William Wordworth's "I wandered lonely as a cloud" and Charles Bukowski's "8 count". Author, Period, Circumstances, Form and Content

Introduction

This term paper will analyse and confront the poems by William Wordsworth and Charles Bukowski. I will begin with “I wandered lonely as a cloud” and investigate the stylistic devices of every stanza, relate them to the latter as a whole, and finally figure out their functions to show how they support my argumentations concerning their ramification.

As far as Bukowski's “8 count” is concerned, I will continue with the same mode of procedure, showing the formal and stylistic devices as well as how the poem is made up and in what way its composition contributes to the created effect. After having shown the poems' inner form and and content, I will provide a comparative analysis with regard to several aspects such as author and period, circumstances under which the poems came into being, or form and content. Eventually, facing the similarities and differences, there will be a conclusion about a reader's role in the interpretative process of these two poems, and literary works in general.

1. Analysis of the poems

1.1 Analysis of “I wandered lonely as a cloud”

“The subject of these Stanzas is rather an elementary feeling and simple impression (approaching to the nature of an ocular spectrum) upon the imaginative faculty, than an exertion of it.”

(William Wordsworth, qtd. in Garber: 152, 20-22)

William Wordsworth's poem “I wandered lonely as a cloud” deals with the apparently simple encounter of the lyric I with many daffodils growing in a beautiful landscape and surpassing everything in their elegance and pulchritude. Yet this impression has such a deep and intensive effect on the observer that the latter always remembers this extraordinary experience when he or she is “[i]n vacant or in pensive mood” (20).

The poem consists of 24- line iambic tetrameter verses which are further organized into four sestets, with a quatrain underlying the rhyme scheme of an alternate rhyme, and a rhyming couplet. The lyric I opens the poem by comparing itself to a lonely cloud, walking around without any explicitly mentioned purpose or destination. It is remote from the earth, thus seemingly detached and perceiving its surroundings from above, then looking down on “vales and hills” (2). The observer remains passive, just watching a peaceful landscape while drifting aimlessly over it. But then, without having expected it (“all at once”, 3), the lyric I awakens from its reverie because it sees “golden daffodils” (4). The unexpectedness is further emphasized by an inversion moving the reader's attention towards this first expression. At the beginning the daffodils are described as a “crowd” (3), that is as a disorganized accumulation; however, the lyric I immediately corrects its first impression by admitting that the flowers are rather growing in a “host” (4). Its shift in perception can be interpreted as being a sudden energy of mind [by means of which] the poet slightly rearranges the pattern they form in his mind, and sees them as a 'host'. In other words the shapelessness, as of a crowd, which the daffodils at first seemed to exhibit, is turned into a pattern… ( Durrant , William Wordsworth 20).

The reason for this rearrangement, as Durrant suggests, is the now active mind of the lyric I. Due to this movement, the latter is capable of “giving it coherence” (ibid). The speaker has a closer look at the daffodils which are not just depicted as yellow, but as “golden”. In doing so, these flowers are presented as more precious- in this way the reader gets more aware of the beauty and importance of the daffodils.

The position of the flowers is more precisely explained in line five when the lyric I lets the reader know that the daffodils are growing “beside the lake, beneath the trees”. Here we are not only informed about what is located around the flowers, but it shows that the observer's mind is active again, insofar as the view is directly focused on “the lake” and “the trees”, using a parallelism that reinforces the perception of nature and the detailed glance at it. Furthermore, a soft “breeze” (6) causes the daffodils to flutter and to dance. By the word “fluttering”, an onomatopoeia, the author establishes a certain impression of a rhythm within the line, and this is why the flowers' movement is so vivid, but not disorganized. Again, the speaker believes the description of a dance, a harmonious swaying by the wind, to be much more adequate. According to Durrant, “[t]hough each flower has its own life and movement, all are part of the dance, the pattern that responds to the breeze” ( Wordsworth and the Great System 130). This means that even if there are many single daffodils, they are made dancing together by the breeze. Also the metaphor of dance, consistently repeated throughout the poem, is a crucial image I am going to deal with.

