You do not have to “go through” the poem inch by inch, line by line. “In the first line the author says. . . . In the second line the author adds. . . . In line three, the poet goes on to observe . . . ,” etc. Your reader would die of boredom. There is nothing wrong with starting a paper — as a means of posing some of your initial questions, perhaps — by looking at the ending.
Wordsworth ends his poem with the speaker enjoying “the bliss of solitude” — the very same speaker who complained, at the beginning, that he was “wandering,” with no company, “as lonely as a cloud,” alienated from both man and nature. How did this melancholy person translate himself into a state of bliss?
Or your paper can begin in the middle of the poem:
“I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” is a poem divided between a single day in the past and many days in the present — the past day when the speaker “saw a crowd / A host, of golden daffodils” and the present days when the daffodils “flash upon [his] inward eye.” The hinge between these two parts of the poem comes at the end of the third stanza:
I gazed — and gazed — but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
What is that “wealth” and how did the common spectacle of “golden” daffodils become transmuted into a different sort of gold, the “wealth” of involuntary memory?
Or your paper can begin with a feature of the poem:
We might expect that a poem beginning “I wandered” would keep to this format throughout, with the speaker as the subject of all the verbs: “I saw,” “I gazed,” “I thought,” and so on. But we notice that Wordsworth’s poem on the daffodils offers a peculiar grammatical alternation between the poet as agent and the flowers as agent: it is almost as if they are engaging in a dialogue. The poet notices; then the flowers do something; then the poet notices; then the flowers do something else; then the poet notices yet again. Wordsworth is teaching us, so to speak, how to look so that the scenes we see can have lasting meaning for us. We need to be willing to receive the impress of the phenomena around us; but we also need to see, to glance, to gaze — and GAZE, with increasing intensity. And this is not necessarily a solemn process: in every stanza of the poem, some thing or person “dances” in this dialogue of the eye with nature.
In short, your paper can begin anywhere, as long as it is well organized and somehow includes all the main features of the poem.
One of the chief features of a well-organized paper is the internal arrangement of its paragraphs. A well-ordered paragraph has a point of view, and a subject that does not change markedly as the paragraph evolves. Here is an example of a badly organized paragraph, in which every sentence jumps to a different grammatical subject:
Wordsworth is writing about seeing a bed of daffodils. The speaker has been wandering in a lonely mood, but then he glimpses the flowers. The 6-line stanza is written with a rhyming couplet at the end, in which we see the daffodils “fluttering and dancing in the breeze.” Nature is for the poet a source of refreshment and solace. Often the Romantic poets found a recourse in nature that they could not find in urban life. Metaphors from nature are important to the Romantics; this is seen in Wordsworth’s comparison of his loneliness to that of a cloud. The daffodils represent to Wordsworth the happiness and company to be found in nature.
The grammatical subjects of the successive sentences of this paragraph are Wordsworth, the speaker, the stanza, Nature, the Romantic poets, metaphors, and daffodils. A reader feels seasick as the paragraph lurches from focus to focus. The writer should choose one focus: the paragraph should be about Wordsworth, the composer of the poem; or about the speaker who utters the poem; about the scene in the poem (daffodils); about the technique of the poem (the stanzas, sentence-forms, rhymes); about Romantic poets and their relation to nature; or about metaphors in the poem.
A new paragraph is the place to change the focus. After a paragraph on Wordsworth as poet, it might be fine to have a paragraph about the speaker, followed by a paragraph about the metaphors in the poem — providing logical transitions are found to get from one topic to the next. For instance, if you had opened with a brief summary of the plot of the poem, telling about the speaker’s loneliness and his seeing the daffodils first with his outward eye and then with his inward eye, you could bring that paragraph to a close by saying, “Yet behind this speaker, with his interest in the psychology of memory-imprinting, we find Wordsworth the author, who is constructing this speaker, and these stanzas, and these metaphors.” Then you could have a paragraph about the author and how he has arranged the poem scenically, rhythmically, metaphorically, and so on.
Ideally, in a well-organized paper, you ought to be able to delete, from each paragraph, the follow-up sentences supporting the topic sentence, and be left with a “skeleton” consisting of nothing but the topic sentences for each paragraph. That skeleton would make sense by itself, would proceed logically, and would contain all the main points of your paper. Some writers like to do a sentence-outline of this sort after taking notes on the poem and seeing what the notes add up to in general terms. Then all they have to do is to fill in the evidence supporting the topic sentence for each paragraph. This is a sturdy and logical way of ordering a paper. In rereading and revising your paper, you might try typing out what you consider the topic sentence of each paragraph and seeing how well those sentences hang together as a logical sequence. Often you discover that something you have noticed late, and written down late, really belongs somewhere earlier in the paper, or that an earlier sentence properly should be brought down into the conclusion.