Your opinion please!!!

[queenbu]

Originally Posted by BobK

I think this is the key - For oft [even years afterwards]... they flash upon that inward eye ; the experience of seeing the daffodils is still with him. I don't like any of the three.

Yes, I know that he is writing about that walk years after, in fact .........but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought: but he still refers to the walk as a lonely walk I wandered lonely as a cloud

...our meddling intellect
Misshapes the beauteous forms of things;
We murder to dissect.

I like this quote. Perhaps Wordsworth was referring to the new age of science and technology but I have often thought that we analyze too much what poets write. I imagine them laughing at us from wherever they are now when they see us giving a million interpretations of what they wrote. But I guess that's literature!

[MrPedantic]

I would agree with Bob; "inward eye" is the key. The scene is best described in the words the poet chose to describe the scene: if you read a poem through your own paraphrase, you are no longer reading the poem.

(Analysis of how the effects of a particular poem are achieved is of course a different matter.)

It's a very popular poem among people who don't ordinarily read much poetry, perhaps because it's simple, and usually turns up in anthologies for children. Many people know it by heart, and recite it to themselves "in blissful solitude".

So you could say that those readers also use the vision of the daffodils as a source of retrospective pleasure and comfort, and recall it to their "inward eye" in much the same way that Wordsworth claimed to recall it; even though they never themselves saw the daffodils to which the poem refers.

The daffodils in question were not the larger forms and cultivars of Narcissus pseudonarcissus that are commonly found in gardens and municipal plantings today, by the way, but a smaller, slightly paler, more delicate form.

MrP