10 of the Best William Wordsworth Poems Everyone Should Read

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

W. H. Auden said of Edward Lear that ‘he became a land’. William Wordsworth (1770-1850) became ‘Romanticism’, in many ways: he came to embody the starting-point of English Romanticism through his early collaboration with Samuel Taylor Coleridge on Lyrical Ballads (1798) and his famous preface, published two years later in the second edition, calling for poetry which uses direct, natural human speech rather than overly ornate language and diction.

In 1843 he became the UK Poet Laureate, and wrote barely a word more. But in his lifetime he wrote a great amount of poetry, in various forms and modes. Below are ten of Wordsworth’s very best poems, with a little bit about them.

Learn more about Wordsworth’s writing with our pick of the most famous quotations from his work.

1. ‘Composed upon Westminster Bridge’.

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 …

This sonnet, written in 1802, praises the beauty of London in the early morning light, as the poet stands on Westminster Bridge admiring the surrounding buildings.London, even by the early nineteenth century, was a world of industrialisation, smog (that is, smoky fog, created by industrial activity), as well as the centre of government and empire, two things that came under heavy scrutiny by the early Romantic poets.

Yet the London of early morning is serene and still, and it is this quiet scene that Wordsworth praises here.

2. ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’.

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 …

One of Wordsworth’s most famous poems, ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’ (as it should properly be known; it’s commonly known as ‘Daffodils’) is about the poet’s kinship with nature, and how the memory of the daffodils dancing cheers him whenever he recalls them.

What’s less well-known is that Wordsworth’s sister Dorothy – and, indeed, his wife – had a hand in the composition of the poem, as we explore here.

3. From The Prelude. Wordsworth’s great long autobiographical poem in blank verse (though it’s not without its flaws), The Prelude has many great passages, and this is one of the best, from the first book of the poem, describing the poet’s schooldays:

Wisdom and Spirit of the universe!
Thou Soul that art the eternity of thought!
That giv’st to forms and images a breath
And everlasting motion! …

If this excerpt whets your appetite for the whole poem, you can read that here.

4. ‘London, 1802’.

Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee: she is a fen
Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,
Have forfeited their ancient English dower
Of inward happiness …

In this sonnet, Wordsworth addresses the poet John Milton (1608-74), expressing the wish that Milton were still alive, because his country, England, needs him now. England has become stagnant and corrupt in all quarters. Everyone has become selfish. Only Milton, it seems, can restore England to its former greatness, by restoring the virtues that it has lost.

By 1802, Wordsworth was a literary celebrity, thanks to the publication of Lyrical Ballads, which he co-authored with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in 1798. Wordsworth had been a staunch supporter of the French Revolution in 1789, later declaring, ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive!’

But by 1802, the Revolutionary regime had given way to Napoleon’s imperial tyranny, and the Napoleonic Wars. How can England defend itself against a foreign power while there is such corruption and selfishness among its people?

Milton thus stands as a beacon of enlightenment and integrity, a man who has the best interests of England at heart and has the skill and influence to make a real political difference.

5. ‘Tintern Abbey’.

But oft, in lonely rooms, and ‘mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart …

This poem was not actually composed at Tintern Abbey, but, as the poem’s full title (‘Lines Written (or Composed) a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798’) reveals, was written nearby, overlooking the ruins of the medieval priory in the Wye Valley in South Wales.

Well, actually, according to Wordsworth, he didn’t ‘write’ a word of the poem until he got to Bristol, where he wrote down the whole poem, having composed it in his head shortly after leaving the Wye.

Wordsworth tells us that although it’s been five years since he last clapped eyes on this scene, the memories of the beautiful landscape have often returned to him when he has been in busy ‘towns and cities’ or sitting ‘in lonely rooms’. We have analysed this poem here.

The poem is one of the great hymns to tranquillity, quiet contemplation, and self-examination in all of English literature.

6. ‘My heart leaps up when I behold’.

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

This simple nine-line poem describes how the poet is filled with joy when he sees a rainbow, and that he has always felt this way, since ‘my life began’; he hopes he will always keep that sense of enchantment with the natural world.

The poem contains Wordsworth’s famous declaration, ‘The Child is father of the Man’, highlighting how important childhood experience was to the Romantics in helping to shape the human beings they became in adult life.

7. ‘A slumber did my spirit seal’.

No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees …

Often included as one of Wordsworth’s ‘Lucy poems’, this short lyric is about feeling at peace, as though asleep and existing in a deep calm. This is because of an unidentified ‘she’ who did not seem to be marked by the passing of time or the ravages of nature as other mortals are.

But wait: in the second stanza, we are suddenly informed of the woman’s (girl’s?) death: she lies still and powerless, unable to see or hear, and has become a part of the day-to-day world of nature.

8. ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’.

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream …

Philip Larkin once recalled hearing this poem recited on BBC radio, and having to pull over to the side of the road, as his eyes had filled with tears. It remains a powerful poetic meditation on death, the loss of childhood innocence, and the way we tend to get further away from ourselves – our true roots and our beliefs – as we grow older.

Wordsworth later wrote of the poem: ‘Nothing was more difficult for me in childhood than to admit the notion of death as a state applicable to my own being.’

In the poem, Wordsworth confides that he now loves the brooks more now he is older, and that dawn, and a new day, still fill him with appreciation of the world and all it can offer. The clouds gathering round the setting sun, foreshadowing the poet’s own decline and eventual death, remind him also that another day has ended and this has brought new glories.

Thanks to the nature of the human heart, which allows us to connect emotionally with the world around us, even the ‘meanest flower’ inspires thoughts in the poet which ‘lie too deep for tears’. We have analysed this poem here.

9. ‘The Solitary Reaper’.

Behold her, single in the field,
Yon solitary Highland Lass!
Reaping and singing by herself;
Stop here, or gently pass! …

As well as writing odes and short lyrics, Wordsworth could also turn his hand to the ballad, as this poem demonstrates. Inspired by a visit to the Scottish village of Stathrye which the poet undertook with his sister, it has one of Wordsworth’s favourite subjects – the life of simple rustic folk.

It is a quintessentially Romantic poem in many respects: its ballad form, its focus on solitariness among nature (the girl is reaping in the fields of the wild highlands), and its emphasis on human emotion (‘plaintive numbers’; ‘natural sorrow, loss, or pain’).

10. ‘Surprised by joy – impatient as the Wind’.

Surprised by joy—impatient as the Wind
I turned to share the transport—Oh! with whom
But Thee, long buried in the silent Tomb,
That spot which no vicissitude can find?

Written about the death of the poet’s three-year-old daughter Catherine, this sonnet is about all death, too – about turning to share a feeling or a moment with somebody who is no longer there. One of Wordsworth’s most viscerally moving poems, and for that reason, one of his best.

However, the closing sestet (six-line unit) tends to divide readers. Is it an eloquent and sincere outpouring of grief, or is it a set of platitudinous statements about grief?

This is probably where objective analysis gives way to subjective, personal preference. But ‘Surprised by joy’ remains one of Wordsworth’s most accessible and popular short poems, and is one of his finest depictions of personal grief.

For more Romantic poetry, see our pick of John Clare’s poems, Keats’s best poems, Shelley’s greatest poems, and these classic poems by Coleridge.