The first stanza serves as an introduction to the poem because it both sets the lyric I's inner state of mind as well as its position from which it comes across the numerous golden daffodils, and depicts their place and pattern.

In the next stanza the lyric I compares the daffodils to “stars that shine / and twinkle” (7-8). By this link between the earth and the endless universe, or, more precisely, “the Milky Way” (8), the flowers and their appearance gain a timelessness and are seen in a larger dimension. For one thing, the lyric I's view of the stars gets more intense, as the latter do not just shine, but even twinkle. For another, this imagery establishes an order, as it was also the case in the first stanza. Nothing is just there by coincidence; the speaker presents both “the local order”, that is the flowers and their place in nature, and the greater order of the cosmos (cf Durrant). The happiness and the active speaker's mind that organizes everything that it sees into coherent movements stand in contrast to the initial loneliness and passive experiencing of the surroundings. What is more, the end- and timelessness is projected upon the daffodils. Their place in nature is “[a]long the margin of a bay” (10), and the hyperbole “never- ending line” (9) further strengthens the impression of an enormous number of magnificent flowers. To the speaker, there seem to be “ten thousand” of them (11), with an inversion and the hyperbole used one more time to emphasize this unbelievable amount of daffodils. They are engaged in a “dance” (12), moving backwards and forwards by the aforementioned breeze.

In these lines the breeze as well as the metaphor of dance reoccur. The perception of the flowers as a group with many daffodils that nevertheless belong together and move simultaneously is stressed by the lyric I. While the speaker's scope of what he sees becomes expanded and intensified, the reader's awareness of the daffodils and the environment in which they are growing is extended, too. In the first line of the following stanza, the lyric I draws a distinction between the waves also moving because of the breeze, and the daffodils growing next to the lake. Now the metaphor of dance is applied to the water; but the reader, whom the information is only given in the next line that the flowers are nonetheless of a greater significance, is kept in suspense: the impression of the

dancing waves is not surpassed until the created tension is resolved by letting us know after an enjambment that the daffodils are more admirable. Moreover, the fact that the waves can by no means be equal to the daffodils is demonstrated by Durrant as follows:

The waves are acted upon by the force of the wind, and, as water is a fairly simple substance, the pattern of response is comparatively limited. The daffodils, however, […] 'dance' […] with more complex patterns under the pressure of the breeze. For this reason Wordsworth finds the patterns more intricate, and more delightful, and finds a more joyful life in the flowers than in the waves. ( William Wordsworth 22 ).

Due to the “glee” of the daffodils (14), “a poet” (15) who observes the latter is also made “gay” (15). The lyric I describes the positive influence of nature, but at the same time limits the number of people who are able to enjoy this spectacle. Wordsworth was convinced that a poet has “a greater organic sensibility” and thus “[i]t is such a man only […] who finds himself in a state of creative joy when placed in such a situation” (Snukal 89). The speaker in the poem is not lonely any more, but “in [...] a jocund company” (16); yet he does not expect them to become important later on. The lyric I just gazes, with the stress always falling on the word “gazed” (17), and is not aware of the effect of the dance of the daffodils (“but little thought”, 17), and an inversion emphasizes the words “little” and “to me” in line 18. Also the alliteration at the end of this stanza rises the reader's awareness concerning the delight and pleasure which the lyric I is able to feel.

In this stanza the daffodils are set in contrast to the waves which are not able to surpass the flowers in beauty and joy. The image of dance is mentioned again, though always in a different form: “dancing”, “dance”, “danced”, and “dances”, to the effect that the poem appears as a well- structured and closed whole. The lyric I is eventually made happy by the daffodils' “show” (18). Line 19 and 20 introduce the lyric I as being at home and lying on its couch when it is “[i]n vacant or in pensive mood”. The inversion foregrounds the words “on my couch” in order to differentiate between the three preceding stanzas which are written in the past tense and take place outside in nature, and this stanza written in the present tense and located in the house of the speaker. As a result

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