Daffodils by William Wordsworth and

¶ … Daffodils" by William Wordsworth and "Miracle on St. David's Day" by Gillian Clarke is evident through subject matter, and also direct reference.

Clarke's poem details a reading at an insane asylum during which a mute patient interrupts the reader to recite Wordsworth's "The Daffodils." Additionally, Clarke's poem opens on "[a]n afternoon yellow and open-mouthed/with daffodils" and concludes with the contrasting image of "daffodils aflame" during "the flowers' silence." While these aspects obviously draw a parallel between the two texts, a closer look at how each poem operates will further the comparison. Wordsworth wrote during the Romantic period, a period that held impressions and feelings over rationality and/or logical interpretation.

In "The Daffodils" the speaker of the poem first characterizes him/herself as "lonely as a cloud/That floats on high o'er vales and hills." This image, while serving aesthetic purposes, also suggests a rootless being, free from logic and exacting thought. It combines nature and the subject, two very important aspects of Romantic material. A cloud covers the sun. Daffodils appear more "aflame" under the sun. This idea of wandering while yet still covering, will come into play later on again when we return to Clarke's poem.

1 Wordsworth's speaker finds pleasure and amazement in the image of the daffodils. He "gazed -- and gazed -- but little thought/What wealth the show to me had brought." The speaker can't shake the image and yet there is "little thought." The line break here serves an interesting purpose. It creates a line that suggests the speaker is staring, but thinking very little. This confirms the more ecstatic nature of Romantic poetry.

Then, using enjambment, the line break disrupts the reader's impression by going on to state that what is little thought, is the "wealth the show…had brought." The staring and amazement are not signs of dumbness; they are reactions to the beauty of the image, an image that later accrues more and more as it relates to the imaginer, namely, the subject. The importance of the information discussed above is that it details the importance of subjective aesthetic experience over rational interpretation.

To Wordsworth, it is more important to feel the experience than to logically interpret it. Romantic poetry combated the Enlightenment with pure sensation and subjectivity. Logic and rationalism are structures that many thinkers consider to be above each subject, to be universal. Wordsworth's poem, and Clarke's as well, situates a subject as the focus of the poem. Clarke's poem represents the same ideas of subjectivity and Romanticism. The first word in the title of Clarke's poem firmly aligns her work with Wordsworth's. Miracle. A miracle is something beyond explanation.

To be beyond explanation is to be beyond reason. Further signs of a more subjective appeal in Clarke's poem can be seen with her word choice. One of the people to whom she reads, is "not listening, not seeing, not feeling." She describes others as "absent," "dumb" and "frozen." By the end, a mute man recites, "The Daffodils" perfectly, and after his performance, "the daffodils outside are still as wax." Here we remember Wordsworth's speaker, gazing and silent.

The overwhelming nature of the experience has rendered him speechless and yet he is more enlightened by feeling than by any reason. The mute man "rocks / gently to the rhythms of the poems" just before he recites, "The Daffodils." Much like Wordsworth's speaker, the mute man is overcome and captured by something that is above reason and logic.

He enjoys the feeling of the poetry and, through the recitation of, "The Daffodils" he "has remembered there was a music / of speech and that once he had something to say." As a subject,.