I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud ( German "I wandered lonely like a cloud" ), also known under the title Daffodils (German: " Narcissus "), is an English poem by William Wordsworth , according to official information from 1804, which the can be assigned to the English romantic movement . It is considered the most famous Wordsworth poem.
background
Wordsworth was inspired to write this poem on April 15, 1802 during a walk in the Lake District in Glencoyne Park with his sister Dorothy Wordsworth , during which they became aware of a "long belt" (German: "long belt") of daffodils. The British Library has a corresponding handwritten manuscript from the same year . Inconsistent, he wrote the poem by his own account in 1804, two years after the formative event, in Dove Cottage in the Lake District. It was first published by him in 1807. Eight years later, a revised version appeared in Wordsworth's poetry collection Poems in Two Volumes , in which he made minor changes to all stanzas except the last one (for more details see section "Text"). The original text version is no longer common today.
In 1995, the poem ranked fifth in a BBC Radio 4 poll of the most popular British poems .
text
Wordsworth revised the poem in 1815. He replaced "dancing" with "golden", "along" with "beside" and "ten thousand" with "fluttering and". He also added a stanza between the first and the second and changed “laughing” to “jocund”. He left the last stanza unchanged. The poem consists of four stanzas in total.
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 often, 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.
Translations
The poem is available in translations by various authors.
The first stanza in the translations by Uwe Grüning (1980) and Bertram Kottmann reads :
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.
William Wordsworth
I wandered like the cloud,
Which drifts lonely on valley and hill
And saw, rich in blossom gold,
armies of daffodils, whose wings made the
wind, which blew from the near shore,
dance brightly in the game.
Uwe Grüning
Like a cloud, I moved along,
the lonely one sweeps high across the country
when, unexpectedly, a sea
of golden daffodils stood before me .
By the lake, where the trees are, they
fluttered, danced in the wind.
Bertram Kottmann
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b William Wordsworth (1770-1850). In: bbc.co.uk, BBC History , accessed on August 30, 2019.
- ^ Daffodils at Ullswater. Glenridding. In: visitcumbria.com, accessed on August 30, 2019.
- ↑ A thing of beauty is happiness forever. Poems of the English and Scottish Romanticism, English and German. From the English. Adaptations by Wolfgang Breitwieser, Günter Deicke , Adolf Endler , Roland Erb, Uwe Grüning, Werner Günzerodt, Helmut T. Heinrich , Stephan Hermlin , Rainer Kirsch, Günter Kunert , Erhard Mehnert, John B. Mitchell, Heinz Piontek , Walter Wilhelm and Hubert Witt . Edited by Horst Höhne. 2nd Edition. Verlag Philipp Reclam jun., Leipzig 1983, ISBN 3-921695-41-4 , p. 172 f.