Sunday, December 4, 2011

I was wondering if the following would indicate a positive or a negative connotation.I mean I know what these connotations are but I was wondering...

The poem itself is a very positive expression of memory in
that memory is better than actual experience. It is like a bank in which you may forever
make a withdrawal. The force of simile is positive: the poem serves as an introduction
to some simple (and other, not-so-simple) modes of poetic figuration (or “troping”). It
begins with a simile (I was like a cloud) and moves into other kinds of comparisons. He
(Wordsworth) is solitary, but he is also part of a group. In another simile, he makes
the daffodils themselves solitary, or removed. The role of personification: Wordsworth
chooses to humanize (or personify) his daffodils, and we may wonder why. There is a
continual exchange between him and his flowers, as he surveys his position by comparison
with theirs. Grammar and word choice: it is important to examine a poet’s diction and to
ask why he chooses certain words instead of other, almost equivalent ones. What do we
make of “host,” “golden,” “wealth,” “show,” and the lines “A poet could not but be
gay/In such a jocund company”? These are all extremely positive values. Importance of
repetition and variation: One thing we notice is that many of the poem’s opening details
are repeated, though with variation, in subsequent stanzas, and we must determine the
force of such repetition. Above all, we notice two special twists in stanza 4: a
repetition of all of the previous details and a shift in tense from the past to the
generalized present.1. Wordsworth also includes—and in some cases repeats—references to
the four classical elements: air, earth, fire, water. The words “dance” or “dancing”
appear in all four stanzas. Overall unity: the poem not only recounts, but also
dramatizes, the workings of the human mind (one of Wordsworth’s great themes) and makes
an important statement about the independent, unwilled, and uncontrollable faculty of
memory. It does so, at its climax, with a telling and delightful use of alliteration and
a particular emphasis on a preposition (a part of speech that Wordsworth used to great
advantage), in this case “with,” that links him to the flowers. "Stars that shine" and
"twinkle" reflect a positive glowing force.

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