Tubular Vision: Great Moments in Literature, No. 47.

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Great Moments in Literature No. 47: Wordsworth returns home after a hard days wandering. His sister, Dorothy greets him at the door.

“Where have you been? Dinner is ruined,” she says angrily.

“Sorry,” Wordsworth replies. “I’ve been wandering.”

“You might have phoned to tell me you’d be late.”

“I could not. The telephone has not yet been invented.”

“Well I’m sure you could have emailed or something.”

“I don’t know your email address.”

“It’s dorothy dot wordsworth at cockermouth dot co dot cumberland.”

Wordsworth takes out a pencil to write it down, then pauses.

“That first dot,” he asks: “is it just a dot, not dissimilar to a full stop, or it is open inverted commas, D-O-T, close inverted commas, indicating that it is a sobriquet or nickname, being an abbreviated form of ‘Dorothy’?”

“Nobody calls me Dot and gets away with it,” says Dorothy, “but to get back to your wandering. Why were you wandering?”

“I was lonely,” replies the poet.

“How lonely?”

“As lonely as a cloud.”

Dorothy looks highly dubious. “Clouds aren’t lonely. They’re quite gregarious, usually.”

“Not the sort of cloud to which I am referring.”

“Well what sort of cloud was that? Nimbus, cirrus, cumulonimbus or what?”

“How should I know? I’m not a meteorologist. It was the sort of cloud that floats on high.”

“Where on high?”

“On high. You know. O’er hills.”

“Just o’er the hills?”

“No. O’er the vales too. O’er vales and hills, in fact.”

“Well it could hardly float over the hills without floating over the vales between them as well. Not unless it’s displaying some sort of quantum effect, leaping from hillock to hillock. Anyway, that’s a pretty poor reason for being late.”

“It wasn’t the clouds that made me late. It was the daffodils.”

“Daffodils? What do you mean, daffodils? You never mentioned any daffodils.”

“Well I saw them all at once.”

“How many daffodils?”

“Lots.”

“Be more precise.”

Wordsworth emits a hopeless sigh. “Oh, I don’t know. A crowd of them, I suppose. Or maybe a host. Ten thousand at a guess.” Then he adds, rather feebly, “They were golden.”

“Now I know you’re lying. You can’t see ten thousand daffodils all at once. First you see a few, then you see the rest. Anyway, I know what colour daffodils are,” fumes Dorothy. “Well burnt dinner is not golden. It is black. I shall never cook for you again.” She storms out and the rest is history.

- William Hartson

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