Dr Seuss on Big Boobs and Lips by the Bard of Bat Yam, Poet Laureate of Zion

Percy Bysshe Shelley: “Ozymandias” A poem to outlast empires. by the Bard of Bat Yam, Poet Laureate of Zion

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Shelley’s friend the banker Horace Smith stayed with the poet and his wife Mary (author of Frankenstein) in the Christmas season of 1817. One evening, they began to discuss recent discoveries in the Near East. In the wake of Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt in 1798, the archeological treasures found there stimulated the European imagination. The power of pharaonic Egypt had seemed eternal, but now this once-great empire was (and had long been) in ruins, a feeble shadow.

Shelley and Smith remembered the Roman-era historian Diodorus Siculus, who described a statue of Ozymandias, more commonly known as Rameses II (possibly the pharaoh referred to in the Book of Exodus). Diodorus reports the inscription on the statue, which he claims was the largest in Egypt, as follows: “King of Kings Ozymandias am I. If any want to know how great I am and where I lie, let him outdo me in my work.” (The statue and its inscription do not survive, and were not seen by Shelley; his inspiration for “Ozymandias” was verbal rather than visual.)

Stimulated by their conversation, Smith and Shelley wrote sonnets based on the passage in Diodorus. Smith produced a now-forgotten poem with the unfortunate title “On a Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing by Itself in the Deserts of Egypt, with the Inscription Inserted Below.” Shelley’s contribution was “Ozymandias,” one of the best-known sonnets in European literature.

In addition to the Diodorus passage, Shelley must have recalled similar examples of boastfulness in the epitaphic tradition. In the Greek Anthology (8.177), for example, a gigantic tomb on a high cliff proudly insists that it is the eighth wonder of the world. Here, as in the case of “Ozymandias,” the inert fact of the monument displaces the presence of the dead person it commemorates: the proud claim is made on behalf of art (the tomb and its creator), not the deceased. Though Ozymandias believes he speaks for himself, in Shelley’s poem his monument testifies against him.

“Ozymandias” has an elusive, sidelong approach to its subject. The poem begins with the word “I”—but the first person here is a mere framing device. The “I” quickly fades away in favor of a mysterious “traveler from an antique land.” This wayfarer presents the remaining thirteen lines of the poem.

The reader encounters Shelley’s poem like an explorer coming upon a strange, desolate landscape. The first image that we see is the “two vast and trunkless legs of stone” in the middle of a desert. Column-like legs but no torso: the center of this great figure, whoever he may have been, remains missing. The sonnet comes to a halt in the middle of its first quatrain. Are these fragmentary legs all that is left?

After this pause, Shelley’s poem describes a “shattered visage,” the enormous face of Ozymandias. The visage is taken apart by the poet, who collaborates with time’s ruinous force. Shelley says nothing about the rest of the face; he describes only the mouth, with its “frown,/And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command.” Cold command is the emblem of the empire-building ruler, of the tyrannical kind that Shelley despised. Ozymandias resembles the monstrous George III of our other Shelley sonnet, “England in 1819.” (Surprisingly, surviving statues of Rameses II, aka Ozymandias, show him with a mild, slightly mischievous expression, not a glowering, imperious one.)

The second quatrain shifts to another mediating figure, now not the traveler but the sculptor who depicted the pharaoh. The sculptor “well those passions read,” Shelley tells us: he intuited, beneath the cold, commanding exterior, the tyrant’s passionate rage to impose himself on the world. Ozymandias’ intense emotions “survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things.” But as Shelley attests, the sculptor survives as well, or parts of him do: “the hand that mocked” the king’s passions “and the heart that fed.” (The artist, like the tyrant, lies in fragments.) “Mocked” here has the neutral sense of “described” (common in Shakespeare), as well as its more familiar meaning, to imitate in an insulting way. The artist mocked Ozymandias by depicting him, and in a way that the ruler could not himself perceive (presumably he was satisfied with his portrait). “The heart that fed” is an odd, slightly lurid phrase, apparently referring to the sculptor’s own fervent way of nourishing himself on his massive project. The sculptor’s attitude might resemble—at any event, it certainly suits—the pharaoh’s own aggressive enjoyment of empire. Ruler and artist seem strangely linked here; the latter’s contempt for his subject does not free him from Ozymandias’ enormous shadow.

