Mohammed Alhamili

Dr. Dahlia Porter

ENGL 5750

Sep 7, 2016

“Daffodils”

            The poem is a magnificent work of literature that I enjoyed reading specially when considering the variety of versions that it had which makes it an appealing literary pursuit. The abstract experiences are not easily rendered on pages since they happen with a blink of an eye, but bearing in mind that the poem has more than three versions it becomes manageable at least to convey the differences between them.

            When looking at the title page, I was struck by the introduction of William Wordsworth through his work instead of just writing his name which raises the question of whether the seriousness of the people’s pursuit of literature as one of the dominant pillars of education at that time was directly related to the work itself without considering the author or his importance that they needed to be reminded of the author’s works or was it a way of advertising? Personally, I think it was more of an advertisement than it was a reminder since poetry was the most famous genre in that period.

            Upon turning the title page, I was expecting a title for the poem, but then I thought maybe the title was on a separate page and it was not included in the packet. The poem materialized the definition of poetry; “literary work in which special intensity is given to the expression of feelings and ideas by the use of distinctive style and rhythm.”  Daffodils was an intensified language that shows the readers the beauty of nature and the mentality of Wordsworth as a poet and how he conveyed the image in the poem in a balanced manner between having no details and overloading the poem with descriptions that are hard to imagine or have contradiction when presented in the same time. In the 1815 version Wordsworth modified the poem in what I consider destructive rewriting. Wordsworth was striving to make his poem perfect, which led him to add more details that have already been stated in the previous versions. In the first stanza he depicts the Daffodils “along the lake, beneath the trees, fluttering and dancing in the breeze, but in the second stanza the scene shifts from “along the lake” to be “along the bay.”  The poem swerved from being a musical genius that makes the readers dance on the beat with Daffodils to a riddle that needs to be solved. These modifications may have come as a result of Wordsworth first success after he altered the Lyrical Ballads to the taste of the readers.