Texas Romantic

William Wordsworth wrote his famous “I Wondered Lonely as a Cloud” in 1804 after he and his sister Dorothy took a long stroll in the English Lake District of Cumbria where they lived, and where I plan soon to revisit. In anticipation of our rapidly approaching return to England, I present Wordsworth’s famous poem, as well as my own Texas rendition, a result of my inability to resist setting his poem (in a sense) amid my own pastoral setting.

I

I WANDERED LONELY AS A CLOUD

          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 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.

I FROLICKED, HAPPY AS A LAMB

     by Brenda Ethridge Ferguson
     (with sincere apologies to William Wordsworth)

I frolicked, happy as a lamb
That romps at play in grasses high
When, with a start, I saw them--Bam!
A population coming nigh
In tops of trees, throughout the grass,
Sweeping down the hills en mass.

Ceaseless as the cloudless skies
That give us ever rainless days,
They marched brigade-like on the rise
Across the fields, within our gaze.
Ten million spied I on the move,
Swinging their hips in hipster groove.

The grasses waved these hoppers on,
With destruction boogie bound.
A writer, melancholy prone,
In such company gloom I found.
I watched and watched those monstrous foes,
Regretting the lack of murder crows.

Now when stretched out upon a hill
All hot, and tired, and caring less,
I see again the barren fields,
Which is a plague, a Godly test.
Yes, I am thankful and highly blessed
But boogieing not, as you have guessed.

Happy Independence Day!