#2 (The Daffodils)

The Daffodils by William Wordsworth

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the Milky Way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced, but they
Out-did the sparkling leaves in glee:
A Poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

(http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15925)

I decided to share this poem because it was one of the first poems that I ever studied back in middle school when I was first introduced to poetry. I think about this poem every spring, and think that it is a beautiful representation of the beauty that is a daffodil.

#1 (On revision...)

I've been thinking about revision a lot this week as I prepared my final workshop materials in preparation for my final project. The main revision that I would like to focus on is for "The ones who love you." I got a lot of comments on my revised draft that people loved the changes that I made, so that was great to see. Obviously, the most noticeable change was in the overall formatting. I kept the anaphora, but decided that establishing one instance and then either supporting or undermining that instance would be a more exciting engagement with the reader than the original one-liners. The hardest part for me came when establishing the rhythm and rhyme of the piece. I had some inherent in the first draft, and then was able to add some to the beginning of the second to make it a somewhat standardized pattern. However, I ran into issues when I liked the phrasing of some of the retorts later in the piece and couldn't rephrase them without sounding forced. After struggling with this for awhile, I decided to surrender the second draft as it was, with a rearranged form and an incomplete sound. In order for this poem to feel complete to me, I will need to either add the sounds where they are required or take all of the sounds out. This is all to say that I have definitely learned that the revision process is not something easily done. It is more akin to lions fighting over a scrap of meat, except both of the lions embody two opposing views of the writer, and the meat could be as small as a comma or as large as an entire poem. Either way, revision is brutal.