Thy Solitary Walk

Sadly (for me if no one else!) I'm at the end of my 7-part blog-sequence on Wordsworth; I feel I've said all I wanted to say about his poetry for now. Just a few final quotations, which restate some of Wordsworth's ideas and beliefs 'in a nutshell'...

Stephen Gill and Duncan Wu, in their introduction to William Wordsworth's Selected Poetry published by Oxford World's Classics, say that in Wordsworth's philosophical verse ...the universe is not mechanical and dead, but alive and vitally connected with the human mind; awakened consciousness leads to an awakened moral sense and must lead to communion with the divine. In the profoundest sense, love of nature leads to love of Man and awareness of God.

This comes from the famous Ode: Not in entire forgetfulness,/And not in utter nakedness,/But trailing clouds of glory do we come/From God, who is our home:/Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

And, in conclusion, this is taken from the last section of Lines Written A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey - addressed to Dorothy, Wordsworth's beloved sister and walking companion:

Therefore let the moon/Shine on thee in thy solitary walk;/And let the misty mountain winds be free/To blow against thee; and in after years,/When these wild ecstasies shall be matured/Into a sober pleasure, when thy mind/Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms,/Thy memory be as a dwelling-place/For all sweet sounds and harmonies; Oh! then,/If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief,/Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts/Of tender joy wilt thou remember me,/And these my exhortations!

Rejoicing In The Morning's Birth

I have always very much liked the 1st 2 verses of Wordsworth's poem Resolution And Independence - the one about his encounter with the leech-gatherer. Here Wordsworth reveals to us - simply and clearly, through an undistorted lens of language, without any affectation or abstraction - the joy of a shiny-new morning after a stormy night:

There was a roaring in the wind all night;
The rain came heavily and fell in floods;
But now the sun is rising calm and bright;
The birds are singing in the distant woods;
Over his own sweet voice the Stock-dove broods;
The Jay makes answer as the Magpie chatters;
And all the air is filled with pleasant noise of waters.

All things that love the sun are out of doors;
The sky rejoices in the morning's birth;
The grass is bright with rain-drops; on the moors
The Hare is running races in her mirth;
And with her feet she from the plashy earth
Raises a mist; which, glittering in the sun,
Runs with her all the way, wherever she doth run.

This was one of the poems I had to memorize off by heart for school English lessons (the 1st few verses at any rate) - and it stays with me still, a familiar and much loved piece of mental furniture. I don't know why it remains so very resonant; perhaps it's something to do with its simplicity, and its sensory nature. Wordsworth sets the scene for the whole poem beautifully in these 1st 2 verses; he paints an immediate word-picture that is pleasingly visual - bright and clear as the rinsed-clean morning itself. In fact, when you examine it, all 5 senses are stimulated: you can see the raindrops on the grass and the running hare; you can hear the singing birds, the brooding stock-dove, the roaring wind and the gurgling streams; you can smell, nearly taste, the saturated ground; you can feel, almost touch, the 'plashy earth' beneath the hare's feet.

A Heart That Watches And Receives

Here's an alternative slant on education. (Wordsworth had been strongly influenced by the nature philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and had definitely read Rousseau's Émile; or on Education, which was published in 1762. Early in the New Year I posted a 3-part sequence about Rousseau, which starts here.)

The Tables Turned
An Evening Scene on the Same Subject

Up! up! my Friend, and clear your looks;
Why all this toil and trouble?
Up! up! my Friend, and quit your books;
Or surely you'll grow double.

The sun above the mountain's head,
A freshening lustre mellow,
Through all the long green fields has spread,
His first sweet evening yellow.

Books! 'tis a dull and endless strife;
Come, hear the woodland linnet,
How sweet his music! on my life,
There's more of wisdom in it.

And hark! how blithe the throstle sings!
He, too, is no mean preacher;
Come forth into the light of things,
Let Nature be your Teacher.

She has a world of ready wealth,
Our minds and hearts to bless -
Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health,
Truth breathed by cheerfulness.

One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.

Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous form of things -
We murder to dissect.

