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.

Robert Frost's The Pasture revisted

One of the most unlikely poems of the Modernist period is that by Robert Frost: “The Pasture.” It is unlikely for many reasons. First, it seems more like a Romantic lyric, i.e., one hundred years too late, because of its rural depiction and its simple, formal diction. Second, its tone is gentle and polite, a rarity among the Modernists. And third, it does not ostentatiously break with tradition.

Structurally the poem is two quatrains, the rhyme scheme is abbc deec, and for such a small poem, it’s surprising how much repetition there is. The opening lines of the two quatrains begin the same, and the ending lines are exactly the same.

It is interesting to compare it to another relatively famous 8-lined poem, “The Red Wheelbarrow,” by William Carlos Williams.  There is a visual difference between the two poems.

The Pasture

By Robert Frost

I’m going to clean the pasture spring;
I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):
I sha’n’t be gone long.—You come too,

I’m going out to fetch the little calf
That’s standing by its mother. It’s so young
It totters when she licks it with her tongue.
I sha’n’t be gone long.—You come too.

The Red Wheelbarrow

By William Carlos Williams

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

Frost uses iambic pentameter lines and a refrain that moves from iambs to spondees. Williams’ short lines in four paired stanzas follow a syllabic pattern of 4-2-3-2-3-2-4-2. Though there is assonance in Williams’ poem, lines 5(ā) and 7(ī), there is a more subtle use of it in Frost’s poem: lines 1 (ēn/ing), 2(ā and ē), 3(ā and ah) and 4(ah and ū). Is Frost more interested in the sound of his poem than Williams is?

Where Frost uses the farm setting as part of his meaning, Williams is more abstract, “so much depends/ upon.” Frost is interested in imbuing his work with nuanced feeling; Williams is spare with feeling and language. Though Williams seems almost taciturn, so too is Frost; but whereas Williams cuts off anything other than the list of things in and of themselves, Frost suggests feelings, and invites the reader to “come along.”

Realists and Modernists tended to abhor metaphor (compare Hawthorne and Melville to S. Crane and Hemingway), whereas the Dark Romantics reveled in it. But though Frost is no Romantic, he doesn’t quite want to toss metaphor out; Williams does. Williams filters out any Romantic attitudes about the wheelbarrow or the chickens; but in the process also filters out, what he considered, too much sentiment. The Imagists, intent on taking pictures of the World, like many in photography and film, reveled in the surface of reality because they did not believe in many of the non-physical ideas, like gentility, beauty, patience, kindness, etc. And it shows.

Risotto by the Bard of Bat Yam, Poet Laureate of Zion

The most obstreperous part about making something, also the best,
Is existing in the reality of middle,
Sustaining an act of rigorous radical imagination,
I simmered a broth: onion, lemon, a big handful of mint.

The phone did ring. With my left
Hand I answered it,
Sautéing the rice, then adding the mixed shrimp sea food broth
Slowly, one ladle at a time, with my right. What’s up?

The miracle of risotto, it’s easy to miss, is the moment when the husks dissolve,
Each grain of rice releasing its tiny explosion of starch.

God help you take it off the heat just then, let it sit
While you shave the parmesan into paper-thin curls,
It must be perfectly creamy,
But still have a bite.

There will be dishes to do,The moon will rise,

A cacophony of hoots, cackles, and wails.
Residuals of Tastes and Smells
Light intoxication  half bottleiced Chardonnay





Ingredients:

5 cups chicken or seafood broth, plus more as needed
1 (8-ounce) bottle clam juice
1/2 teaspoon saffron threads, crushed
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1/4 cup minced shallots (about 2)
2 cups arborio or carnaroli rice
1/2 cup dry white wine
1/2 pound bay scallops
1/2 pound medium shrimp, peeled and deveined
1/2 pound squid (calamari) tubes, sliced into rings
1 teaspoon fine sea salt
2 tablespoons finely chopped fresh parsley


Method:
Heat broth, clam juice and saffron to a boil in a medium saucepot. Reduce heat and keep simmering.

