Daffodils and inheritance of English

Across generations, India has quietly constructed its own Western canon, shaped by British inheritance. English-medium education in India orbits a unique set of texts. Shakespeare, quite unsurprisingly, looms large, while Roald Dahl makes his predictable appearances. Yet among these rotating fixtures, one poem has received an almost ritual permanence.

“I wandered lonely as a cloud.”

For millions of Indian students, Wordsworth’s Daffodils is less a poem than a rite of passage. It is memorised, paraphrased, diagrammed, and recited so often that its opening line has become an informal English-proficiency test. In The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri captures this instinct precisely, when Ashima Ganguli is asked to recite Wordsworth as evidence of her education. Daffodils is a credential.

But why this poem? Why does a meditation on solitude in the Lake District endure so stubbornly in the collective memory of English education in India? At first glance, the choice seems to be colonial inertia. Wordsworth is British. When India inherited British institutions, syllabi carried over. Yet that explanation feels incomplete. Other Romantic poems have faded. Entire authors have been swapped out. Daffodils alone persists. And that resonance is deeply ironic.

Wordsworth’s poem is fundamentally about the longing of a man living amid early industrial modernity for a simpler, more “natural” past. It is a poem born out of anxiety in the first world: a fear that progress corrodes the soul, that economic expansion demands aesthetic and spiritual sacrifice. This is the familiar posture of Romanticism — nostalgic, inward-looking, and deeply privileged. For an Indian reader, especially one educated amid visible scarcity and uneven development, this longing can seem baffling. What does it mean for a colonised subject, or the descendant of one, to study a poem in which the central crisis is not hunger or injustice but an excess of “civilisation”? Wordsworth mourns the loss of nature at precisely the moment Britain is extracting it elsewhere. And yet, it is precisely this contradiction that gives Daffodils its strange power in the Indian classroom.

Read from the subcontinent, the poem unintentionally exposes the fragility of the imperial centre. The coloniser, Britain, often imagined as confident, dominant, and self-assured, suddenly seems vulnerable. Despite its economic growth and industrial prowess, it has lost something essential. The daffodils are not just flowers; they are evidence of a cost. Progress comes with grief. For the colonised, this was a subtle reversal. The empire, which was so often portrayed as morally and materially superior, is revealed to be spiritually anxious. Its poets long for escape. But Daffodils does more than reveal imperial anxiety. It produces something more insidious: desire.

Réné Girard described “mimetic desire” as wanting something not for its intrinsic value, but because someone we admire, or fear, values it. In this sense, Wordsworth’s daffodils become aspirational objects. If the coloniser finds meaning in untouched landscapes, then those landscapes must matter. If beauty lies in solitude and stillness, then those too must be signs of sophistication. The ability to quote Wordsworth fluently, even after decades of Independence, still signals cultivation in Indian social spaces.

Indian students are not just taught the poem but are taught to value what the poem values. This desire does not end with Independence. It mutates. The coloniser leaves but the colonial mentality lingers. Fluency in English literature becomes social capital. Familiarity with British aesthetics signals class. The poem remains because it reflects inherited taste. What makes Daffodils especially powerful is how quietly it works. There is nothing overtly imperial about it. No Union Jack, no governors, no conquest. It is soft power at its most effective, naturalizing a world view under the guise of beauty. The poem asks students to internalise English nostalgia.

Nevertheless, there is room here for reinterpretation rather than rejection. To teach Daffodils today without examining why it persists is to miss its most instructive lesson. The poem can be read as a historical artifact that reveals how empires imagine themselves at moments of doubt. It can be taught alongside questions rather than answers: What does Wordsworth long for, and why? Who gets to romanticise nature? Whose landscapes were sacrificed so others could wander “as lonely as a cloud”? India does not need to discard Daffodils. But it does need to stop treating it as neutral.

The poem’s real pedagogical value does not lie in its imagery but in what it reveals about power, taste, and inheritance. When Indian students recite Wordsworth today, they are reenacting a history: one that deserves to be named, examined, and finally, reimagined. Perhaps it is time we stopped asking students to memorise Daffodils, and started asking why we still need to.

ss7049@columbia.edu