Enough of Science and of Art;
Close up those barren leaves;
Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

Cygneous

Cow parsley lined the narrow road out of Bag Enderby - the commonest plant of our roadside verges. And in the more shaded, wooded areas I found blue and green mats of the small bugle flower, one of the dead nettle family, and well known as a cure-all. Nicholas Culpeper, the 17th century herbalist, wrote that it cured 'wounds, thrusts and stabs', which says a lot in a little about the 17th century - and, on reflection, it might be useful today too... Culpeper says it can cure every ailment from ulcers and broken bones to gout and delirium tremens. This panacea-plant is also supposed to be a narcotic. Perhaps this narcotic quality does provide some temporary relief from pain - persuading you it has eradicated the illness for good?

The occasional butterfly fluttered by - a white, a blue, a small tortoiseshell, an orange tip, several speckled wood - and I also noticed that bees and other insects were now active again. My path passed this row of trees, making for a gleam of gold in the middle distance...

This proved to be neither a yellow brick road nor a rainbow's pot of gold, but, more prosaically, yet another field of oilseed rape, with a small lake fringed with bulrushes beyond it...

... and in one corner of the pool I found a female mute swan (pen) sitting on her nest...

As I approached nearer and nearer, trying to get a good camera shot, the male (cob) appeared out of nowhere...

The closer I came, the higher he arced his wings in warning. I crept away, leaving them both to their cygneous, family affairs...

I was almost back at my starting point in Hagworthingham when I spotted this single Scots pine tree, surely the soulmate or younger sibling of the lonely pine I photographed on my previous walk from Tealby to Normanby-le-Wold...

Wisdom And Spirit Of The Universe

What better way to illustrate Wordsworth's boyhood 'rapture', his joyous immersion in nature, and the intensely lived experiences of his youth, than in this extract from his great autobiographical poem The Prelude. It's long been one of my favourite passages. It's also 1 of the 7 poems by Wordsworth included in that seminal volume of my childhood, The Golden Treasury Of Poetry, selected by Louis Untermeyer.

Wisdom and Spirit of the universe!
Thou Soul that art the Eternity of Thought!
And giv'st to forms and images a breath
And everlasting motion! Not in vain,
By day or star-light, thus from my first dawn
Of childhood didst Thou intertwine for me
The passions that build up our human Soul;
Not with the mean and vulgar works of Man;
But with high objects, with enduring things,
With life and nature, purifying thus
The elements of feeling and of thought,
And sanctifying by such discipline
Both pain and fear, until we recognize
A grandeur in the beatings of the heart.

Nor was this fellowship vouchsafed to me
With stinted kindness. In November days,
When vapours rolling down the valleys made
A lonely scene more lonesome; among woods
At noon, and 'mid the calm of summer nights,
When, by the margin of the trembling lake,
Beneath the gloomy hills, homeward I went
In solitude, such intercourse was mine;
'Twas mine among the fields both day and night,
And by the waters, all the summer long.

And in the frosty season, when the sun
Was set, and, visible for many a mile,
The cottage windows through the twilight blazed,
I heeded not the summons:- happy time
It was, indeed, for all of us; to me
It was a time of rapture: clear and loud
The village clock tolled six; I wheeled about,
Proud and exulting like an untired horse
That cares not for his home. - All shod with steel,
We hissed along the polished ice, in games
Confederate, imitative of the chase
And woodland pleasures, the resounding horn,
The pack loud bellowing, and the hunted hare.
So through the darkness and the cold we flew,
And not a voice was idle; with the din,
Meanwhile, the precipices rang aloud;
The leafless trees, and every icy crag
Tinkled like iron; while the distant hills
Into the tumult sent an alien sound
Of melancholy, not unnoticed; while the stars,
Eastward, were sparkling clear, and in the west
The orange sky of evening died away.

Not seldom from the uproar I retired
Into a silent bay, or sportively
Glanced sideway, leaving the tumultuous throng,
To cut across the reflex of a star;
That gleamed upon the ice. And oftentimes
When we had given our bodies to the wind,
And all the shadowy banks, on either side,
Came sweeping through the darkness, spinning still
The rapid line of motion, then at once
Have I, reclining back upon my heels,
Stopped short, yet still the solitary cliffs
Wheeled by me, even as if the earth had rolled
With visible motion her diurnal round.
Behind me did they stretch in solemn train,
Feebler and feebler, and I stood and watched
Till all was tranquil as a dreamless sleep.

1799.

I think in this piece we can see condensed everything Wordsworth ever wanted to say; it remains a core passage for me, at the heart of my imaginative and walking life.

Tennyson Country

Old yew, which graspest at the stones/That name the underlying dead,/Thy fibres net the dreamless head,/Thy roots are wrapped around the bones. In Memoriam: A. H. H. TENNYSON.