The challenge for Shelley will thus be to separate himself from the sculptor’s harsh satire, which is too intimately tied to the power it opposes. If the artistic rebel merely plays Prometheus to Ozymandias’ Zeus, the two will remain locked in futile struggle (the subject of Shelley’s great verse drama Prometheus Unbound). Shelley’s final lines, with their picture of the surrounding desert, are his attempt to remove himself from both the king and the sculptor—to assert an uncanny, ironic perspective, superior to the battle between ruler and ruled that contaminates both.

The sestet moves from the shattered statue of Ozymandias to the pedestal, with its now-ironic inscription: “‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings./Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’” Of course, the pharaoh’s “works” are nowhere to be seen, in this desert wasteland. The kings that he challenges with the evidence of his superiority are the rival rulers of the nations he has enslaved, perhaps the Israelites and Canaanites known from the biblical account. The son and successor of Ozymandias/Rameses II, known as Merneptah, boasts in a thirteenth-century BCE inscription (on the “Merneptah stele,” discovered in 1896 and therefore unknown to Shelley) that “Israel is destroyed; its seed is gone”—an evidently overoptimistic assessment.

The pedestal stands in the middle of a vast expanse. Shelley applies two alliterative phrases to this desert, “boundless and bare” and “lone and level.” The seemingly infinite empty space provides an appropriate comment on Ozymandias’ political will, which has no content except the blind desire to assert his name and kingly reputation.

“Ozymandias” is comparable to another signature poem by a great Romantic, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.” But whereas Coleridge aligns the ruler’s “stately pleasure dome” with poetic vision, Shelley opposes the statue and its boast to his own powerful negative imagination. Time renders fame hollow: it counterposes to the ruler’s proud sentence a devastated vista, the trackless sands of Egypt.

Ozymandias and his sculptor bear a fascinating relation to Shelley himself: they might be seen as warnings concerning the aggressive character of human action (whether the king’s or the artist’s). Shelley was a ceaselessly energetic, desirous creator of poetry, but he yearned for calm. This yearning dictated that he reach beyond his own willful, anarchic spirit, beyond the hubris of the revolutionary. In his essay “On Life,” Shelley writes that man has “a spirit within him at enmity with dissolution and nothingness.” In one way or another, we all rebel against the oblivion to which death finally condemns us. But we face, in that rebellion, a clear choice of pathways: the road of the ardent man of power who wrecks all before him, and is wrecked in turn; or the road of the poet, who makes his own soul the lyre or Aeolian harp for unseen forces. (One may well doubt the strict binary that Shelley implies, and point to other possibilities.) Shelley’s limpid late lyric “With a Guitar, to Jane” evokes wafting harmonies and a supremely light touch. This music occupies the opposite end of the spectrum from Ozymandias’ futile, resounding proclamation. Similarly, in the “Ode to the West Wind,” Shelley’s lyre opens up the source of a luminous vision: the poet identifies himself with the work of song, the wind that carries inspiration. The poet yields to a strong, invisible power as the politician cannot.

In a letter written during the poet’s affair with Jane Williams, Shelley declares, “Jane brings her guitar, and if the past and the future could be obliterated, the present would content me so well that I could say with Faust to the passing moment, ‘Remain, thou, thou art so beautiful.’” The endless sands of “Ozymandias” palpably represent the threatening expanse of past and future. Shelley’s poem rises from the desert wastes: it entrances us every time we read it, and turns the reading into a “now.”

The critic Leslie Brisman remarks on “the way the timelessness of metaphor escapes the limits of experience” in Shelley. Timelessness can be achieved only by the poet’s words, not by the ruler’s will to dominate. The fallen titan Ozymandias becomes an occasion for Shelley’s exercise of this most tenuous yet persisting form, poetry. Shelley’s sonnet, a brief epitome of poetic thinking, has outlasted empires: it has witnessed the deaths of boastful tyrants, and the decline of the British dominion he so heartily scorned.

Facebook By Dr Seuss by the Bard of Bat Yam, Poet Laureate of Zion

The Conservative by the Bard of Bat Yam, Poet Laureate of Zion

Dr Seuss Does Facebook by the Bard of Bat Yam, Poet Laureate of Zion

Think how the meters of a distant tongue Gave figuration to men’s hopes and fears, by the Bard of Bat Yam , Poet Laureate of Zion

Think how the meters of a distant tongue
Gave figuration to men’s hopes and fears,
To passions gravity, to love its tears,
The chords with which our human hearts are strung.

