Poetic Connections

My poem from a couple of days ago — with its lines I skipped away, a nobody with nothing, / And felt as light as dust and free as air — brought to mind the Beatles' song, Nowhere Man:

He's a real nowhere man,

Sitting in his Nowhere Land,

Making all his nowhere plans

For nobody.

Which made me recall this piece by Emily Dickinson:

I'm nobody! Who are you?

Are you nobody, too?

Then there's a pair of us! — don't tell!

They'd banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!

How public, like a frog  

To tell your name the livelong day  

To an admiring bog!

Which caused me to think of my favourite Emily Dickinson poem: 

We introduce ourselves

To Planets and to Flowers

But with ourselves

Have etiquettes

Embarrassments

And awes

Which at once conjured up Wordsworth's daffodils: 

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host, of golden daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine

And twinkle on the milky way,

They stretched in never-ending line

Along the margin of a bay:

Ten thousand saw I at a glance,

Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

Which connected inevitably with other Lake District poets, including the great but underappreciated Norman Nicholson:

And what need therefore

To stretch for the straining kite? — for kite and flower

Bloom in my room for ever; the light that lifts them

Shines in my own eyes, and my body’s warmth

Hatches their red in my veins. It is the Gulf Stream

That rains down the chimney, making the soot spit; it is the Trade Wind

That blows in the draught under the bedroom door.

My ways are circumscribed, confined as a limpet

To one small radius of rock; yet

I eat the equator, breathe the sky, and carry

The great white sun in the dirt of my finger nails.

Which returned me to the wonderful Emily Dickinson, who ate the equator and breathed the sky despite being confined to Amherst, Massachusetts:

The wind tapped like a tired man,

And like a host, “Come in,”

I boldly answered; entered then

My residence within

  

A rapid, footless guest,         

To offer whom a chair

Were as impossible as hand

A sofa to the air.

  

No bone had he to bind him,

His speech was like the push         

Of numerous humming-birds at once
From a superior bush.

  

His countenance a billow,

His fingers, if he pass,

Let go a music, as of tunes

Blown tremulous in glass.         

  

He visited, still flitting;

Then, like a timid man,

Again he tapped —’t was flurriedly —

And I became alone.

I could go on like this all day, for poetic connections are so infinitely rich . . .

The Disappearing Line

The Solitary Walker on Hadrian's Wall. (Photo taken by George at Transit Notes.)

Walking was not always considered the normal, pleasurable, everyday activity that it is now. In eighteenth-century England the foot traveller could be viewed with suspicion and disdain:   

A traveller on foot in this country seems to be considered as a sort of wild man or an out-of-the-way being who is stared at, pitied, suspected, and shunned by every body that meets him . . . 

In England any person undertaking so long a journey on foot is sure to be looked upon and considered as either a beggar, or a vagabond, or some necessitous wretch, which is a character not much more popular than that of a rogue . . . 

To what various, singular, and unaccountable fatalities and adventures are not foot-travellers exposed, in this land of carriages and horses?

CARL PHILIPP MORITZ

This all changed with the Romantic writers and poets. Wordsworth (and his sister Dorothy), Coleridge, Hazlitt and De Quincey were all prodigious walkers. This extract is from Wordsworth's The Prelude — for me one of the finest poems ever written. Whenever I read the words 'its disappearing line' and 'a guide into eternity, / At least to things unknown and without bound' I get an excited thrill:

I love a public road: few sights there are

That please me more: such object hath had power

O'er my imagination since the dawn

Of childhood, when its disappearing line,

Seen daily afar off, on one bare steep

Beyond the limits that my feet had trod,

Was like a guide into eternity,

At least to things unknown and without bound.

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

Hazlitt's essay On Going a Journey is a key piece of writing for the solo, independent walker:

One of the pleasantest things in the world is going a journey; but I like to go by myself. I can enjoy society in a room; but out of doors, Nature is company enough for me. I am then never less alone than when alone . . .

