FROM THE BOOK
William Wordsworth is best known for his seminal lyric poem, I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud, also known as Daffodils. But Totaro tells in her book how he cruelly suffered from anosmia, a condition that left him unable to smell the delights of the natural world
“The flower that smells the sweetest is shy and lowly.”
William Wordsworth, one of the great English Romantic poets, wrote these words in 1821. He was a prodigious walker who adored wandering the English countryside composing poetry about the glories of nature – but he could not smell the beauty he observed.
He penned four verses in one afternoon about the joy and beauty of daffodils, their colour and movement – flower heads bobbing and long stems waving as the breeze puffed across the water. But never once did he mention the smell that must have enveloped him as he passed through the golden field, a rich, narcissus-like fragrance that can polarise opinion as some perceive it as pleasantly musky or vanilla-ish while others liken it to raw onions, cat urine or even spoiled fish.
A search for the words “smell”, “scent”, “odour” and “fragrance” in a six-volume collection of his works published in 1865 and now digitised threw up just half a dozen uses. When he did describe smell, the word he fell back on was “sweet” – a quality that, even in anosmia, is recognisable by the tongue.
Wordsworth’s nephew, the Bishop of Lincoln, Christopher Wordsworth,
observed that references to scent in his uncle’s poetry were based on what family and friends described to him: “With regard to fragrance, Mr Wordsworth spoke from the testimony of others: he himself had no sense of smell.
“The single instance of his enjoying such a perception… was, in fact, imaginary. The incident occurred at Racedown (Lodge in Dorset), when he was talking with Miss H (his fiancée Mary Hutchinson), who coming suddenly upon a parterre of sweet flowers, expressed her pleasure at their fragrance, a pleasure which he caught from her lips, and then fancied to be his own.”
Wordsworth’s friend and fellow
poet, Robert Southey, noted 20 years later that once, in youth, the poet’s fifth sense had briefly returned: “Wordsworth has no sense of smell. Once, and only once in his life, the dormant power awakened; it was by a bed of stocks in full bloom, at a house he inhabited in Dorsetshire, some five-and-twenty years ago; and he says it was like a vision of Paradise to him; but it lasted only a few minutes, and the faculty has continued torpid from that time.
“The fact is remarkable in itself, and would be worthy of notice, even if it did not relate to a man of whom posterity will desire to know all that
can be remembered. He has often expressed to me his regret for this privation. I, on the contrary, possess the sense in such acuteness, that I can remember an odour and call up the ghost of one that is departed.” The friendship between Southey, passionate and driven by the sensual pleasures of taste and smell, and Wordsworth, enclosed in his sensory vacuum, struck me with a profound melancholy.
The notion that Wordsworth was just once able to perceive the powerful floral scent of stock and lose it again seemed inordinately cruel.