Consider how the bards of old had sung
Before their numbers vanished with the years,
And how their harps delighted captive ears
When thought itself was green and fancy young.

Alas, my song cannot unburthen care
Nor life’s unceasing worriments remove;
And though my lays be lost on empty air,

Yet, days to come shall not these notes reprove:
Their sweetness imitates a single fair,
The music that is you, my only love.

The Reality of Facebook by the Bard of Bat Yam , Poet Laureate of Zion

I’d heard about social networking,
And how it was the next big thing,
So I just had to take a look,
And ended up on Facebook.

It only took me a little while,
To fill out most of my profile,
But I have spent many a night,
Figuring out the rest of the site.

I never realized I had so many friends,
The friend requests never end,
All the people I can’t stand at work,
And now the biggest high school jerk.

I have to admit I’ve learned a bunch,
I know what all my friends eat for lunch,
And it really helps me that I know,
Everyone’s favorite TV show.

The work on Facebook never stops,
I have to water my imaginary crops,
Send get-well wishes to Farmville quick,
My friend’s imaginary cow got sick.

I now realize my chances are dire,
Of ever building a Mafia empire,
And perhaps it is a bit of a shame,
My It Girl will never go on to fame.

My kids' statuses tell me of their life,
At dinner time I get poked by the wife,
I try to keep my friend count nice and fat,
So, I even signed up the dog and cat.

I guess you can say my life’s complete,
I have more friends than I’ll ever meet,
On Facebook I can roam far and wide,
And I never have to go outside.

Welcome to Facebook By the Bard of Bat Yam , Poet Laureate of Zion

Your Smile

like caramel to an apple
your smile
sticks in my mind
gooey and warm
wrapping my day
in authentic happiness

Physical Exertion

Unacquainted tones
Unfamiliar light
Artist steps off
Free flight

Cannot breath
Need reprieve
Needle pricks
And stitches

Cries embrace
A weeping face
Rhythms meeting
And leaving

Stinging pains
Painted stains
Crashing waves
And heart songs

Words jumbled
Phrases crumbled
Lost and blocked
In swelling sea

Chapter and Verse of #OyVeyDonaldTrump

The US president’s almost primal language is a source of widespread amusement and horror. But some have begun exploring its aesthetic power

“I know words … I have the best words,” Donald Trump once declared with his usual, braggadocious aplomb. For once, he may be right. Dreaded by transcribers and translators worldwide, Trump wields his lively, if limited, vocabulary like a rubber hammer; this is a man who uses “schlong” as a verb and whose babbling is too frequently leapt upon by pundits and despairing lexicographers: bigly, covfefe, the aforementioned braggadocious.

But like his fellow wordsmith Shakespeare, Trump has produced a remarkable burst of something like poetry. There is Hart Seely’s Bard of the Deal, a 2015 book of poetry compiled from interviews, speeches, and tweets; at least two different collections called Make Poetry Great Again (one in Norwegian); and the forthcoming Bigly: Donald Trump in Verse by Cheers writer Rob Long. He has also inspired others to verse: A Hundred Limericks for a Hundred Days of Trump, Trumpetry, and the self-published Shit My President Says Poetry.

The latest collection of Trumpian verse is The Beautiful Poetry of Donald Trump, by McSweeney’s writer Rob Sears. Consider:


I am the best(1)
I predicted Apple’s stock would fall(2)
I will build a great, great wall(3)
I build buildings that are 94 stories tall(4)
My hands – are they small?(5)

Sears is far from the first to notice potential in Trump’s voice: after all, elevating a man who struggles bigly to articulate himself to poetry is inherently funny. “He does speak in very compact, distilled phrases that tell you a lot about who he is, in a small number of words. So it’s not that far away from poetry,” says Sears. “Lots of declarative sentences, a staccato rhythm. There is no complexity to anything he says. People have said he writes like a third grader with a limited vocabulary. I’ve read so many of his words and there really are no exceptions.”

Working with the Trump Twitter Archive, the Trump Archive and American Presidency Project to collect long-deleted tweets and forgotten quotes from the pre-internet era, Sears describes “a weird process, more like being a data scientist than writer”. More than 30 years of Trump’s misogyny, xenophobia and taste for vengeance are on display – all fastidiously footnoted. And as Sears says: “I am certain there are tons of good quotes that have never been written down.”

