Analysis of chosen seminar narrative (The daffodils - from a native's perspective)

Sia Figiel’s poem The daffodils – from a native’s perspective is essentially a response to William Wordsworth’s 1807 poem “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” also more commonly known as “Daffodils”. Figiel has chosen to incorporate aspects of Wordsworth’s original poem such as

“But I too wandered

Lonely as

A cloud”

“That floats on high

O’er vales

And hills”

“On your host of golden daffodils beside the lake beneath

The trees fluttering and dancing”

By blending aspects of this ‘old English’ with colloquial language I believe that Figiel is making a contrast between Wordsworth’s world and her world. It’s a world in which Figiel herself can escape into but in a way she seems slightly dubious about this unfamiliar or foreign world. She cannot relate to aspects of it and I think she refers to this and talks a little bit about it within the text, about not really knowing anything about it but through Wordsworth’s writing being able to experience it.

“The one thing

I didn’t have to

Share

Not knowing what

Was fluttering

What

Was dancing

But

Never mind

Whatever they must have been

They must have

Been magical

Enchanting even

Because they

Too

Put a smile

On my face”

We know that Sia Figiel is a writer and that she can escape into this world of writing. She talks about her education and it being so different from her place, from Samoa but at the same time it gives her this escape even though it has not connection her place and it is outside of her cultural boundaries. It expresses a contradiction, a love for the literature and a love for terrible soaps like days of our lives, but at the same time it’s not indigenous to her or to Samoa. She goes into this world of literature and she highlights that it’s sort of foreign to her but then of course she’s brought back to reality.

“Do

You

Know

What

I

Mean

Mr

Words

Worth?

Do

You

Know

What

I

Mean?”

To me by asking Mr Wordsworth these questions it’s almost as though Figiel is trying to communicate back across that void. Mr Wordsworth you have communicated to me, I have connected to your poem about daffodils but all of this other stuff is going on as well so do you get me? She doesn’t understand what it’s like to have daffodils so we can identify that one way relationship between to the coloniser and the colonised.