I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

On this grey and steamy summer morning, with dark rain-filled clouds obscuring the horizon, months after the last of our daffodils died leaving thin and shrivelled stems, the bulbs waiting to be dug up and stored away until we put them back into the earth next autumn, I wonder whether Wordsworth thought himself to be, in the words of  Percy Bysshe Shelley, his fellow Romantic poet, `one of the unacknowledged legislators of the world.’

As we walk along the boardwalk, Rocky slow-walking beside me because we are at the beginning of our walk and he is creaky, I find myself crying tears coming from somewhere I cannot physically locate but it is the place where poets leave their dreams of eternity.

I am not any sort of expert on the Romantic Poets, and it is more than likely that Louise Adler, who on the 7.30 report last week, quoted Shelley on poets as legislators, when she was defending the three STC actors who wore Palestinian scarves at the curtain call on opening night of Chekhov’s The Seagull, is far more knowledgeable than me when it comes to poetry, including the Romantic poets. 

But as I walked on the beach this morning and for not the first time in my life, I was in tears over dancing daffodils and aloneness and the meaning and feeling of solitude, the bliss and joy of it. And I thought—again for this has been true for half a century or longer—that I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, listening to myself reciting it, is for me to be outside of time, not old and not young, in full bloom and at the same time, a stem of a withered daffodil, ageless, lost in the echoes of eternity.

Years ago, when they were little, my children would take down the book of selected Romantic poets and ask me to read about the daffodils. When the tears came, they were delighted. One birthday, they presented me with the poem glued on to a sheet of paper that was bordered with red hearts.

I am not any sort of authority on the Romantic poets, and it may well be that I simply am not equipped to understand what Louise Adler was actually arguing when she offered up Shelley and his notion of poets as the unacknowledged legislators of the world as a defence of the STC actors in their Palestinian scarves.

Wordsworth, I wonder, did he consider himself a legislator of the world when he wrote I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud? Did Shelley for that matter when he wrote To a Skylark? I don’t think so but perhaps people more knowledgeable than me about the Romantic Poets may have a more informed view.

But me, I am not even sure what Shelley meant by the poet as legislator of the world except that I think he did not mean it literally and perhaps he meant it to resonate in the way that poems resonate even when their literal meaning is eternally elusive. I mean poets are not legislators are they, though there have been legislators who were poets.

Wordsworth and Shelley and yes, Louise Adler too were with me this morning because tomorrow, apparently, hundreds of actors and other theatre people and playwrights I assume, and other performers―they have signed a petition, more than a thousand of them― are going to come to work wearing Palestinian scarves and pins and perhaps they will hold up signs sporting Free Palestine slogans as well.

Inspired no doubt by the words of Percy Bysshe Shelley. The truth is I don’t much care about these protests except for the non-protestors in these work places who undoubtedly will be made to feel that they are on the side of genocide. I think it also reasonable for theatre companies and other performance spaces to let people know that such protests might take place so that people who might find such protests upsetting can stay at home.

This morning I also read an article by the political scientist, Dennis Altman, a self-described left-wing Jew who wants to tell the Jewish community that it is ignoring the suffering of the people of Gaza and that that is a morally indefensible position to take. Now Altman as far as I know, has never said anything substantial about the October 7 attacks by Hamas and how these attacks affected Israelis and Jews around the world. He has not, as far as I know, written about or explained why, for instance, a day or two after October 7, there were demonstrations accusing Israel of committing genocide. Altman basically thinks that Jews who believe that antisemitism on the left—especially anti-Jewish hostility from the anti-Israel left― is on the rise are either deluded or cynically using the antisemitism accusation to silence the critics of Israel’s horrific war in Gaza.

And not just Jews. He excoriates the four journalists who last Saturday in The Australian, wrote pieces about rising antisemitism in Australia and about what may be the consequences, and describes them as conservative peddlers of non-existent antisemitism for cynical political ends.

I do not think I misrepresent him here and nor do I think it is misrepresenting him to say that he has no great feelings of connection or sympathy for the Jews—and I know many of them—who were—and remain—heartbroken by what happened on October 7. Ad hominem attacks in the main without any analysis of what the writers are arguing.

What then is Altman doing, who is he speaking to, when he writes that the Jewish community `needs to demonstrate it understands the pain of the Palestinians…?’ To the Jews whose anxieties and fears and actual experience of antisemitism he dismisses as, at best, misguided? He expects them to listen to him?

He does not, I suspect. I do not think he is writing to them, the Jews who feel that antisemitism is on the rise and making their lives miserable, surely not, for he must know that there is no reason for them to listen to him. The piece was published on Plus61J, and I would suspect that some of its readers—but far from a majority―would have some sympathy for Altman’s view that antisemitism of the left is a non-issue. Perhaps they might even believe that it is a creation of The Australian?

But I know he is not talking to me as I walk along the boardwalk, my tears drying, my heart filling with something approaching joy on this dull summer morning. Joy at the thought of the dancing daffodils.

And then something like pain when I think of Altman more or less accusing people like me of a profound heartlessness, of an unwillingness to look at what is happening in Gaza and to feel a bottomless sorrow for the suffering of its people.