Artist’s Statement
I know that I’ve mentioned it before, but I’m a fan of solitude. When I was looking for a poem to adapt to an interactive format, I knew that I wanted it to be something to do with being alone. “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” just felt right to me. I can think of two ways to interpret the poem: First, we can take it literally, that the speaker stumbled upon a sea of daffodils and revisits that memory often. The other way that I see the poem is someone surrounded by people who he doesn’t know, but the whole of humanity makes him hopeful when he’s down.
To illustrate either of these feelings, I wanted a strong visual aspect for the Twine poem. I found a handful of images that I felt went along with the literal meaning of the poem, and then placed each image with the stanza that I felt it matched best with. After some technical efforts to make the pictures automatically resize, center, and then round the corners, I decided that the images weren’t enough to get my feelings across.
Sometimes, we have bad days, or even just days where we don’t accomplish much. When I read the line, “when on my couch I lie In vacant or in pensive mood,” I felt something of an affinity with that description. I used to dwell in that state of mind often, and it can be difficult to climb out of. With that in mind, I had the background change to black (after dropping to grey in the previous passage), and then added some blank passages to prolong that darkness. While I’m a strong proponent of solitude, it can be lonely to be lonely sometimes.
Sometimes, something will just suddenly get you out of a funk. It can be anything from a friend, to a job, or in this case, a memory of daffodils. The passage when the daffodils “flash upon that inward eye” of the speaker brings us to a white background and marks the only time in the experience where the picture and the text are on the same page. Getting over a period of depression or other mental ill is blissful, and I wanted that passage to reflect that.
We all have our ups and downs, and that’s both okay and something to acknowledge. It’s even something that we can celebrate; happiness and satisfaction are much more meaningful if you’re familiar with the opposite. I think this poem is a great example of that.