Meanwhile, heat oil in a large saucepot over medium-high heat. Add shallot and cook until translucent, about 2 minutes. Stir in rice and toast cook until translucent, about 2 minutes. Stir in wine and cook, stirring constantly, until liquid is absorbed.

Set timer for 14 minutes and begin to add saffron broth, 1/2 cup at a time, stirring each time until most liquid is absorbed. After 14 minutes, stir in scallops, shrimp, squid and salt. Continue to cook and stir, adding broth 1/2 cup at a time until rice is al dente and seafood is just cooked through, about 6 minutes (you may not use all broth). Stir in parsley and serve.

Paw Pints in Heaven by The Bard of Bat Yam , Poet Laureate of Zion

Tabby is now in a place that is made of gold,
Heaven, a  place where  never we do  grow old,
but one answer I have not heard at all,
will there too be paw prints from my me?

She  promised us joy right from the start.
I just wonder if she'll be a part.
So as I sit here and dream of the day,
In heaven she will the Ginger Saint  willstay?

When you're walking down with the Saints of old,
 glimpse expectantly of that new road,
and if there Tabby shall see,
maybe too a paw print just for me.

A Valediction: of Weeping by John Donne ,... a favourite poem of the Bard of Bat Yam, Poet Laureate of Zion

Let me pour forth
My tears before thy face, whilst I stay here,
For thy face coins them, and thy stamp they bear,
And by this mintage they are something worth,
For thus they be
Pregnant of thee;
Fruits of much grief they are, emblems of more,
When a tear falls, that thou falls which it bore,
So thou and I are nothing then, when on a diverse shore.


On a round ball
A workman that hath copies by, can lay
An Europe, Afric, and an Asia,
And quickly make that, which was nothing, all;
So doth each tear
Which thee doth wear,
A globe, yea world, by that impression grow,
Till thy tears mix'd with mine do overflow
This world; by waters sent from thee, my heaven dissolved so.


O more than moon,
Draw not up seas to drown me in thy sphere,
Weep me not dead, in thine arms, but forbear
To teach the sea what it may do too soon;
Let not the wind
Example find,
To do me more harm than it purposeth;
Since thou and I sigh one another's breath,
Whoe'er sighs most is cruellest, and hastes the other's death.

John Donne probably wrote “A Valediction: of Weeping” after he met his future wife, Ann More, and before he took holy orders and turned most of his authorial energies to sermons and spiritual meditations. We can’t be sure about the timing, though; while we have Donne’s biography and his poems, aligning the two is tricky. We know that Donne wrote poems only for himself and a close circle of friends and patrons, never for fame and seldom for publication. It would seem reasonable to guess that “A Valediction: of Weeping”—which, like a number of Donne’s love poems, dramatizes a scene of lovers parting—might have been written during the early years of his marriage, when Donne was often obliged to be away from home, leaving his young wife and children alone. But we can’t be sure that the poem isn’t wholly an act of imagination with no connection to Donne’s personal experience.


This uncertainty has permitted some of Donne’s readers to regard his poems not as acts of self-expression, but as the abstracted, cerebral constructions of a fierce wit. Yes, the poems may be autobiographical, but Donne’s predilection for intricate rhetorical figures, paradoxes, surprising swerves in tone, associative leaps, and ingenious conceits can make them feel artificial, or made of artifice. Donne’s reputation as merely a wit made his work deeply unpopular for many years after his death. Probably the most famous condemnation came from Samuel Johnson, who labeled Donne’s style “metaphysical”—he didn’t intend the term as a compliment.


In the early 20th century, incipient Modernists, most notably T.S. Eliot, found new layers of value in Donne. His perceived cool intellectualism seemed fresh and vigorous to poets grown weary of Romanticism’s emotionalism and emphasis on the self. Donne soon became a favorite of the New Critics as well. That school’s emphasis on reading poems as autonomous systems—discounting extra-textual considerations such as the author’s intentions and historical situation—was well suited to Donne’s poetry; his intentions are difficult or impossible to determine, and each poem he wrote seemed designed to function as, to use a phrase from one of Donne’s Holy Sonnets, “a little world made cunningly.”


