Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
These lines have been quoted from "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" composed by William Wordsworth, the famous romantic poet who initiated a new kind of poetry towards the end of the eighteenth century.
The romantic exuberance of the speaker has been suggested here through the use of a hyperbole.
Two years ago, the speaker of the poem saw a huge number of daffodils while walking about aimlessly. In his description of the daffodils, the first person speaker of the poem says that the colour, number and joviality of the flowers made him emotional. He was moved by the scene. The deep excitement led him to emotional exaggeration.
He burst out in a hyperbole. One cannot count ten thousand at a glance. This is an overflow of his feeling at the show. This kind of "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" is known as a romantic expression. The speaker's imagination that the daffodils, like living beings, were tossing
and dancing is far from reality. This kind of high soaring imagination is another aspect of romanticism. So, these two lines are highly romantic in character. These lines further present the speaker and the daffodils in the same happy mood. These lines, thus, prepare the ground for the
communion between the speaker and nature, symbolised by the daffodils.
