Wordsworth’s lines “I wandered lonely as a cloud” are, as he would have said, about “something more” than yellow daffodils at the water’s brim. I have heard how schoolmasters and mistresses point out in the “Poetry Lesson” that the whole importance of this poem lies in Wordsworth’s simple perception of the beauty of Spring flowers; but it seems to me to be an important poem only because Wordsworth has written spontaneously (though perhaps under his sister’s influence) and recorded to his own satisfaction an emotional state which we all can recognize. These daffodils have interrupted the thoughts of an unhappy, lonely man and, reminding him of his childhood, become at once emblems of a golden age of disinterested human companionship; he uses their memory later as a charm to banish the spectres of trouble and loneliness. I hope I have interpreted the poem correctly. Let us now fantastically suppose for the sake of argument that Wordsworth had been intentionally seeking solitude like a hurt beast hating his kind, and had suddenly come across the same daffodil field: he surely might have been struck with a sudden horror for such a huge crowd of flower-faces, especially if his early memories of flower picking had been blighted by disagreeable companionship and the labour of picking for the flower market. He would then have written a poem of exactly the opposite sense, recording his sudden feeling of repulsion at the sight of the flowers and remarking at the end that sometimes when he is lying on his couch in vacant or in pensive mood, they flash across that inward eye which is the curse of solitude, “_Oh then my heart with horror fills_ _And shudders with the daffodils._” For readers to whom he could communicate his dislike of daffodils on the basis of a common experience of brutal companionship in childhood and forced labour, the poem would seem a masterpiece, and those of them who were schoolmasters would be pretty sure to point out in _their_ Poetry Lessons that the importance of the poem lay in Wordsworth’s “perception of the dreadfulness of Spring Flowers.”