Donne’s poems in general, and “A Valediction: of Weeping” in particular, are certainly cunning. But it would be a mistake to think of them as nothing more than exercises in cleverness. We’ll find in this poem, as in many others by Donne, that his wit often serves as a means to a larger end rather than as an end in itself. The poem may be a highly organized “little world,” but it consistently gestures toward a larger world: the actual, chaotic, emotional one in which we live.


“A Valediction: of Weeping” begins with a scene of two lovers parting:

Let me pour forth
My tears before thy face, whilst I stay here,
For thy face coins them, and thy stamp they bear,
And by this mintage they are something worth

The poet is asking for his lover’s indulgence. If he cries now, while he’s still with her, her “face” will be reflected in his tears, transforming them from ordinary waste into objects of value—“coins.” The poet isn’t asking for a physical connection here; he doesn’t say “embrace me before I go.” Instead he seeks to reflect and be reflected by the beloved, at once emphasizing their connection and the fact that they are already—even now before his departure—undeniably separate. This dynamic might be similar to the one we enter into while reading Donne’s poem. On the one hand, the clever figures and rhyme scheme remind us that the poem is an artificial construct of symbols and sounds. But at the same time, the poem’s dramatic situation encourages us to identify with the speaker’s authentic human grief. Let’s look at the entire first stanza:

Let me pour forth
My tears before thy face, whilst I stay here,
For thy face coins them, and thy stamp they bear,
And by this mintage they are something worth,
For thus they be
Pregnant of thee;
Fruits of much grief they are, emblems of more,
When a tear falls, that thou falls which it bore,
So thou and I are nothing then, when on a divers shore.

The financial metaphor of lines 3 and 4 suggests that there’s a transaction involved here, and we see already an example of the kind of hall-of-mirrors paradox Donne so relished, and will soon use again, in this very poem. Perhaps the speaker is departing to earn actual coins to support the beloved. If so, that would be a gesture of unification and shared purpose, but at the same time one ironically requiring separation. In order to be with you, Donne seems to imply, I must leave you.

In line 7 Donne suggests that his tears are both “fruits” of his present grief at parting and “emblems” of his future grief, when he will be away. (Of course, this “grief” might also be understood not as the grief of parting from the beloved, but as the grief of having to undertake the journey in the first place.) So the tears are literal and metaphorical, physical and symbolic, at the same time. Similarly, the poem as a whole can be seen both as a sincere expression of grief and as an “emblem”—a representation, that is—of grief.

The next two lines feature a tricky metaphor for the speaker’s future sorrow:

When a tear falls, that thou falls which it bore,
So thou and I are nothing then, when on a divers shore.
As his own tear falls, his beloved’s reflection falls with it. He and she both become “nothing”; her reflection falls and thus vanishes, and he, like his tear, departs. If he is departing on a sea voyage—as “divers shore” might suggest—then we may add another dimension to this already crowded conceit. Both tears and the sea are salty water, and here tears figuratively signify the impending separation, just as the sea will literally enforce it. Keeping in mind that a “fall” in a relationship can refer to unfaithfulness, this line could even be read as a premonition of adultery: the tears provoked by my sorrow at leaving you fall, just as you will fall into unfaithfulness when I’m gone. Following this line of thinking, “So thou and I are nothing then, when on a divers shore” turns to pure bitterness: when we’re apart, we’re nothing to each other.

