Critique of Poetry
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William Wordsworth is the poet I chose because he admires nature, expresses it through his poems, and writes so beautifully romantic about the world itself. The first poem I chose to analyze is “I wandered Lonely as a Cloud” a lyric poem focusing on the poets response to the beauty of nature. “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” has been one of my favorite poems in this course because it makes me think of all the times I have encountered myself with nature and how I have appreciated it while there but I have never taken those thoughts with me to the comfort of my living room.
William Wordsworths “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” contains a series of literary terms such as alliteration, simile, personification, meter, and metaphors. The poem is formed of four stanzas of six lines each. In each stanza, the first line rhymes with the third and the second with the fourth, giving the poem an AB, AB rhyme style. The stanza then ends with a rhyming couplet. Wordsworth unifies the content of the poem by focusing the first three stanzas on the experience at the lake and the last stanza on the memory of that experience.
In the first stanza, while wandering like a cloud, the speaker happens upon daffodils fluttering in a breeze on the shore of a lake, beneath trees. In the second one, the daffodils stretch all along the shore. Because there are so many of them, they remind the speaker of the Milky Way, the galaxy that scientists say contains about one trillion stars, including the sun. The speaker humanizes the daffodils when he says they are engaging in a dance. This takes us onto the third stanza where in their gleeful fluttering and dancing, the daffodils outdo the rippling waves of the lake. But the poet does not at this moment fully appreciate the happy sight before him. In the last line of the stanza, Wordsworth uses anastrophe, writing the show to me had brought instead of the show brought to me. And finally in the fourth stanza, not until the poet later muses about what he saw does he fully appreciate the cheerful sight of the dancing daffodils. Wordsworth again uses anastrophe, writing when on my couch I lie and my heart with pleasure fills.
The second poem I chose to analyze is also by William Wordsworth, “The World Is Too Much With Us” which is a poem in the form of a sonnet. In English, there are two types of sonnets, the Petrarchan and the Shakespearean, both with fourteen lines. Wordsworths poem is a Petrarchan sonnet, it consists of an eight-line stanza (octave) and a six-line stanza (sestet). William Wordsworth composed this poem when the Industrial Revolution was in full flower. No doubt the materialism the revolution engendered was one of the reasons Wordsworth wrote the poem.
The theme for this poem relies on how society is so bent on making and spending money in smoky factories and fast-paced business enterprises that it ignores the pristine glory of nature,