Not  all poems are born equal. Some are born of noblemen and learned  scholars; their verbose verses dazzle their readers with a cornucopia  full of daring and vivid imagery. Others are born of hoi polloi — laymen whose words, simple and sincere, are meant to be consumed by  the general public not the condescending aristocrats. Ever since the  conception of arts, artists have deeply divided themselves into two  camps: Arts for arts’ sake, and arts for the sake of the humanity; and  fiercely fought each other over such arbitrary division. William  Wordsworth, the great poet of Romanticism, was an exception to this  rule: He wrote of awesome nature, of humanly woes, of religious  inspiration in the unsophisticated language of the common man; and yet,  his poems still retained the artistic quality previously only seen in  the highest of highbrow arts. This essay will take a close look at his  poem I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud, more commonly known as Daffodils and compare it with the famous poem Ozymandias by his close friend and contemporary, Percy Bysshe Shelley, in order to shed light on this unique aspect of Wordsworth’s poetry.
Wordsworth opened the poem with an ineffable feeling of loneliness: “I wandered lonely as a cloud/ That floats on high o’er vales and hills,”.  Loneliness, as described by Wordsworth, is not a strong emotion but  rather light, almost imperceptible — much akin to the white clouds that  floats aimlessly over a hilly landscape on a clear day. Compare this  loneliness to that described by Shelley in Ozymandias: “Nothing  beside remains. Round the decay/ Of that colossal wreck, boundless and  bare/ The lone and level sands stretch far away.” Shelley’s  loneliness is hostile while Wordsworth’s is mellow; Shelley’s loneliness  consumes the readers with fear and vastness while Wordsworth’s  dissolves and vanishes into the beautiful landscape.
In the next four lines, Wordsworth depicted a bed of flowers seamlessly melting into that landscape: “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.” The  words he used are simple enough: a host, a crowd, beside, beneath; the  objects he mentioned are familiar and intimate: the lake, the trees, the  breeze. Even in his use of literary device, he did not stray too far  from the norms when describing a field of daffodils: They dance, they  twinkle, they stretch. “Continuous as the stars that  shine/ And twinkle on the milky way,/ They stretch in never-ending line/  Along the margin of a bay:”. This amiable yet refreshing image is  in stark contrast with Shelley’s otherworldly depiction of strange,  alien objects in the aforementioned poem: “[…] Near them, on the sand,/ Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,/ And wrinkled lips, and sneer of cold command,”.  Nature as told by Shelley looks down upon its readers, tantamount to  Ozymandias the King of all ancient Kings who looked down upon his  subjects; on the other hand, nature as told by Wordsworth is cordial and  jovial, reminiscent of the village people of England who celebrate the  coming of Spring: “Ten thousands saw I at a glance,/ Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.”
In the last two stanzas, Wordsworth showed us how his mood was improved by such beautiful sight: “The waves beside them danced; but they/ Out-did the sparkling waves in  glee:/ A poet could not be but gay,/ In such a jocund company:”.  The three words glee, gay and jocund were used in succession to signify  the departure of that indescribable melancholy at the beginning of the  poem, as well as the quiet arrival of delicate happiness. The author,  the I in the poem, could not help but be captivated by such an exquisite sight. He looked at it, transfixed and lost in speechless amazement. He  dared not even think, lest he disturb the perfect tranquility he was  immersed in: “I gazed — and gazed — but little thought/ What wealth the show to me had brought:”. This “pensive mood” is vastly different from the sense of utmost helplessness seen in Ozymandias: “Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,/ The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:”.  If Shelley’s loneliness metastasizes into despair, Wordsworth’s  metamorphoses into some sort of hazy happiness — the kind of happiness  that comes from a plate full of hot, freshly baked peach cobbler and  teeth-numbing ice-cream enjoyed on the veranda of grandma’s cottage in a  somnolent town, from a distant childhood since ages past. And if  Shelley’s memory of the desiccated statue would come back later only to  remind him of the ephemerality of it all: “And on a pedestal these words appear:/ ‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:/ Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’”;  then Wordsworth’s memory, which one could never recall willingly, would  reemerge from the innermost depth of one’s psyche when one is down and  out alone, and turn one’s day brighter if only for a short while:
 “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.”
 
In summary, nature — a recurring theme in William Wordsworth’s poetry —  possesses the tenderness of a mother, with all its familiarity and  radiant warmth. True to his philosophy of poetry in the preface to the  second edition of Lyrical Ballads, the 18th century Romantic poet had,  by using unsophisticated language or by evoking homely emotions, proved  that poetry is not only for the pretentious snobs but also for the  “common man” as well. The fact that Wordsworth needed to do such a  thing, however, is a curiosity in and of itself — was Poetry not born of  and nourished by the everyday people since before the advent of  writing? At what time in history did poetry become a property of the  élite, the educated class? The question is a whole other topic worthy of  multiple lengthy essays that I will explore at a later time.