Quotes from William Wordsworth, Selected Poems

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;

The Child is father of the Man.

The Child is father of the Man; And I could wish my days to be Bound each to each by natural piety.

The world is too much with us; late and soon, / Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.

The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;

But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home: Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

To me the meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar:

Though nothing can bring back the hour Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower; We will grieve not, rather find Strength in what remains behind;

Earth has not anything to show more fair: Dull would he be of soul who could pass by A sight so touching in its majesty:

Come forth into the light of things, Let Nature be your teacher.

One impulse from a vernal wood May teach you more of man, Of moral evil and of good, Than all the sages can.

Great God! I'd rather be A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;

Dear God! the very houses seem asleep; And all that mighty heart is lying still!

And this prayer I make, Knowing that Nature never did betray The heart that loved her;

With an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things.

She lived unknown, and few could know When Lucy ceased to be; But she is in her grave, and, oh, The difference to me!

that best portion of a good man's life, His little, nameless, unremembered, acts Of kindness and of love.

A sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused,

Will no one tell me what she sings?— Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow For old, unhappy, far-off things, And battles long ago:

A violet by a mossy stone Half hidden from the eye! —Fair as a star, when only one Is shining in the sky.