Poetry Friday: Daffodils in November

My eight year old is memorizing William Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud" and I'm remembering how much I love this poem:

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That 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 shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

You can find the final stanzas here at The Poetry Foundation.

I hesitated briefly about sharing this. It is, after all, November ("dull November brings the blast/then the leaves are whirling fast"!). So it may seem a bit strange to share such a springtime poem.

But then it occurred to me that Wordsworth would love knowing we're reading and enjoying his poem in November. For Wordsworth, part of the magic of poetry was "recollection." He wrote elsewhere that poetic images could provide "life and food for future years." And so we see him in this poem, in that last stanza, lying on his couch in "vacant or in pensive mood," finding pleasure as this remembered image of the golden daffodils "flashes" on his "inward eye."

We don't know, of course, when he lay pensively on his couch recollecting this golden sea, but a dull, gray November day might be a good bet.

For some extra loveliness, you can listen as Jeremy Irons reads the poem.

This week's poetry round-up can be found at Random Noodling.