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“I wandered lonely as a cloud” takes place in the countryside. As the speaker describes, it’s along the shore of an unnamed lake that he once encountered a magnificent “host of golden daffodils” (line 4). William Wordsworth himself confirmed that he wrote the poem about an experience he had while walking with his sister Dorothy in England’s Lake District. The real-life daffodils they saw were dancing near the shore of a glacial lake known as Ullswater. Although it’s interesting to know the real source of the scene described by the speaker, what’s most significant is the poem’s rural setting in a pastoral countryside. As the speaker suggests in the final stanza, he spends most of his time away from the natural world, and is predisposed to feelings of loneliness, alienation, and melancholy. Significantly, then, it’s during this sojourn in the country that he finds a sense of connection and joy. Yet it’s important to remember that the speaker is not currently in the country. He is recounting a past experience, the memory of which has the capacity to lift his spirits. In this sense, the poem’s setting isn’t actually the countryside. Rather, it’s the speaker’s own mind.

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