Wordsworth rap

THE contemplative poems of William Wordsworth have drawn lovers of literature to England's peaceful Lake District for two centuries. Even without a hip hop beat.

But in an effort to make the region's most famous poet more relevant to a younger audience, local tourism officials have released a rap version of Wordsworth's 200-year-old classic of Romantic verse: I wandered lonely as a cloud.

The reworking manages to "stay true to the original sentiment with some slight variation of the lyrics", Cumbria Tourism insisted.

Accompanying the hip-hop theme on its website is a video featuring "MC Nuts" - a giant dancing red squirrel.

Watch the video here , or read the original poem.

A spokesman for Cumbria Tourism said the song shows how "modern-day rap and its clever use of wordplay is a distant relative of poetic rhyming verse".

Wordsworth wrote the poem about the "bliss of solitude" he felt after observing a field of daffodils on the shores of Lake Ullswater.

The opening paragraph, memorised by schoolchildren around the globe, is now changed to: "I wandered lonely along as if I was a cloud/ That floats on high over vales and hills/ When all at once I looked down and saw a crowd/ And in my path there was a host of golden daffodils so check it."