On either side the river lie,/Long fields of barley and of rye,/That clothe the wold and meet the sky. The Lady Of Shalott. TENNYSON.

Continuing my saunter from Hagworthingham to Bag Enderby, I finally arrived at Bag Enderby churchyard. An English country churchyard would not be complete without its yew tree. You can see Bag Enderby's yew in the picture below.

3 facts about the yew tree: 1. Its wood was used for English longbow making; 2. its leaves and bark have been used in medicinal drugs to reduce high blood pressure and alleviate hypertension; 3. its presence in churchyards often betokens a site of pre-Christian, pagan or Celtic origin - so the yew may have been there long before the church.

Saint Margaret's Church in Bag Enderby dates from the early 15th century, and is built mainly of greenstone - that's sandstone laced with the mineral glauconite, which turns green when quarried and exposed to the elements:

Opposite the church was this magnificent but lopsided horse chestnut tree, its 'candles' blowing in the wind...

... and inside the church was a map of the river Lymm, Tennyson's childhood river (really more of a stream), which I'd just crossed half an hour beforehand, and an information panel about the illustrious poet himself:

However the most interesting object in the church was this octagonal, medieval font, ornamented with stone carvings:

Tennyson was born in 1809 in the nearby village of Somersby where his father, George Clayton, was rector. He was rector at Bag Enderby too. He fathered 12 children, of which Alfred, our budding poet, was the fourth. Alfred and his siblings most probably played in and around this ancient, hollow tree I found on an overgrown green close by the church. Only the stump remains:

Legend has it that John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, preached beneath this tree. Not too astonishing - as Wesley roamed the length and breadth of England and Wales for many years evangelizing under trees, in fields, at market crosses and anywhere in the open air he could find an audience.

I left behind me the ghosts of the Tennyson children, and the photograph of a very Victorian-looking Alfred Lord Tennyson, and the murmur of his babbling brook, and set off down a different path back to Hagworthingham...

(I've written before about Tennyson and his poetry here.)

To be continued...

The Gift Of Swifts

They've made it again,/Which means the globe's still working, the Creation's/Still waking refreshed, our summer's/Still all to come - Swifts by TED HUGHES.

I just happened to be looking out of the window this morning when I saw a buzzard soaring high over the house, the sunshine clearly picking out its brown and white markings. You'd never have seen buzzards here 10 - 15 years ago. Since the banning of many types of pesticide in the UK, the increase in raptor numbers has been a great success story.

And then I saw the swifts, shooting through the blue air on dark, scimitar-like wings. Yes, the swifts are back - for me, the true heralds of summer. I watch for them every year, and my heart leaps unfailingly each time I witness their arrival.

Anne Stevenson, in her poem Swifts, calls them earth-skimmers, sky-scythers, air pilgrims, high crosses cruising in ether, and sleepers over oceans in the will of the world's breathing.

This is the 1st verse of Anne Stevenson's poem:

Spring comes little, a little. All April it rains.
The new leaves stick in their fists; new ferns still fiddleheads.
But one day the swifts are back. Face to the sun like a child
You shout, 'The swifts are back!'

(I once briefly met Anne in the Poetry Bookshop, Hay-on-Wye - that mecca for bibliophiles and oenophiles where almost every building is a bookshop or a pub - in the early 1980s, I think it was. I'm pretty sure she co-owned the business at the time. I used to sell books myself back then, and managed to flog her some Dylan Thomas titles as stock for her already overburdened shelves. Her poetry is well worth checking out - and this would be a good place to start.)

I've touched on swifts before, in a piece that also reflected on my favourite months of the year and which described in a not-too-sombre way a friend's funeral I went to. You can read it here.

Trailing Clouds Of Glory

Not in entire forgetfulness,/And not in utter nakedness,/But trailing clouds of glory do we come/From God, who is our home:/Heaven lies about us in our infancy! Ode

Childhood can be a time of spontaneous, unrestrained, direct physical contact with the natural world (Contact! Contact! Thoreau). Certainly Wordsworth had this kind of experience during his own childhood. Family difficulties made him turn more and more to the fells, valleys and lakes of the Lake District. A number of his poems, particularly the early parts of The Prelude, try to recapture some of the awe, wonder and delight he felt in this natural setting.