The president may still wish that many of these quotes were never written down, such as his now startling call for coordinated global action on climate change in 2009 (in Sear’s poem “We’ll be fine with the environment”); or the grotesque pass he dribbled at a female Celebrity Apprentice candidate, in the third line of following poem:


Hot little girl in highschool6

I’m a very compassionate person (With a very high IQ)7

Just think, in a couple of years, I’ll be dating you8

It must be a pretty picture, you dropping to your knees9

Come here, I’ll show you how life works10. Please11

For all the fun with his buffoonery, Trump’s language still holds power, because of a style of speech that might be described as demagogic water-cooler banter: constant references to us versus them, and “winners” and “losers”, the latter being possibly the most frequent word in Sears’s collection, which includes several blistering haiku dismissing John McCain (“Doesn’t know how to win”), Rosie O’Donnell (“Sad sack”) and Ted Cruz (“Dyin’ Ted”).
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“I thought maybe he was, on some weird level, a kind of strategic genius,” says Sears of Trump’s ability to convince average Americans. “But now I know there’s nothing clever or pre-planned about what he says. It is just lucky for him that he communicates this way, and that he has such simple ideas.”

But there was one speech that convinced Sears that there was more to the president than met the eye. “I came across a speech on the White House website, addressed to the people of Flint, Michigan, about the water scandal. It was quite reassuring and had a lot of figurative turns of phrase. It really surprised me, and I thought, ‘He’s not so simple, there is another side to Trump,’” he says. “And then I got to the bottom and realised I’d got my dates wrong. It was Obama.”


1. Tweet, 8 August 2013

2. Tweet, 28 January 2014

3. Presidential bid announcement at Trump Tower, 16 June 2015

4. Campaign rally in Plymouth, New Hampshire, CSPAN, 7 February 2016

5. Hannity, Fox News, 29 February 2016

6. Discussing losing his virginity, on The Howard Stern Show, 1997

7. Tweet, 21 April 2013

8. Quoted as saying this to two 14-year-old girls in the Chicago Tribune, December 1992

9. To Brande Roderick on The Celebrity Apprentice, 2013 season

10. The New Yorker, 19 May 1997

11. Speech after winning Florida, Illinois and North Carolina primaries, 15 March 2016

The No Food Diet by Bard of Bat Yam, Poet Laureate of Zion

The no food diet. 
The diet when you stare at food 
and you think about food 
and your mouth begins to water 

but 
you deprive yourself of the spoils that food brings. 

You think that your reflection in the mirror is more important.
And maybe it is, 
maybe looking better is more important than that chocolate chip cookie. 

But your organs shutting down
and your bones popping out, 
is that worth it? 

No, Nothing is worth that. 
Nothing is worse than being so miserable that you can't bring yourself to eat.

It stops being a restrictive diet and it becomes a war, 
a war with yourself. 
Maybe if you had just eaten that chocolate chip cookie, 
just maybe you wouldn't have this life-long battle.

Ode to Loosing the Battle of the Bulge and Dieting by the Bard of Bat Yam, Poet Laureate of Zion

As down toward my feet I gaze,
my vision blocked by a bulging maze,
I’m reminded in most significant ways,
I’ve eaten too much,for too many days.

Oh what to do is my fervent cry, 
shall I give up goodies like cakes and pie,
how many calories does a mouthful make,
if I just give up the vanilla shake?
Obesity, is my doctors call,
but I checked the chart, 
hanging on his wall,
it says at my weight
I really should be,
fifteen feet tall
not five foot three.

so to all who eat,
there is a lesson to learn,
the more calories in,
the more there’s to burn,
and if you don’t burn them
you’ll be covered by fat,
you’ll resemble hungry hippo
and that will be that.

Allahu Akbar again in France : A Reflection On the Murder of Two Women Outside the Gare Saint Charles in Marseilles, France, This Morning, October 1, 2017 by the Bard of Bat Yam, Poet Laureate of Zion

“Allahu akbar!” rang the words clear,
The man was shouting them at me.
No way of knowing they would be
The last words that I would ever hear.

For such Aphrase! I made a mental note
set aside some time to meditate
On what it means to say that “God is great!”
. . final thought before he slit my throat.

A mas’baha is strung with many a unkept bead—
Exactly ninety-nine—to honor, Mohamed his laud,
And glorify the holy Names of God;
Each Name an inspiration, prayer, and creed.

