The speaker of William Wordsworth’s poem speaks in the first person and describes the unfolding of his own thoughts and feelings. This type of speaker is very typical for a lyric poem like “I wander lonely as a cloud.” We don’t technically know much about the speaker in terms of age, gender, class, or race. However, critics conventionally associate the speaker with Wordsworth himself, who confirmed that the experience recounted in the poem is his own. One day in 1802, he and his sister Dorothy were walking in England’s famous Lake District, when they came upon a marvelous patch of daffodils next to a lake known as Ullswater. Although it isn’t necessary to assume that poet and speaker are identical, it’s important to note that the speaker of this poem does explicitly identify himself as a poet in lines 15–16: “A poet could not but be gay, / In such a jocund company.”

Perhaps most important about the speaker, though, is his emotional and psychological characteristics. As he indicates in both the first and final stanzas, he is predisposed to feelings of loneliness and melancholy. Although he appears to prefer being alone over having company, this preference also leads to the kind of alienation he expresses in the opening simile (lines 1–2):

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills

These lines conjure a powerful image of emotional detachment that, though sad, also has a strangely serene quality. The speaker’s sense of alienation is temporarily disrupted when he comes upon the daffodils dancing by the lakeshore. This transfixing vision calls him into a new form of attention, but the moment is ephemeral. He eventually moves on, leaves the countryside, and returns to where the “couch I lie / In vacant or in pensive mood” (lines 19–20). Yet for all his evident melancholy, the speaker also has a powerful imagination. With his well-developed “inward eye” (line 21), he is able to see the daffodils again. It is this imaginative ability that allows him to balance the sorrow of loneliness with “the bliss of solitude” (line 22).

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