William Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” Daffodil Festival covers
Many of us learned, in school, one of my favorite poems: I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud by William Wordsworth, a short poem first published in 1807, altered several times, and published in its final version in 1817. Wordsworth relates a memory of what he thought of, at the time, as a fleeting moment of joy: seeing a field of countless daffodils fluttering in the breeze. In the poem, he reflects that, years later, when in a detached and pensive mood, the vision would reappear to him and bring him pleasure once again.
In March of 2016, the Daffodil Festival Committee of Camden, Arkansas arranged a pictorial postmark featuring the head of a daffodil and the name of the festival in script letters. For these covers, I digitally cropped an image of Vincent van Gogh's post-impressionistic painting A Field of Yellow Flowers, which is so evocative of movement that I can imagine them dancing exactly like Wordsworth's daffodils. I added the closing couplet of the poem, and used as postage the 29¢ daffodil stamp from the Garden Flowers series (Scott #2761) and the 37¢ daffodil stamp from the Spring Flowers set (Scott #3901).
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