or bad. A picture for example, is a frame captured in the moving animation of time and is frequently regarded as being worth a thousand words. If one single frame, one dimension, one moment, something so short it can’t even be expressed by time, be valued as a thousand words. Then take into consideration a memory, something which takes into account of all sense, takes consideration to time, mind, emotion and thought, something that has infinite value and is only second to the present and by all means of ever so advancing technology has yet to be mimicked. Yet there is one device that has this ability and has been used for thousands of years, literature. A narrow mined answer would probably be poetry, but even with the extremities of poetry to allow such powerful passages of events; basic literature is still the foundation for every other category including poetry. It works by your mind building the “memory”, which in turns becomes yours. Your newly acquired memory is unique in itself and nobody else shares it the same. Something that is felt through William Wordsworth’s “I wandered lonely as a cloud” and expresses such extreme emotion but does in such a manner that allows the reader to evaluate there need for such a place, a place to come back to, to look into their mind and to reminisce the past. Such a feat is accomplished through his ever so notable figurative language, poetic diction, imagery and meter.

In the traditional analyses, words in literal expressions denote what they mean according to common or dictionary usage, while words in figurative expressions connote additional layers of meaning. This involves the use of a cognitive framework which is made up of memories of all the possible meanings that might be available to apply to the particular words in their usage. This set of memories will give prominence to the most common or literal meanings, but also suggest reasons for attributing different meanings, for example the reader acknowledges that the author intended a completely different meaning than that of the literal meaning of the text, which can be done through can be done through metaphor, personification, and simile. The characterization of the sudden occurrence of a memory, the daffodils "flash upon the inward eye --- which is the bliss of solitude” is psychologically acute, but the poem's main brilliance lies in the reverse personification of its early stanzas. The author is metaphorically compared to a natural object, a cloud, "I wandered lonely as a cloud -- that floats