I feel no difference between your two phrases, but the editor in me is triggered to think "should've wrote 'i wandered like a cloud.'"
I can think of specific writing that really worked for me. Peter Watts for example described the passing of one spaceship "under" a blacked out space station, describing how the only thing the astronauts could see were surfaces lit up by their own ship's thruster fire, behind them, casting long shadows ahead. I liked that.
Just curious. Do you find some combination of words more "beautiful" then other combination of words that says more or less the same thing?
For example "I wandered lonely as a cloud" vs "I wandered alone, like a cloud".