One hundred beads would be a travesty.
And God as “Slayer of Women” is blasphemy

I wandered lonely as a Cloud by William Wordsworth.. one of the favourite poems of the Bard of Bat Yam, Poet Laureate of Zion

I wandered lonely as a Cloud
That floats on high o’er Vales and Hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host of golden Daffodils;
Beside the Lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced, but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:—
A Poet could not but be gay
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the shew to me had brought:

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,
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the Daffodils.

          I wandered lonely as a cloud
          That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
          When all at once I saw a crowd,
          A host, of golden daffodils;
          Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
          Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

          Continuous as the stars that shine
          And twinkle on the milky way,
          They stretched in never-ending line
          Along the margin of a bay:
          Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
          Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

          The waves beside them danced; but they
          Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
          A poet could not but be gay,
          In such a jocund company:
          I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
          What wealth the show to me had brought:

          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;
          And then my heart with pleasure fills,
          And dances with the daffodils.
.

William Wordsworth (1815)

"I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" (also commonly known as "Daffodils") is a lyric poem by William Wordsworth. It is Wordsworth's most famous work.

The poem was inspired by an event on 15 April 1802, in which Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy came across a "long belt" of daffodils. Written some time between 1804 and 1807 (in 1804 by Wordsworth's own account), it was first published in 1807 in Poems in Two Volumes, and a revised version was published in 1815.

In a poll conducted in 1995 by the BBC Radio 4 Bookworm programme to determine the nation's favourite poems, I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud came fifth. Often anthologised, the poem is commonly seen as a classic of English romantic poetry, although Poems in Two Volumes, in which it first appeared, was poorly reviewed by Wordsworth's contemporaries.

Background

The inspiration for the poem came from a walk Wordsworth took with his sister Dorothy around Glencoyne Bay, Ullswater, in the Lake District. He would draw on this to compose "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" in 1804, inspired by Dorothy's journal entry describing the walk:

Ullswater in the English Lake District. Ullswater from Gobarrow Park, J. M. W. Turner, watercolor, 1819.

When we were in the woods beyond Gowbarrow park we saw a few daffodils close to the water side, we fancied that the lake had floated the seed ashore and that the little colony had so sprung up – But as we went along there were more and yet more and at last under the boughs of the trees, we saw that there was a long belt of them along the shore, about the breadth of a country turnpike road. I never saw daffodils so beautiful they grew among the mossy stones about and about them, some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness and the rest tossed and reeled and danced and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the Lake, they looked so gay ever glancing ever changing. This wind blew directly over the lake to them. There was here and there a little knot and a few stragglers a few yards higher up but they were so few as not to disturb the simplicity and unity and life of that one busy highway – We rested again and again. The Bays were stormy and we heard the waves at different distances and in the middle of the water like the Sea.^[

— Dorothy Wordsworth, The Grasmere Journal Thursday, 15 April 1802

At the time he wrote the poem, Wordsworth was living with his wife, Mary Hutchinson, and sister Dorothy at Town End, in Grasmere in England's Lake District. Mary contributed what Wordsworth later said were the two best lines in the poem, recalling the "tranquil restoration" of Tintern Abbey,

They flash upon that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude

Wordsworth was aware of the appropriateness of the idea of daffodils which “flash upon that inward eye” because in his 1815 version he added a note commenting on the “flash” as an “ocular spectrum”. Coleridge in Biographia Literaria of 1817, while he acknowledging the concept of “visual spectrum” as being “well known”, described Wordsworth’s (and Mary’s) lines, amongst others, as “mental bombast”. Fred Blick,  has shown that the idea of flashing flowers was derived from the “Elizabeth Linnaeus Phenomenon”, so-called because of the discovery of flashing flowers by Elizabeth Linnaeus in 1762. The phenomenon was reported upon in 1789 and 1794 by Erasmus Darwin, whose work Wordsworth certainly read.

The entire household thus contributed to the poem. Nevertheless, Wordsworth's biographer Mary Moorman, notes that Dorothy was excluded from the poem, even though she had seen the daffodils together with Wordsworth. The poem itself was placed in a section of Poems in Two Volumes entitled Moods of my Mind in which he grouped together his most deeply felt lyrics. Others included To a Butterfly, a childhood recollection of chasing butterflies with Dorothy, and The Sparrow's Nest, in which he says of Dorothy "She gave me eyes, she gave me ears".

