Wordsworth’s daffodils

The most famous poem in the English language, ‘I wandered lonely as a Cloud’, was composed in 1804, two years after Wordsworth saw the daffodils while walking along the shore of Ullswater on a stormy day with his sister, Dorothy.

The poem was first published in three verses in Poems, in Two Volumes in 1807. Much more well-known now is the altered and expanded four-verse version that Wordsworth published in Poems, 1815.

Read more about ‘I wandered lonely as a Cloud’ and our Daffodil Trail.

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.