I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

Romanticism both grew out of and developed as a reaction against the Age of Enlightenment, which was the dominant philosophical movement in Europe during the 17th and 18th centuries.

Although Romanticism broadly agreed with many of the ideals of the Age of Enlightenment, like individual freedom and religious tolerance, it found its emphasis on scientific rationality restrictive.

The Romantic poets believed that classical literary forms no longer served them—they wanted to bring a greater subjectivity into their work, in protest against the social control and destructive modernity they were witnessing. They felt the human experience was minimized in the face of industrialized progress.

This led to their prioritizing the temperament of the individual, and recognizing the struggles of ordinary people, whose lives were often trampled underfoot at this time. Their only recourse was the life of the imagination, where people could maintain their unique identities, their dignity, and their freedom.

While this is a simplification of the nuances of the age, there is little doubt that the Industrial Revolution changed our relationship with nature and with one another for ever. By harnessing nature and individuals in the pursuit of capital, we advanced our civilization, but we disrupted our ability to live in communion with nature.

Individual craftsmanship lost its value, along with the rural way of life in England, the virtues of which had been extolled in pastoral poetry since the 16th Century.

“I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” is typically Romantic in that it foregrounds the thoughts and feelings of one individual—the speaker—who refers to himself in the first person. This is evident from the title of the poem itself, which also happens to be the first line of the poem—the speaker tells the reader the poem is essentially about his own experiences.

He goes on to provide a sketch or impression rather than a description of the landscape; what the scene looks like is not as important as how he feels about it.

The language of the poem is richly metaphorical. Objects are compared to other objects and to human beings. The poem takes place in a generic countryside, with no place names or referents provided; this is not a significant omission, however, as the speaker is at pains to show how the landscape transforms and alters his consciousness.

Like many Romantic poems, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” promotes the countryside as ideal, a place that renews and energizes. Being immersed in nature brings one into a state of harmony. The Age of Enlightenment had no such cozy relationship with nature, believing it should be harnessed for the improvement of civilization. “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” suggests this idea would have horrified Wordsworth.

The poem shows nature as sentient, which is typically Romantic—the fact that we can enter into a wordless dialogue with nature makes us sympathetic to its cause, even as it is viewed as a site of the sublime, capable of elevating our consciousness.