Xin Chen
Poems by Willam Wordsworth
For this blog post, I’m going to discuss the selected poems by William Wordsworth. “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” “A Slumber Did My Spirit” and “Nutting.”
In “I Wandered Lonely as Cloud,” I think the theme for this poem is being trapped in the beauty of nature. At first, he described the scenes that he has encountered the daffodils around the lake. He describes the daffodils to be “Fluttering and dancing in the breeze” (line 6). He kind of relates the scene with the stars in the Milky Way “Continuous as the stars that shine and twinkle on the Milky Way” (line7-8). I don’t get the relationship between the two because if you can see the flowers dancing, one often doesn’t connect it with the stars in the Milky Way. But the scene is so beautiful that whenever he feels empty or trapped in thoughts, he would think of the scene in his mind, “ and then my heart with pleasure fills, and dances with the daffodils”(line 23-24). It somehow brings him pleasure whenever he wants to escape from the world and lost in his thoughts. When one gets lost in their thoughts, they often think of stuff that gives them pleasure, trapped in the imaginary places that they wish to be.
In the second poem “ A Slumber Did My Spirit,” I think this poem is about a time when he was in denial of not accepting that an important woman in his life has died. “A slumber did my spirit seal: I had no human fears: she seemed a thing that could not feel” (line 1-3). He seems to be trapped in thought that she is still alive, then in the second and last stanza he seems to realized that she is dead because he says that her body will be a part of Earth which implies that she is dead, “ Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course with rocks and stones and trees” (line 7-8).
Both the “ I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” and “A Slumber Did My Spirit” can relate to each other because they’re both about getting trapped in thoughts. I thinks that they’re opposite of each other, one is about something beautiful invading his thoughts and latter is about him in denial, trying to keep reality out of his mind.
As for the last poem, “Nutting,” I didn’t really get the whole thing but I think it’s about him describing the experience of a young boy getting “flowers” in the nature when he was young. I think this poem has some sexual connotations. It seems as long he’s talking about pure and innocent nature, he describes it as “A virgin scene”(line 20) I think he’s relating it virginity and purity. Another example is when he’s playing with the flowers, the metaphor of comparing the one’s virginity as taking flowers from the woods, to “deflower.’ “Among the flowers, and with the flowers I played” (line25). And that’s not all, there’re many words that I can point out that gives the idea that sex is involved. Lets start with the title “tall and erected”, “as joy delight in”, ”boyish hopes”, “through beds of matted fern” and etc.
The only relationship I found in all three is that the nature is involved with all of them. In the first poem, it describes its love for scenery in nature, the second one is comparing one’s death to nature, and the last one compares the virginity of a woman to nature. Nature plays a slightly different role in all three but they’re involved in someway.so the three poems is basically about love for nature, virginity and death.
