William Wordsworth's "I wandered lonely as a cloud"

In the previous episode of Influential Lyrics, we considered a famous sonnet in which Wordsworth laments what he sees as a growing alienation from the natural world as people are increasingly caught up in a materialist culture of "getting and spending." That poem, you may recall, concludes with the speaker longing for a more profound and reciprocal relationship with nature, but it doesn't really offer any reason why such a relationship would be so essential to the flourishing of humankind.  The present poem—arguably Wordsworth's most famous—offers an answer to that question.  In "I wandered lonely as a cloud" (a.k.a. the Daffodil poem), Wordsworth crafts his own experience of a scene of natural beauty into a psychological—perhaps even spiritual—model that demonstrates the sustaining power of an appreciation of natural beauty.  At 24 lines, the poem is slightly longer than most of the Influential Lyrics offerings, but its short tetrameter lines, its decisive rhyme words, and its simple narrative make it a most memorable poem. The present podcast offers a reading of the poem, an explication, and some commentary explaining why this "simple" poem is so significant within its broader historical contexts.