Friday, April 7, 2017

Clouds and Daffodils


I recently thought of Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" when I was watching all the cloud formations as I drove through New Mexico and Arizona. Of course, the poem is really about daffodils and memory, the clouds being simply a simile to describe the speaker's wandering: "lonely as a cloud." But I was glad to be reminded of daffodils, too, especially as winter gives way to spring this April. The daffodils in the poem are "sprightly" and "jocund'" as they "flutter in the breeze." 
As the speaker watches them, he has no idea how much joy they will bring him later, when he conjures them up in his memory and "dances with the daffodils."  So powerful is memory that it can reproduce a vivid scene from our past as though it were with us in the present: we experience not only the visual vista but also the emotional experience.