A Little Light Music

“Oh to be in England……” Browning

I was so excited about today that I went back to bed after breakfast without a book.

While the Italian’s are singing beautiful opera from there balconies and the Spanish are playing classical music and being applauded, the Brits are singing drinking songs in the dark while being sworn at by irate neighbours.

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 waves 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.

– William Wordsworth (1815)

I together with thousands of other school children learnt this at my teachers knee way back in the 1950’s. I still cannot remember it!!! But i do remember the bit about the daffodils dancing, as a result daffodils are my favourite flower.


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