Hail, Poetry, thou heaven-born maid!
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Thou gildest even the pirate's trade.
Hail, flowing fount of sentiment!
All hail, all hail, divine emollient! *
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In the sweetly apolitical online places where I am wandering (lonely as a cloud) to avoid as much as possible of the election coverage, I found celebration of last Friday, April 15, as the anniversary of an 1802 occasion of mighty importance.
I will identify the momentous anniversary in a moment.
First, though, I rejoice that although it has taken me far too long (for I am 76) I have at last grown up and out of fascination with Australian party politics. What a liberating rite of growing up it is! It reminds one of, say, one's rapturous emergence from puberty and the moving on into adulthood.
I know that this growing up has truly happened because while this week's news of Albo's now famous electioneering "gaffe" (he didn't know the national unemployment rate) didn't interest me in the slightest, the same week's discovery of the anniversary of a 19th-century occasion of literary importance quickened my pulse.
In the feverishly frothy way of these things in election times, Albo's little smattering of fleeting ignorance of something became, for the media and for Albo's foes, a giant Gotcha! moment as big as the Ritz.
It was silly, and yet the way in which this little wormlet of election news somehow wriggled into my election-news-resistant bubble helped validate the maturity of my vow to abstain as far as possible from following the froth and bubble and filth of the election campaign.
Yes, Albo was found to be ignorant of something, but some sorts of ignorances don't matter in the Great Scheme of Things. What doth it profit a nation if its leaders know the national unemployment rate but know nothing of the empathy-fostering arts and humanities?
In my imagination I have the ears of Scomo and of Albo. I don't know or care if they can remember unemployment figures. Instead, probingly, I ask them: Do you know what 1802 event this Friday was the anniversary of, Mr Morrison? Do you have foggiest, Mr Albanese? I give you both a helpful clue-word. Daffodils.
Still no ideas, Prime Minister and aspiring prime minister? One more clue then, and a big, clarifying clue at that. Wordsworth.
But both fail my soft quiz, the Prime Minister (characteristically trying to cheat) even heard to whisper an urgent "What's a wordsworth?" to a staffer who (for she only did Commerce at uni) turns out to be as culturally clueless as her boss and no help at all.
From this little fantasia of mine, cluey readers will have gathered that this Friday April 15 was the anniversary of the day in 1802 when William Wordsworth, out on a ramble, saw the host of golden daffodils that inspired his best known poem, I wandered lonely as a cloud. Alerted to the mighty anniversary, I marked the day by reading the golden poem aloud to the captive audience of my wife and my dog. The ears of both of them twitched appreciatively.
Give me, every time, a leader, a candidate who can name and even recite a little of a Wordsworth poem rather than a leader/candidate who can (like any old parrot or a robot) trot out a dry statistic.
I will not vote for a candidate unimproved by the divine and empathy-stoking emollient of the arts.
And so, when any day now the ACT election candidates hold their Town Hall meeting, I will take along to ask them such questions without notice as: In which of Shakespeare's plays does the Prince of Denmark marvel at a human skull, and whose skull is it? What was the real name of the Australian revered as "La Stupenda" and what was he or she stupendous at doing? Complete the verse that begins "They f**k you up your mum and dad./They may not mean to, but they do" and name the curmudgeonly poet offering that forensic societal insight. How many daffodils does Wordsworth see "at a glance" in his famous poem and what, bless them, are the carefree and jubilant daffodils up to?
No candidate stumped by any of these sorts of questions (they are simple general knowledge questions easily answered by anyone living a well-rounded life) need bother to ask for this cultured voter's vote.
- Hymn to Poetry sung reverently by the sensitive new-age pirates of Gilbert and Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance.