I had to learn the poem below by rote when I was at school and probably, like many of us, I never really stopped to engage with the whole of what Wordsworth was writing about.
Loneliness seems so pervasive and mostly experienced as an undesirable state. Existentialists talk about it as one of our ultimate anxieties as manifest in the experience of isolation and separateness. So many times, I’ve heard people talk about dying alone as their greatest fear.
“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 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.”
I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud (Daffodils)
William Wordsworth
The loneliness fear has many disguises including worry of rejection, feeling different and depraved, alienated and in the wrong. It’s connected to our wish to belong, to be liked, to be visible and heard by others.
We are relational; we not only need people in our life but also flourish and develop because of them. Yet, we are also alone in that no one can know what it’s truly like to be you or me; what it is for you or me to live life to its full and to die in its ineffable finality. Jung wisely wrote that loneliness often erupts at life transitions and is a call back to oneself to learn and to grow.
One has to wonder about the metaphor of the daffodils used by Wordsworth and whether he had found a key to the inseparable spirit between man and nature. Or was this just the romance of the English poet?
Alison Strasser
Come explore with us the many fears and forms of loneliness in an upcoming 2 day workshop
