William Wordsworth’s poem “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” describes the speaker seeing daffodils beside a lake.
The poem was inspired partly by an April 1802 walk Wordsworth took with his sister Dorothy near Ullswater in England’s Lake District. Dorothy’s journal recorded a large group of flowers near the water, and Wordsworth later transformed that observation into one of his best-known lyric poems.
The poem was first published in 1807 in Poems, in Two Volumes. Wordsworth revised it several times, including a notable change in 1815 that added the opening phrase “I wandered lonely as a cloud.” The flowers are also described as “a host,” emphasizing their great number and lively movement in the breeze.
Readers sometimes remember the poem simply as “The Daffodils,” a widely used alternative title, although its standard title is “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.” Its final stanza shifts from the outdoor scene to memory, showing how recollection can renew the speaker’s happiness.