"I wandered lonely as a cloud"

Okay, it is true that this poem is really about daffodils which currently slumber underground in Virginia gaining strength for next spring's display. But the first line describes this little cloud so well. 


I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

Begins the somewhat sappy poem by William Wordsworth. I admit that I never liked much Wordsworth but as I read this poem afresh I was struck the the ending stanza:

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.



Where I would change the last word to "clouds" and ruin the rhyme scheme.


Wordsworth and John Constable, my constant companion, were contemporaries. I wonder if they ever met? Later critics considered both "romantics" in English literature and art. English Romanticism was a reaction against the Neoclassicism of the late 17th and early 18th centuries which re-imagined the ideals of ancient Greek and Rome. 


Romanticism emphasizes the solitary individual, love of nature, imagination over reason, passion for rural life, worship of beauty, and was fascinated with mysticism and myths of the past. Constable counts as a Romantic painter for me because of his celebration of landscape, nature, rural life and his essential honesty in portraying these things. I'm not sure what he and Wordsworth would have had to say to one another.


The cloud appeared over Masonic Lane about 6:10 pm. My notes on the back read: "white cumulus against a sea of gray." The medium is oil pastel, a particularly buttery one called Caran d"Ache Neopastels.