It was on this day in 1802 that William Wordsworth (books by this author) was walking home with his sister, Dorothy, and saw a patch of daffodils that became the inspiration for one of his most famous poems.
They were returning from a visit to their friends Thomas and Catherine Clarkson, who lived on the shore of Ullswater, the second largest lake in England's lake district, a beautiful deep lake, nine miles long, surrounded by mountains. The Clarksons were good friends. Thomas was a fierce abolitionist who had made it his life's work to end slavery. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, also a neighbor in the Lake District, wrote: "I once asked Tom Clarkson whether he ever thought of his probable fate in the next world, to which he replied, 'How can I? I think only of the slaves in Barbados!'" Apparently Tom wasn't a fan of poetry, either. But Dorothy Wordsworth and Catherine exchanged letters. Later that year, Wordsworth got married, and he and his wife, Mary, named one of their daughters after Catherine. They all enjoyed the Clarksons' witty and intelligent conversation.
Dorothy and William had left Dove Cottage at the end of March for a round of visiting friends, including Coleridge. William left Dorothy with the Clarksons for eight days while he went to Yorkshire to visit Mary, the woman he would marry six months later. On Monday, April 12th, Wordsworth left Mary to head back to his friends' house. He got caught in a snowstorm and his horse needed new shoes, but he plodded on to stay at an inn for the night, and during the ride he wrote a poem, "The Glow-worm," which begins:
Among all lovely things my Love had been;
Had noted well the stars, all flowers that grew
About her home; but she had never seen
A glow-worm, never one, and this I knew.
He made it back to the Clarksons' the next evening, spent a day with friends, and after dinner on the 15th he and Dorothy set out to walk home. It was many miles back to Dove Cottage, but they were used to long walks, and took it slowly, stopping often either to seek shelter from the weather or to admire things they passed.
Dorothy wrote in her journal: "It was a threatening misty morning — but mild. [...] The hawthorns are black and green, the birches here and there greenish but there is yet more of purple to be seen on the Twigs. We got over into a field to avoid some cows — people working, a few primroses by the roadside, woodsorrel flower, the anemone, scentless violets, strawberries, and that starry yellow flower which Mrs C. calls pile wort. When we were in the woods beyond Gowbarrow park we saw a few daffodils close to the water side. We fancied that the lake had floated the seeds ashore and that the little colony had so sprung up. But as we went along there were more and yet more and at last under the boughs of the trees, we saw that there was a long belt of them along the shore, about the breadth of a country turnpike road. I never saw daffodils so beautiful. They grew among the mossy stones about and about them, some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness and the rest tossed and reeled and danced and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the lake, they looked so gay ever glancing ever changing. This wind blew directly over the lake to them. There was here and there a little knot and a few stragglers a few yards higher up but they were so few as not to disturb the simplicity and unity and life of that one busy highway. We rested again and again."
For his part, William didn't write anything about the daffodils for at least two years, maybe more. No one is sure when he wrote the poem "I wander'd lonely as a cloud," but it was published in 1807. It didn't get a very good reception. One critic wrote, "He thinks it worth while to give a tame, matter-of-fact account of some daffodils blown about with the wind, because he thought of them afterwards." Another poet said, "Surely, if his worst foe had chosen to caricature this egotistic manufacturer of metaphysical importance upon trivial themes, he could not have done it more effectively." But these days it is one of Wordsworth's most famous poems, and when the BBC conducted a nationwide poll in 1995 for the country's favorite poems, it was ranked number five.
Wordsworth's 1807 version of the poem was only three stanzas long, 18 lines. When he revised it in 1815, he tinkered with some lines — changed "Ten thousand dancing in the breeze" to "Fluttering and dancing in the breeze" — and he added another stanza, the stanza that is now second and begins, "Continuous as the stars that shine / And twinkle on the milky way ..."
Not only did Wordsworth probably reference Dorothy's journal for inspiration, but his wife, Mary, came up with two lines: "They flash upon that inward eye / Which is the bliss of solitude." William said they were the best lines in the poem.
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