Welcome back to the Daily Poem here in the Close Reeds Podcast Network.

I'm David Kern.

Today's poem is by William Wordsworth, and I figured that since we've been reading a few, you know, dark poems over the last few weeks.

Let's do something a little more pleasant.

So let's read William Wordsworth,

well, arguably his most famous poem called I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, also commonly known as

daffodils. It's a lyric poem, which was inspired by an event in April of 1802, in which Wordsworth

came across, well, a bunch of daffodils.

It was written between 1804 and 1807 and first published in 1807 in poems in two volumes,

and a revised version was published in 1815.

So here it is. I wandered lonely as a cloud by William Wordsworth.

I wandered lonely as a cloud that floats on high or veils 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

eye at a glance, tossing their heads in sprightly dance. The waves beside them danced, but they

outdid the sparkling waves in glee. A poet could not but be gay in such a

joke and company. I gazed and gazed, but little thought what wealth that 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.

One of the reasons this poem is so popular, I think, is because of the sort of resolution it offers within its problem.

It opens with somebody walking lonely, right?

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