The earlier Lyrical Ballads, a collection of poems by both himself and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, had been first published in 1798 and had started the romantic movement in England. It had brought Wordsworth and the other Lake poets into the poetic limelight. Wordsworth had published nothing new since the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads, and a new publication was eagerly awaited. Wordsworth had, however, gained some financial security by the 1805 publication of the fourth edition of Lyrical Ballads; it was the first from which he enjoyed the profits of copyright ownership. He decided to turn away from the long poem he was working on (The Recluse) and devote more attention to publishing Poems in Two Volumes, in which "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" first appeared.

Revised version

Narcissus pseudonarcissus, the "daffodil" native to the Lake District

Wordsworth revised the poem in 1815. He replaced "dancing" with "golden"; "along" with "beside"; and "ten thousand" with "fluttering and". He then added a stanza between the first and second, and changed "laughing" to "jocund". The last stanza was left untouched.

The plot of the poem is simple. In the 1815 revision, Wordsworth described it as "rather an elementary feeling and simple impression (approaching to the nature of an ocular spectrum) upon the imaginative faculty, rather than an exertion of it..."

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host of golden daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine

and twinkle on the Milky Way,

They stretched in never-ending line

along the margin of a bay:

Ten thousand saw I at a glance,

tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they

Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:

A poet could not but be gay,

in such a jocund company:

I gazed—and gazed—but little thought

what wealth the show to me had brought:

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;

And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the daffodils.

Pamela Woof notes "The permanence of stars as compared with flowers emphasises the permanence of memory for the poet."

Andrew Motion notes that the final verse replicates in the minds of its readers the very experience it describes

Reception

Contemporary

The title page of Poems in Two Volumes

Poems in Two Volumes was poorly reviewed by Wordsworth's contemporaries, including Lord Byron, whom Wordsworth came to despise.Byron said of the volume, in one of its first reviews, "Mr. W[ordsworth] ceases to please, ... clothing [his ideas] in language not simple, but puerile".Wordsworth himself wrote ahead to soften the thoughts of The Critical Review, hoping his friend Francis Wrangham would push for a softer approach. He succeeded in preventing a known enemy from writing the review, but it didn't help; as Wordsworth himself said, it was a case of "Out of the frying pan, into the fire". Of any positives within Poems in Two Volumes, the perceived masculinity in The Happy Warrior, written on the death of Nelson and unlikely to be the subject of attack, was one such. Poems like "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" could not have been further from it. Wordsworth took the reviews stoically.

Even Wordsworth's close friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge said (referring especially to the "child-philosopher" stanzas VII and VIII of Intimations of Immortality) that the poems contained "mental bombast". Two years later, however, many were more positive about the collection. Samuel Rogers said that he had "dwelt particularly on the beautiful idea of the 'Dancing Daffodils'", and this was echoed by Henry Crabb Robinson. Critics were rebutted by public opinion, and the work gained in popularity and recognition, as did Wordsworth.

Poems in Two Volumes was savagely reviewed by Francis Jeffrey in the Edinburgh Review (without, however, singling out "I wandered lonely as a Cloud"), but the Review was well known for its dislike of the Lake poets. As Sir Walter Scott put it at the time of the poem's publication, "Wordsworth is harshly treated in the Edinburgh Review, but Jeffrey gives ... as much praise as he usually does", and indeed Jeffrey praised the sonnets.^[21]

Upon the author's death in 1850, the Westminster Review called "I wandered lonely as a Cloud" "very exquisite".

Modern usage

The poem is presented and taught in many schools in the English-speaking world: these include the 7th grade of most schools of the Indian Certificate of Secondary Education (ICSE), India; the English Literature GCSE course in some examination boards in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland; and in the current Higher School Certificate syllabus topic, Inner Journeys, New South Wales, Australia. It is also frequently used as a part of the Junior Certificate English Course in Ireland as part of the Poetry Section. In The Middle Passage, V.S.Naipaul refers to a campaign in Trinidad against the use of the poem as a set text because daffodils do not grow in the tropics.

Because it is one of the best known poems in the English language, it has frequently been the subject of parody and satire.

The English Prog Rock band Genesis parodies the poem in the opening lyrics to the song "The Colony of Slippermen", from their 1974 album The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway.

It was the subject of a 1985 Heineken beer TV advertisement, which depicts a poet having difficulties with his opening lines, only able to come up with I walked about a bit on my ownor I strolled around without anyone else until downing a Heineken and reaching the immortal "I wandered lonely as a Cloud" (because "Heineken refreshes the poets other beers can't reach"). The assertion that Wordsworth originally hit on "I wandered lonely as a cow" until Dorothy told him "William, you can't put that" occasionally finds its way into print.

