Vivid Childhood Experiences
The Irish poet Seamus Heaney wrote in his essay on William Wordsworth that Wordsworth as a child “imagined he heard the moorlands breathing down his neck” and “he rowed in panic when he thought a cliff was pursuing him across moonlit water.”

Wordsworth And His Sister Go Out For A Walk
Perhaps this intensity of imagination similarly stoked his creative juices when he and his sister came across a long stretch of beautiful daffodils in bloom when they went out for a walk one day in April 1802.

Creating ‘I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud’
Why is this probably so? Because apparently it was that memory which led to his writing in 1804 his poem entitled I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud.

One Lone Daffodil
Here is one ‘relative’ of those daffodils photographed for a Quillcards Flower Ecard 208 years later this spring by David here in the north of England:

I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud
A masterpiece on the glory of daffodils, Wordsworth’s poem was first published in 1807 three years after he wrote it:

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.

‘The Spontaneous Overflow Of Emotions’
Much has been written about Wordsworth and his art, of course.

In this classic poem, Wordsworth set his hat on the common daffodil that grows in abundance in England to convey his idea that poetry is “the spontaneous overflow of emotions” and that the subjective experience and the emotions that we feel in such circumstances are crucially important.

Hail To Those Hosts of Golden Daffodils
His poem is set firmly in the English consciousness, which is why every spring when the daffodils make their splash I and many other people think of his “host of golden daffodils” as we admire their luminous beauty set in peaceful country settings.

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We went to a farm this past weekend where one of the number of buildings dotted around the area is a piggery. It was there that we saw these adorable piglets suckling.

The second photograph here is actually a close-up crop of the first photograph. This way you can clearly see what caught our attention, namely that the nearest piglet is still attached to its umbilical cord indicating that the little critter must have been born only shortly before we saw this.

As you can see, yellow material from the afterbirth is still covering its body.

The sight of the piglet hustling and bustling its way in among its siblings to suckle from its mother seemed like a small miracle.

We noticed another pig in a nearby stall in the piggery. As you can observe here, it looked so contented that we simply had to take its photograph.

Pig Facts
As we read in the piggery, a female who has had no pigs before is called a gilt. This is differentiated from the term sow, which indicates a female who has had piglets.

The gestation period for all pigs is three months, three weeks, and three days – which is quite a nifty number to remember, as I hope you will agree.

The weather has been changeable – first sunny, then rain, then some sun again and then more rain – all in one day. Then in the late afternoon the sun came out again and we went for a walk in Middleton Wood, which is near Ilkley in North Yorkshire.

The woods were carpeted with bluebells, which looked especially attractive with the sun slanting through the trees in the late afternoon.

For a close-up photograph of an English bluebell showing how the flowers all grow on one side of the stem, see our bluebell article here. In contrast, the flowers of the Spanish bluebell grow all around the stem, so the plant grows upright.

We will be adding these photographs to our ecard collection within the next week.

We will also be adding photographs from our India trip to our ecard collection, so look out for those also.