har-ish

I stumbled upon Wordsworth when I was sixteen, at that wonderfully impressionable age when I was already a romantic at heart. I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud was probably the poem that first made me curious about poetry, about how something as ordinary as a field of flowers could suddenly become an emotion you carry for years.

Coming from a provincial town, meadows and open fields were familiar to me, even if they weren’t necessarily filled with daffodils. And perhaps that is why I have never really had a precise picture of Wordsworth’s flowers in my head. These are the daffodils I imagined at sixteen, the ones I somehow fashioned in my mind while reading the poem. I am not even sure I knew what daffodils looked like then. But in my imagination, they were always this colour, scattered across a field beside the water, glowing in the sun.
So this isn’t quite Wordsworth’s landscape. It is the landscape that Wordsworth left behind in me.