Sir, – I am writing to thank Frank McNally for his Irishman’s Diary of April 8th on William Wordsworth, the 250th anniversary of whose birth took place the previous day. I am sure I am not the only Irish Times reader who has thought of Wordsworth’s familiar lines about the daffodils on our daily walks over the past few weeks.
How appropriate that Wordsworth’s anniversary is being marked during the most extraordinary Spring many of us can remember, with its hosts of golden daffodils and other signs of nature’s returning bounty. Or are we more aware this year of the annual phenomenon of spring without the usual distractions of what Wordsworth termed “getting and spending”?
No one did more than this major poet to instil in us a sense of how nature’s return lifts and renovates our jaded spirits, never more so than in this time of pandemic virus.
I am grateful to Frank McNally for his thoughtful piece, not only on Wordsworth but on his essential collaborators and life companions, sister Dorothy and wife Mary. – Yours, etc,
ANTHONY ROCHE,
Monkstown, Co Dublin.