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As already suggested by the title, “I wandered lonely as a cloud” is characterized by a wistful tone. To be wistful is to have a vague feeling of longing, often tinged with melancholy. Wordsworth’s speaker is clearly predisposed to melancholy. In the opening lines, the speaker reflects on an experience of feeling aimless and detached from the world around him, longing for some kind of connection. A sense of connection arose when he came upon a dazzling swath of daffodils along a lakeshore. The sight of these dancing flowers disturbed him from a daze and called him into a new form of attention. Gazing at the daffodils, the speaker experienced the fullness of the present moment. However powerful this moment was for the speaker, it was ultimately ephemeral. The feeling of connection he’d enjoyed would inevitably fade away, leaving him to return to his former loneliness. As the speaker indicates in the final stanza, detachment and melancholy continue to shape his daily existence: “For oft when on my couch I lie / In vacant or in pensive mood” (lines 19–20). In such moments, the speaker harbors a wistful longing for the pleasure the daffodils once gave him.

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