Inevitably one grows up and remembers in tranquillity these early, unrepeatable, golden years of boyhood. As an adult, though something is lost (the immediate, unreflective, even 'divine' experience of the 'thoughtless' boy), in recompense one may have the pleasure of recollection, and a more developed intellect to ponder the experience - using it as a source of inspiration, perhaps writing about it.

Wordsworth regrets here his adult lack of boyhood's vision: The things which I have seen I now can see no more... I know, where'er I go,/That there hath passed away a glory from the earth. Ode

The loss of youth's rapture is replaced by something else:

...That time is past,
And all its aching joys are now no more,
And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this
Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur: other gifts
Have followed, for such loss, I would believe,
Abundant recompense. For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth, but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man,
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things...

Lines Written A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey


For me these are among the finest lines Wordsworth ever composed.

From Hag To Bag

Last Saturday I took another walk in the Lincolnshire Wolds. I followed farmers' tracks and field paths from the village of Hagworthingham (known locally as 'Hag') to the village of Bag Enderby, then returned a different way. The weather was warm, and the sky mainly overcast. By the middle of the afternoon it became almost sultry, with a temperature more like that of a summer's day. Meandering slowly along the route, I passed some garish yellow acres of oilseed rape...

... and this five barred, wooden gate leading into a grass field...



... then saw this riven tree...

...close by the River Lymm, which Alfred Lord Tennyson immortalized in his poem The Brook: I come from haunts of coot and hern,/I make a sudden sally,/And sparkle out among the fern,/To bicker down a valley...

On the hedgebanks, at woodland edges, and in other shady spots, I found stitchwort, red campion (see pic below), lesser celandine, and tangles of herb robert, a flower which demonstrates perfectly the ancient 'doctrine of signatures' - herbalists once recommended herb robert as a treatment for blood disorders as its stem and leaves turn blood-red in the autumn.

(The 'doctrine of signatures' was formulated by early physicians, herbalists and mystics. They believed God had marked the objects of His creation with a sign or 'signature' - perhaps relating to their form or colour - which gave a clue to their purpose; for instance, the walnut, since the shell resembled the shape of a human head and the nut had the texture of a human brain, was supposed to be good for head ailments. Another example of sympathetic magic?)

In the sunnier, less sheltered grassland areas, the year's first daisies had opened, and there were drifts of lilac-coloured cuckoo flowers, a flower which evokes the fields of my childhood: some of my cousins were farmers, and their meadows were full of cuckoo flowers and cowslips, poppies and field scabious - this was long before the days when most farmland became fertilizered and pesticided and monocultured.

The cuckoo flower (aka mikmaid or lady's smock) is a fascinating and nostalgic flower for me. It recalls the long spring and summer days of boyhood - when I used to roam freely and carelessly about the countryside. It's name too has an interesting derivation. Sure, it blooms during the months when the cuckoo sings; but, more intriguingly, the plant is covered in foam in late spring, and it was once believed this substance was cuckoo saliva. Really it has nothing to do with cuckoos, but is produced by the nymphs of the froghopper bug.

The blackthorn blossom had already faded and tumbled, but the hawthorn (or may) bush was just on the cusp of unpacking its tight flower buds. Indeed the odd one was already in bloom. May blossom looks wonderful - but many think it has an unpleasant, sickly smell, an odour of death. I've written before about may blossom, and its connection with Proust, here.

The pungent smell of wild garlic wafted towards me from garlic mustard plants (aka jack-by-the-hedge or hedge garlic) which grew along the hedgerow bottoms, and also from clumps of white-flowered ransoms in the woods and spinneys. Ransoms belongs to the lily family, and you can chop up the leaves and use them as a flavouring in cookery; garlic mustard is a cabbage, and has many culinary uses too - in sauces and in salads, and, of course, as the ingredient for garlic mustard!

To be continued...