Daffodil tourism

The daffodils Wordsworth saw would have been wild daffodils. However, the National Gardens Scheme runs a Daffodil Day every year, allowing visitors to view daffodils in Cumbrian gardens including Dora's Field, which was planted by Wordsworth. In 2013 the event was held in March, when unusually cold weather meant that relatively few of the plants were in flower. April, the month that Wordsworth saw the daffodils at Ullswater, is usually a good time to view them, although the Lake District climate has changed since the poem was written.

Anniversaries

In 2004, in celebration of the 200th anniversary of the writing of the poem, it was also read aloud by 150,000 British schoolchildren, aimed both at improving recognition of poetry, and in support of Marie Curie Cancer Care.

In 2007, Cumbria Tourism released a rap version of the poem, featuring MC Nuts, a Lake District Red squirrel, in an attempt to capture the "YouTube generation" and attract tourists to the Lake District. Published on the two-hundredth anniversary of the original, it attracted wide media attention.^] It was welcomed by the Wordsworth Trust, but attracted the disapproval of some commentators.

In 2015 events marking the 200th anniversary of the publication of the revised version were celebrated at Rydal Mount.

In popular culture

In the 2013 musical Big Fish (musical), composed by Andrew Lippa, some lines from the poem are used in the song "Daffodils," which concludes the first act. Lippa mentioned this in a video created by Broadway.com in the same year.

William Wordsworth (7 April 1770 – 23 April 1850) was a major English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their joint publication Lyrical Ballads (1798).

Wordsworth's magnum opus is generally considered to be The Prelude, a semi-autobiographical poem of his early years that he revised and expanded a number of times. It was posthumously titled and published, before which it was generally known as "the poem to Coleridge". Wordsworth was Britain's poet laureate from 1843 until his death from pleurisy on 23 April 1850.

The second of five children born to John Wordsworth and Ann Cookson, William Wordsworth was born on 7 April 1770 in Wordsworth House in Cockermouth, Cumberland, part of the scenic region in northwestern England known as the Lake District. His sister, the poet and diarist Dorothy Wordsworth, to whom he was close all his life, was born the following year, and the two were baptised together. They had three other siblings: Richard, the eldest, who became a lawyer; John, born after Dorothy, who went to sea and died in 1805 when the ship of which he was captain, the Earl of Abergavenny, was wrecked off the south coast of England; and Christopher, the youngest, who entered the Church and rose to be Master of Trinity College, Cambridge.

Wordsworth's father was a legal representative of James Lowther, 1st Earl of Lonsdale and, through his connections, lived in a large mansion in the small town. He was frequently away from home on business, so the young William and his siblings had little involvement with him and remained distant from him until his death in 1783. However, he did encourage William in his reading, and in particular set him to commit to memory large portions of verse, including works by Milton, Shakespeare and Spenser. William was also allowed to use his father's library. William also spent time at his mother's parents' house in Penrith, Cumberland, where he was exposed to the moors, but did not get along with his grandparents or his uncle, who also lived there. His hostile interactions with them distressed him to the point of contemplating suicide.

Wordsworth was taught to read by his mother and attended, first, a tiny school of low quality in Cockermouth, then a school in Penrith for the children of upper-class families, where he was taught by Ann Birkett, who insisted on instilling in her students traditions that included pursuing both scholarly and local activities, especially the festivals around Easter, May Day and Shrove Tuesday. Wordsworth was taught both the Bible and the Spectator, but little else. It was at the school in Penrith that he met the Hutchinsons, including Mary, who later became his wife

After the death of his mother, in 1778, Wordsworth's father sent him to Hawkshead Grammar School in Lancashire (now in Cumbria) and sent Dorothy to live with relatives in Yorkshire. She and William did not meet again for another nine years.

Wordsworth made his debut as a writer in 1787 when he published a sonnet in The European Magazine. That same year he began attending St John's College, Cambridge. He received his BA degree in 1791. He returned to Hawkshead for the first two summers of his time at Cambridge, and often spent later holidays on walking tours, visiting places famous for the beauty of their landscape. In 1790 he went on a walking tour of Europe, during which he toured the Alps extensively, and visited nearby areas of France, Switzerland, and Italy.