I wandered lonely as a Cloud

William Wordsworth published 1807 412 characters medium

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 dancing Daffodills; Along the Lake, beneath the trees, Ten thousand dancing in the breeze. The waves beside them danced, but they Outdid the sparkling waves in glee:— A Poet could not but be gay In such a laughing company: I gaz’d—and gaz’d—but little thought What wealth the shew to me had brought:

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About this text

Wordsworth wrote this poem in 1804 and printed it in Poems, in Two Volumes in 1807. The walk behind it was beside Ullswater with his sister Dorothy in 1802. Dorothy’s journal entry for April 15 describes the flowers. The 1807 version has three stanzas, and the stanza beginning Continuous as the stars was added in 1815. This text follows the 1807 printing on Wikisource.

Where this text comes fromWordsworth capitalized nouns the way a German printer would, and the 1807 setting linked below keeps every one of them: Cloud, Vales, Hills, Daffodills, Lake, Poet. Modern school reprints quietly lower-case the lot, which is why the text on this page looks wrong to anyone who learned the poem from an anthology. The spelling Daffodills, with two l letters, belongs to that same printing. You are copying the first two stanzas as they stood before the poem was expanded.

What you might not noticeThe line most people quote from this poem, Continuous as the stars that shine, does not appear here at all. Wordsworth added that whole stanza in 1815, eight years after this printing. Source

What it trainsNineteen capital letters in 412 characters, and only two of them stand at the head of a sentence. That is the whole exercise here: the little finger has to fire on ordinary nouns, against every habit built by typing modern prose, and the moment you relax you produce daffodills instead of Daffodills. That word is also the only one in the passage to reach ten letters, and it is misspelled by modern standards, so spellcheck instincts work against you twice. Three long dashes and three colons break the lines where a comma would normally sit, and there are only four commas in the whole fragment.

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Read the full text at the publisher: Wikisource