So while we could read this first stanza as the heartfelt cry of a lover in anguish, devastated to be separated from his beloved, it’s also possible to take these lines as the cynical complaint of a husband who feels persecuted in his role as breadwinner and, even worse, unsure of his wife’s fidelity. Which of these is the correct reading? It’s a natural question to ask, but also a misleading one, because the great pleasure in reading Donne lies in just this kind of ambiguity. His poems are incredibly detailed, specific, and intricate, but at the same time mysterious, vague, and elusive. Here again, we’re led to consider the ways in which the poem both invites us to identify with the speaker’s emotions, and reminds us that what we’re looking at here is not a person but a poem. We’ll see this dynamic continue throughout the rest of the poem, as Donne oscillates between the tangible and the conceptual, the literal and the metaphorical. By the time we get to the final lines, it may even seem that the poem is more concerned with the gap between reality and imagination than it is with its ostensible subject of two lovers parting.

The next stanza introduces a new metaphor that is related—appropriately, given the occasion of the poem—to the idea of travel.

On a round ball
A workman that hath copies by, can lay
An Europe, Afric, and an Asia,
And quickly make that, which was nothing, all,
So doth each tear,
Which thee doth wear,
A globe, yea world by that impression grow,
Till thy tears mixed with mine do overflow
This world, by waters sent from thee, my heaven dissolved so.


This stanza’s transformation of a “nothing” into an “all” is similar to an idea expressed near the end of another Donne poem, “The Canonization.” Both poems use the figure of a world contained in a reflection, and in each case great stress is put on the metaphysical nature of that containment: the physical object is captured in a reflection, but so is the object’s essence. In “The Canonization” it isn’t just the “world” that is contained in the “glasses of your eyes,” but the “whole world’s soul.” The distinction is important. Donne is alluding to the Christian theory of transubstantiation, where the base physical representations of bread and wine are transformed, by the intercession of the Holy Ghost, into holy reality: the body and blood of Christ. Analogous processes occur in “A Valediction: of Weeping.” Much as the tears in line 7 were shown to be both physical “fruits” and metaphysical “emblems,” here Donne conflates reality (the “world” in which we actually live) and representation (the “globe” we use as an icon of that world). A blank ball is nothing until it’s overlaid with maps to become an “all.” A tear is nothing until it reflects the face of the beloved and becomes an “all.” And perhaps the poem itself is both a nothing—a mere collection of sounds and symbols—and yet also an “all,” a container for the poet’s genuine emotions.


The final lines of the second stanza may contain the most knotty ideas in a very knotty poem:

Till thy tears mixed with mine do overflow
This world, by waters sent from thee, my heaven dissolved so.


How are we to understand the phrase “This world” here? There are several possible readings, and as elsewhere in the poem, they range from the simple and concrete to the complex and abstract. “This world” could be the real world the lovers see around them: If we both cry, our eyes will fill with tears, and we literally won’t be able to see each other anymore. But of course the figure also works as a metaphor for the characters’ emotional states: Our mutual sorrow at parting destroys the heaven-on-earth we make when we’re together. Finally, keep in mind the maps Donne showed us earlier in the stanza. The speaker’s tears might also be obscuring his vision of that globe, a “little world made cunningly” that in turn represents the literal earth. Again Donne succeeds in “mixing” the real and the figurative.


“Mixed” might not refer to a literal mixing of the two lovers’ tears, but instead to the process of reproduction—the oscillation of reality and representation—that is gradually manifesting itself as the poem’s central concern. The two lines might suggest that watery reflections of the lovers are being created and destroyed endlessly: in reflecting, or mixing with, each other’s tears, the lovers “overflow” and destroy those reflections, the faces-within-tears from the first stanza. We see the lovers’ (real) tears as images within images, endlessly generative and endlessly in decay.


Immediately following his sequence of globe and water imagery, Donne compares his beloved to the moon, the sphere that controls the flow of tides.


O more than moon,
Draw not up seas to drown me in thy sphere,
Weep me not dead, in thine arms, but forbear
To teach the sea, what it may do too soon;
Let not the wind
Example find,
To do me more harm, than it purposeth;
Since thou and I sigh one another’s breath,
Whoe’er sighs most, is cruelest, and hastes the other’s death.


