A Sleep and A Forgetting. Gregory Hall
dark-eyed maids’ engaging in ‘Lip-dewing song and ringlet-tossing Dance’. These explicitly sexual verses were excised by Wordsworth from his later published editions. A full reading of the poem needs to take into account both these incidents involving lake-side beauty.
The daffodils which the poet sees when wandering ‘lonely as a cloud’ are a ‘crowd’, a ‘host’, ‘a jocund company’, words usually applied to people in a social gathering. Like the nubile young women attending a ball in a Jane Austen novel, they are dancing. They toss their heads in sprightly dance. The word ‘dance’ and its derivatives appear four times in this short twenty-seven-line poem. They outdo the sparkling waves with their dancing. Their petals are ‘fluttering’ as if they wore ball gowns.
But dancing can signify not only an ordinary social courtship ritual. Peasant dances are frequently connected with celebrations of growth and fertility: weddings, harvests, births, the Spring. Dancing by women in a secluded place is suggestive of arcane ritual – of witchcraft, of invocations to the Goddess of the Wood, to the great Mother Goddess, of Bacchic rites.
The daffodils are not merely yellow, but golden. It is the only colour word in the poem, and colour words generally are very rare in Wordsworth. By drawing attention to the golden colour of the daffodils, the poet invokes the sensual connotations of gold: Shakespeare’s ‘golden lads and girls’; the sun and the heat of growth and generation, the ripeness of corn and harvest; personal adornment and luxury; the lure and glamour of sexuality; Aaron’s Golden Calf; the golden shower by which Zeus impregnated Danaë; the golden apples which the virgin athlete Atlanta could not resist; Cleopatra’s barge, ‘of beaten gold’; Blake’s ‘bow of burning gold’ and ‘arrows of desire’.
The poet is ‘lonely as a cloud’. He is a solitary male observer with a high viewpoint from which he can observe but not be readily or closely observed himself. He is a voyeur. The word ‘gazed’ is repeated, to emphasise the passivity of the observer. Finally, having feasted his eyes, he departs.
The show has brought wealth to him – a further hint at the gold of the daffodils, an inner satisfaction. The nature of this wealth is elucidated in the final stanza. In vacant or in a pensive mood – what a modern might describe as a meditative or trance state – the poet has a vision, or fantasy of the feminine daffodils. He has an inward eye which gives him bliss. In this pleasurable state, he fantasises that he is dancing with them.
By his richly suggestive language, Wordsworth creates the essence of the male voyeuristic experience. If the daffodils are nubile young women, like the bathers covertly observed and depicted later by Renoir and Cezanne, then the poet’s vision of bliss is a masturbatory fantasy which he enjoys on the privacy of his couch. Wordsworth’s poem celebrates a peak experience of intensely sexualised natural beauty.
The innocent, child-like eye with which the poet appears to view the beauties of the natural world has thus its shadow side. Behind this modelling of the child’s vision lies the adult’s predatory sexual desires.
‘Spare me a minute, Catriona, darling?’
It was a rich mellow male voice, a voice that was reputed to send shivers up the spines of any woman who heard it. But in Catriona, it merely provoked irritation, particularly as she had been so absorbed in her work and hated to be interrupted. Looking up, and instinctively and protectively sliding a blank sheet of paper over the closely written pages of the fledgling article, she had been about to retort that no, she couldn’t spare even thirty seconds, when she saw that, without waiting for her reply, the owner of the seductive instrument had already slipped inside her office and closed the door behind him.
She swivelled her chair around to face him. ‘What do you want, Michael?’
He was a tall man, wearing expensive but tasteful, not quite formal, but not entirely casual clothes. These, together with his fashionable haircut and smooth manners set him apart from the majority of the male members of the college, whose dress sense and social skills were on a scale between minimal and non-existent.
Michael Harwood, Professor of Cultural Studies, a Chair sponsored by Channel Six, a newish television company already well-known for the lavish nullity of its cultural output, could afford to affect the garb and patter of the well-paid denizens of television and the higher journalism because it was in this world in which he spent most of his time and energy. It was rumoured in the college that he did not even have a university degree, or that, if he did, it had been awarded by some white-tile institution in the Midlands that had become a university only by administrative fiat, and therefore did not count. Harwood was not in the least fazed by his lack of academic respectability. He regarded his nominal colleagues, by and large, as boring sad-hats, grubbing for meagre worms in the scholastic sand, while he surfed the surging ocean waves of the wider world.
‘A warmer greeting, seeing as how I have a very interesting business proposition to put to you.’
‘I’m already quite busy enough, thank you.’
‘Hear me out. You may change your mind. I’ve been asked to front a high-profile arts review programme on my sponsoring channel. We’re looking for a new face to do the literature side. I think you are that face.’
‘Me? On television? You’re joking.’
‘On the contrary. You’re exactly the right type. Youthful, successful, energetic, brilliant. And also, if I may repeat what I’ve told you on many other occasions, you are an extremely beautiful woman. You could be a star. You’re wasted here.’
‘I like my work. I do not like television. I do not want to be a star, even assuming your view of my potential were correct, which it isn’t.’
‘Please at least consider it. I’ve got some publicity stuff with me, showing the scope of the programme. Have dinner with me, and we can discuss it in more detail. I’ve found this superb restaurant – in Crouch End, of all places. I’ve managed to get a table – which hardly anyone can.’
‘No, thank you. Now I have some urgent assessments to do, so would you please leave me alone?’
‘Oh, for God’s sake, Catriona! I’m offering you fame and probably fortune. Don’t turn it down without even thinking about it. Have dinner with me, at least. I’ll run you back to Muswell Hill afterwards.’ He laid an imploring hand on her forearm.
She instantaneously snatched her arm away, as if his fingers had been white-hot irons. ‘Don’t touch me! And how did you know I lived in Muswell Hill?’
He was taken aback by the sudden fierceness in her tone. ‘Why, you must have mentioned it in the common room on some occasion or other.’
‘No, I didn’t. I never do.’
‘All right, then I may have looked you up in the phone book.’
‘I’m ex-directory.’
‘For God’s sake, Catriona! Why are you behaving as if I’m some kind of threat?’
Her full mouth was set in a tight hard line. ‘Because that’s how you’re beginning to seem. You’ve got hold of my address from somewhere in the college records. I don’t hand it out to all and sundry.’
He shrugged, and grinned lop-sidedly, an expression which he believed, with some justification, was guaranteed to succeed even with those most resistant to his charm. ‘So what if I did? I can’t help being fascinated by you. You’re the kind of woman a man would commit far worse crimes for than sneaking a look at a file. Have dinner with me, please.’
‘The answer’s the same now as it always has been. If your idea is that dangling this television thing in front of me like bait will make me more receptive to your blandishments, then that’s worse than unforgivably insulting, it’s crassly stupid. If you continue to pester me, then I shall make a very public complaint about your behaviour to the provost, who, as you know, has as one of her aims the eradication of sexual harassment from the college. Now would you please leave my office.’
She swivelled her chair back to face her desk.
Harwood