“I wandered lonely as a cloud” (“Daffodils”) by William Wordsworth (post 2): The problem with the metaphor is that clouds, being inanimate, don’t have feelings

A more sensible metaphor would have been a lone bird, who might very well have felt lonely. So did Wordsworth make a mistake in his choice of metaphor or did he have his reasons? Here is the poem in its entirety:

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 be but 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 (1).

There are two ready rebuttals to my quibble about clouds. First, this poem is very successful and people like it just the way it is.

Second, if I try to imagine a lonely cloud, I imagine a book written for very young children, whose protagonist is a cloud. (I don’t know if there is such a book, but it seems to me that there could be.) In one edition of this series, the cloud could be lonely at the beginning, but not by the end.

In other words, the metaphor of a lonely cloud is valid, but at an early stage of cognitive development, before the distinction between animate and inanimate objects is firmly entrenched. So the question for this poem becomes why Wordsworth, as an adult writing for adults, used a metaphor more suitable for a child.

Was Wordsworth inspired to use the cloud metaphor by a child-aged alternate personality? Perhaps he even had a child-aged alternate personality named The Cloud. I certainly have no way of knowing the details and specifics. But is there any evidence at all that Wordsworth had multiple personality?

This is not my first post about Wordsworth (search “Wordsworth”). Previously, I briefly discussed his double consciousness; i.e., his multiple personality.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Wandered_Lonely_as_a_Cloud