Daffodils by William Wordsworth and Essay

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Wordsworth's poem, and Clarke's as well, situates a subject as the focus of the poem. Clarke's poem represents the same ideas of subjectivity and Romanticism.

The first word in the title of Clarke's poem firmly aligns her work with Wordsworth's. Miracle. A miracle is something beyond explanation. To be beyond explanation is to be beyond reason. Further signs of a more subjective appeal in Clarke's poem can be seen with her word choice. One of the people to whom she reads, is "not listening, not seeing, not feeling." She describes others as "absent," "dumb" and "frozen." By the end, a mute man recites, "The Daffodils" perfectly, and after his performance, "the daffodils outside are still as wax."

Here we remember Wordsworth's speaker, gazing and silent. The overwhelming nature of the experience has rendered him speechless and yet he is more enlightened by feeling than by any reason. The mute man "rocks / gently to the rhythms of the poems" just before he recites, "The Daffodils." Much like Wordsworth's speaker, the mute man is overcome and captured by something that is above reason and logic. He enjoys the feeling of the poetry and, through the recitation of, "The Daffodils" he "has remembered there was a music / of speech and that once he had something to say." As a subject, as a single person, something has impressed upon him a feeling of joy that transcends reason.

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He is considered insane, irrational, but the most irrational part of the poem, the rhythm, captures him and revives him to what is considered more rational, namely being able to use language. Clarke provides an interesting inversion here. The once mute subject, has become the speaker, and the flowers are now "still as wax."

Both poems take into account the role of subjective experience in determining feeling and "enlightenment." Clarke, using Wordsworth as a starting point, returns reason to the service of feeling. She positions a "sane" person amongst the "insane" and the result is a merging of the two states. In the image of endless daffodils, there is more humanity and "truth" than in any form of rational thought.

Endnotes

1"Romanticism." Encyclopaedia Britannica. 2010. Encyclopaedia Britannica Online. 11 Apr. 2010

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/508675/Romanticism.....

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