This is the first poem that came to mind when Mac brought up the idea of 52 Poems before the group. It is silly, of course. Romantic poetry always seems a little silly. Nevertheless, it is the one poem, perhaps along with "Ode on a Grecian Urn," which I have never forgotten from a poetry course I took in college. Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley …. these are the guys I think of when I think of poetry. I suppose I need this year of poems to break me of this to some degree. Meanwhile, I still find that the last stanza of this poem is quite sublime, and I certainly feel that way about nature in general, very much in preference to the city life that I live most of the time.
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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.
*
–Stu Moore spends more time than he should in a vacant or pensive mood.
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