The beloved is “more than” the moon: not only can she can draw tears from herself, but she can pull those tears all the way up into her own “sphere,” or presence, where the poet is as well. Donne exhorts her not to use her power to “draw … up seas,” that is, to weep, because it could “drown” him in at least three ways. His reflection would be drowned when caught in her tears; seeing her cry would figuratively drown him in sorrow; and if her tears inadvertently “teach the sea” and give an “example” to the wind, he might literally be drowned when he sets sail on his voyage.


The poem’s closing “breath” metaphor, which appropriately follows the “wind” image, once again asserts the union of the lovers: Because we breathe as one when we’re together, our sighs of sorrow use up each other’s breath, and so hasten each other’s death. As we might have expected, Donne ends the poem with a paradox. We tend to associate breath with life, but here an excess of breath leads to death. This metaphor, like the earlier tear/reflection conceit, warns the beloved that her physical expressions of grief—crying, sighing—cause emotional harm. When she cries she drowns his reflection in her tears; when she sighs she steals his life-breath. Once again, the metaphorical and the real appear to be so closely aligned as to become indistinguishable.


This breath figure also has an echo in “The Canonization,” where we find similar images of the lovers as a single being:


Call her one, me another fly,
We are tapers too, and at our own cost die,
And we in us find the eagle and the dove…


In these lines, as in “A Valediction: of Weeping,” the poet and his beloved form one being. That’s not an original idea, but it becomes original when we note that in each case this union is destructive as well as creative. In “The Canonization” the lovers are both flies and the candles that burn the flies, so they “at [their] own cost die”: the fact of their union is also the cause of their destruction. “The eagle and the dove” is a similarly murderous figure, since eagles kill doves. So too in “A Valediction: of Weeping” the lovers are united—in teary reflections and in breath—but those very unions threaten the lovers with ruin. As in the lines about mixed tears overflowing “this world,” the poem’s closing lines suggest the idea of love as a self-perpetuating cycle of creation and destruction. The great achievement of “A Valediction: of Weeping” is its powerful evocation of this very paradox—not only in terms of the lovers, who appear to be simultaneously united and divided, but in terms of the poem itself, which persistently demands that we read it as both artificial and earnest, self-contained and suggestive, a “nothing” and an “all.”

Trivia..... Social Media.... Privacy .... by the Bard of Bat Yam , Poet Laureate of Zion

Emails , whatsapp , sms ....social media ....Facebook ...Linkedin .....Literotica ......Cricinfo .......Google ......Outlook Express .......Mozilla Firefox ......Chrome ..?......KIndle ......Amazon .......eBay ........Flipkart ......OLX .....Snapdeal .....
.......Internet Explorer ........Wikipedia ...........ebooks ......ebanking .......mobile banking ......iPhone ......iPad ......iPod ........Apple .....Samsung .......Microsoft .........Nokia .......LG ......Blackberry .......Visa .......Mastercard .......PIN ......personal index number .......OTP ......one time pin ...........................
Purchase Order , Sales Invoice , Sales Tax .......Excise Duty .........Income Tax .........Credit Note ......Delivery Note .......Goods Receipt Report .......Protocols .......SOP ......DEBIT .......NOTE .........BANK STATEMENT ..............REJECTION ADVICE ......REMITTANCE PROOF .......TRANSACTION EVIDENCE ........AUDIT TRAIL .....CORPORATE VEIL .....
SUB POENA .......AFFIDAVIT ....... INDEMNITY BOND ............
...................................BANK RECONCILIATION ........AIRWAY BILL .....LETTER OF CREDIT ...........BLAH ......BLAH ......
BLAH .................
OVERLOAD ......OVERLOAD ......BURNOUT ..........

Pigeons in Flight by the Bard of Bat Yam, Poet Laureate of Zion

clear blue sky
exuberance....
exhilaration.....
no me......
no you......
only a flight of pigeons
flying high......
at great speed......
wheeling around .....
changing directions .....
exhilaration......
exuberance......
clear blue sky