The criticism about the Industrial Revolution and the return to nature

The Romantic age started in England with the publication of “Lyrical Ballads” of Wordsworth and Coleridge. They belong to the first generation of romantic poets, also known as the Lake poets , from the Lake District, the place where they lived and which inspired the majority of their literary production. In this beautiful natural place Wordsworth found a refuge from the oppression of modern industrial life that he avoided to describe. In fact Nature, in this period, is considered as something alive sharing man’s own feelings. Only the poet, that posseses imagination(a supreme gift, a creative power that is the best way to find the ideal world and a way to escape from the miseries and ugliness of the real world) , can understand the language of nature and translate it in his poems for the common people. For this he use a very elegant but simple language. We can see this concept in “I wondered lonely as a cloud” that summes up all the main features of Wordsworth’s poetry. This poem is also called “Daffodils” because these flowers are the protagonists of the poem:

A normal event, like a walk upon the margin of a bay, is transformed by the poet to an extraordinary one. In fact when, in a state of tranquillity, the poet recall the daffodils, he reaches the sublime. This is, for romantic poets, a particular state of mind caused by wonder, astonishment, fear, magnificence, which permits a poet to understand things better than when he is in a normal state.
In the poem is used the first person, in fact the subject is the poet himself that wandered lonely as a cloud, symbol of freedom, that moves slowly in the air blown by the wind over vales and hills. All at once he sees a crowd (this is a personification) of daffodils. They are said golden, and not yellow, because they are precious, in fact the sight of this flowers reached the poet. The place where these flowers are is described very precisely: they are beside the lake, beneath the trees and they flutter and dance(a personification) in the breeze, an onomatopoeic word to indicate the sound of the wind. The dynamism of the scene wants to indicate the pantheistic vision of nature, which stated that like the rest of the universe, nature was moved by a Mighty Power, an immanent God whose presence is manifest in every stone and tree.
Then he compare daffodils to the stars of milky way, in fact they stretch in a never ending line (a litotes to say that the are really a lot) along the margin of a bay. He sees, he says, ten thousand (a paradox) daffodils tossing (a metonymy to say “moving left and right following a rhythm”) their heads in a sprightly dance. The inversion “saw I” in line 11 wants to focus on the sight of daffodils.
The waves of lake beside them danced(another personification) but they are brighter than the shining waves. Now, in antithesis with the first line, the author say that in such beautiful company a poet couldn’t be gay: in fact now he isn’t alone but he is in company of nature. The repetition of “gazed” emphasizes that the he’s breathless for this show. In fact, when he lie in his couch and is in a vacant or pensive mood, the daffodils flash upon that inward eye which is the bliss of solitude, an oxymoron to indicate that when he recalls the past and links the past whit the present, he reaches the sublime, in fact he than says his heart with pleasure fills and dances with the daffodils.