Nature Is Good For You

Wordsworth (who also became Poet Laureate like Tennyson after him and Carol Ann Duffy recently) believed profoundly in the sublime, affective power of nature. The natural world pervades Wordsworth's poetry. For him nature was significant in many ways. For him nature was -

a moral force: The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,/The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul/Of all my moral being. Lines Written A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey; One impulse from a vernal wood/May teach you more of man;/Of moral evil and of good,/Than all the sages can. The Tables Turned;

an educative force: Books! 'tis a dull and endless strife,/Come hear the woodland linnet,/How sweet his music; on my life/There's more of wisdom in it./And hark! how blithe the throstle sings!/And he is no mean preacher;/Come forth into the light of things,/Let Nature be your teacher. The Tables Turned;

a spiritual and mystical source: There was a time when meadow, grove and stream,/The earth, and every common sight,/To me did seem/Apparelled in celestial light,/The glory and the freshness of a dream. Ode;

a source of poetic inspiration: ...Visionary Power/Attends upon the motions of the winds/Embodied in the mystery of words;/There darkness makes abode, and all the host/Of shadowy things do work their changes there,/As in a mansion like their proper home;/Even forms and substances are circumfused/By that transparent veil with light divine;/And through the turnings intricate of Verse,/Present themselves as objects recognised,/In flashes, and with a glory scarce their own. The Prelude;

a former Eden; an unpolluted childhood paradise lost to the adult self: Whither is fled the visionary gleam?/Where is it now, the glory and the dream? Ode;

a soothing agent of comfort and solace: A soft eye-music of slow-waving boughs,/Powerful almost as vocal harmony/To stay the wanderer's steps and soothe his thoughts. Airey-Force Valley;

a blessing and a joy: Oh there is blessing in this gentle breeze/That blows from the green fields and from the clouds/And from the sky... The Prelude; My heart leaps up when I behold/A Rainbow in the sky. My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold;

a living, breathing entity of feeling and wisdom, existing on a higher plane than 'the mean and vulgar works of man': ... And I have felt/A presence that disturbs me with the joy/Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime/Of something far more deeply interfused/Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,/And the round ocean, and the living air,/And the blue sky, and in the mind of man,/A motion and a spirit, that impels/All thinking things, all objects of all thought,/And rolls through all things... Lines Written A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey.

a stimulus to the imagination: ...Thus sometimes were the shapes/Of wilful fancy grafted upon feelings/Of the imagination, and they rose/In worth accordingly. The Prelude; Imagination! lifting up itself/Before the eye and progress of my Song/Like an unfathered vapour... The Prelude;

a setting for epiphanies later recollected in tranquillity: For oft when on my couch I lie/In vacant or in pensive mood,/They flash upon that inward eye/Which is the bliss of solitude,/And then my heart with pleasure fills,/And dances with the Daffodils. I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud;

a channel for some pantheistic God: A meditation rose in me that night/Upon the lonely Mountain when the scene/Had passed away, and it appeared to me/The perfect image of a mighty Mind,/Of one that feeds upon infinity,/That is exalted by an underpresence,/The sense of God, or whatso'er is dim/Or vast in its own being... The Prelude;

and a remembered treasure store of beauty: ...Though absent long,/These forms of beauty have not been to me,/As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:/But oft, in lonely rooms, and mid the din/Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,/In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,/Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart,/And passing even into my purer mind/With tranquil restoration... Lines Written A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey.

Two Poets Who Happen To Be Women

It's a long way in cultural, political and sexual mores from Alfred Lord Tennyson to Carol Ann Duffy - but now the Poet Laureateship links them both. After many weeks of speculation Duffy was appointed yesterday to the role. I've got to admit that I've had a bit of a block as far as appreciating Duffy's poetry is concerned - but I'm sure it's probably just a personal twinge of literary myopia. Everyone else seems to love her. As I write this I'm making a mental note to read more of her stuff and perhaps form a more enlightened opinion. This poem of hers, however, I liked immediately on hearing it read on the radio today:

A Child's Sleep

I stood at the edge of my child's sleep
hearing her breathe;
although I could not enter there,
I could not leave.

Her sleep was a small wood,
perfumed with flowers;
dark, peaceful, sacred,
acred in hours.

And she was the spirit that lives
in the heart of such woods;
without time, without history,
wordlessly good.

I spoke her name, a pebble dropped
in the still night,
and saw her stir, both open palms
cupping their soft light;

then went to the window. The greater dark
outside the room
gazed back, maternal, wise,
with its face of moon.


(RIP: UA Fanthorpe, who died last Tuesday, 28 April - another outstanding woman poet. Though I don't really like the term 'woman poet' - after all, you don't generally say a 'man poet' or 'male poet', do you, you just say 'poet'; however, Duffy herself has nothing against the term, feeling that women poets often differ quite widely from men poets in many of their themes and how they treat them, eg the subject of childbirth. And perhaps chocolate?)