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The Daffodils

The famous daffodils in Wordsworth’s poem occupy a strange position as both literal and symbolic. Though it may seem silly to point out, what the speaker finds so striking about these flowers is precisely that they are real. At a moment of feeling lonely, disconnected, and withdrawn from the world around him, the sheer reality of the daffodils had the necessary force to pull the speaker out of his funk. Understood in this way, the daffodils are important for the way they aren’t symbolic. It is their material existence in the world that matters, and which has the power to call the speaker into an engaged form of attention. Yet the daffodils do also have a symbolic importance in the way they represent the more general power of the natural world to inspire and provide solace. Admittedly, it isn’t always the case that natural scenery guarantees good mental health. After all, before the speaker came upon the flowers, he had been wandering around the countryside feeling “lonely as a cloud” (line 1). However, once the daffodils came into view, it’s as if the rest of the landscape came into focus as well. This newfound resolution and clarity enables the speaker to recollect the memory when needed later.

The Inward Eye

In the poem’s final stanza, the speaker references his “inward eye,” which allows him to replay the scene with the daffodils long after the scene has ended (lines 19–22):

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude

In the context of this quotation, it is clear enough that the phrase “inward eye” is a figurative reference to the speaker’s memory. Because of the clarity of his recollection of the daffodils, the speaker can replay the scene of dancing flowers in his mind. Wordsworth wrote long before the time of cinema, but the image here might be usefully compared to film projection, where a moving image “flash[es] upon” a screen. The speaker attributes his ability to replay the remembered scene as the source of great solace—a resource that transforms the melancholy of loneliness into “the bliss of solitude.” Arguably, however, the importance the speaker attributes to his “inward eye” suggests that the term refers to more than just a good memory. Rather than simply being a screen on which images can be projected, an eye is an organ of sight that can be directed for the purpose of active looking. An inward eye must therefore be understood as an intentional faculty that is symbolically related to the imagination.

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