Daffodils -- poetry comparison
...emes are connected with the personal experience of the two poets. The Daffodils conveys the point of view of a solitary speaker beside a lake. It is between the "solitariness" of the speaker and the "sociability" imputed to the crowd of daffodils. Though solitarily wandering, ¡°my heart with pleasure fills, and dances with the daffodils¡±. As the beginner of the Romanticism in 19th century, Wordsworth grasps some apparently unimportant object or incident and invests this with universal significance. Different from Wordsworth, Robert Herrick looks into the beauty of nature in a different way. Two centuries earlier, Herrick, a metaphysical lyricist as Donne, believes that everything will die within a short time. They advocated enjoying the present to one¡¯s heart¡¯s content. They hold the Cavalier reaction towards asceticism and other-worldliness of Medieval Christian Church and Puritanism. The henceforth To Daffodils show the poet¡¯s view of the daffodils in a pessimistic way. Like the beautiful daffodils, the poet ¡°will go with you along¡± and ¡°die as your hours do, and dry away.¡± Herrick wishes the beauty to stay, but seems too helpless to maintain it. The tone of the whole poem is somewhat sad and disappointed which is much different from the happy tone of The Daffodils of Wordsworth. The two poems both have special choice of word and use abundant figure of speech. In the first line ¡°I wandered lonely as a cloud¡± in The Daffodils, the poet cautiously choose the verb ¡°wander¡± and likens himself to a cloud, as he and this object are both solitary and in motion. The cloud establishes a reference to things of nebulous appearance, and hence a classification that subsequently embraces the visual effects of the daffodils. The wanderer experiences two visions of daffodils, those seen in a natural environment, and those perceived by his mind in "pensive mood". By using ¡°the Milky Way¡±, "cloud," "host" and dancing "waves", the poet evokes the image of nebulosity. Another simile "If only an artist could paint this landscape" points to Wordsworth's fundamental concern with nature of the poet's imagination. Wordsworth combined traditional religious insight with the modern insights of psychological and aesthetic philosophy. Robert He...