I cannot see the wit of walking and talking at the same time. When I am in the country I wish to vegetate like the country. I am not for criticising hedgerows and black cattle. I go out of town in order to forget the town and all that is in it. There are those who for this purpose go to watering-places, and carry the metropolis with them. I like more elbow-room and fewer encumbrances. I like solitude . . .

The soul of a journey is liberty, perfect liberty, to think, feel, do, just as one pleases. We go a journey chiefly to be free of all impediments and of all inconveniences; to leave ourselves behind much more than to get rid of others. It is because I want a little breathing-space to muse on indifferent matters . . . that I absent myself from the town for a while, without feeling at a loss the moment I am left by myself . . .

Give me the clear blue sky over my head, and the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road before me, and a three hours march to dinner — and then to thinking! I laugh I run, I leap, I sing for joy.

WILLIAM HAZLITT

One of my New Year's resolutions is to do more walking in 2014 than I did in 2013.

A Happy New Year to everyone, and happy walking!

(All the above passages are taken from that excellent book by Morris Marples, Shanks's Pony: a Study of Walking, first published in 1959.)  

Wordsworth at Hawkshead

This is Hawkshead Grammar School in the English Lake District, founded in 1585 by Edwin Sandys, Archbishop of York. From 1778 until 1787 the Romantic poet William Wordsworth was a pupil here. He learnt Latin, Greek, Mathematics and Knife Skills.

Hawkshead Grammar School.

For boys were allowed to bring knives into school, which they used industriously to carve their names and initials into the oakwood desks. You can see Wordsworth's own initials there, and his brother John's. The schoolmasters did not consider this a problem. They also encouraged the boarders to bet on cock fighting matches. (Knives and wagers? Not things allowed in school today, I fancy.) However, woe to those students who committed such misdemeanours as arriving late for class or missing church on Sunday. For these crimes stiff beatings were administered.

The schoolroom, Hawkshead Grammar School.

The headmaster's study, Hawkshead Grammar School.

While he was at Hawkshead, the young Wordsworth lodged with Ann Tyson and her husband in this cottage — which is now a B&B. 

Ann Tyson's Cottage, Hawkshead.

The earth is all before me. With a heart / Joyous, nor scared at its own liberty, / I look about; and should the chosen guide / Be nothing better than a wandering cloud, / I cannot miss my way. I breathe again! WORDSWORTH The Prelude

Walking, Art And Nature (10)



Camino, Spain


I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least - and it is commonly more than that - sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements. THOREAU Walking

The political philosopher and educationalist Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) believed that human beings were inherently good, and that they were only corrupted by the evils of society. He gradually lived an ever simpler life, becoming closer and closer to nature, studying botany, and enjoying the solitary walks he recounted in his ten, classic meditations Reveries Of The Solitary Walker.

Walking, art and nature - these three things are so bound up in Rousseau, and, since his time, have been inextricably linked.  



Camino, Spain

Walking, art and nature. We think of Thoreau's ecstasies in Walden and in his Journals; the mystical outpourings of Richard Jefferies in The Story Of My Heart; William Wordsworth's 'emotion recollected in tranquillity'; the labourer-poet John Clare's walks among the dispossessed pastures of English agricultural history; Gary Syder's Beat and Buddhist mountain treks; Richard Mabey's gentle, literary eco-strolls through the Chilterns and Norfolk; Robert Macfarlane's explorations on foot of Britain's wild places; John Constable walking and painting in Dedham Vale; JMW Turner walking and painting in Europe.    



Camino, Spain

As well as walking in nature being an inspiration for art and literature, walking itself can be an art form in its own right. Richard Long, whom I've written about before, gives walking a totemic resonance through natural artworks created on the walk, or even through the signature of the actual walk itself: its mark, footprint and track across the landscape.

 

Camino, Spain

Sadly (for me at least!) I've reached the end of my ten-part journey through walking country. I hope some of it has been inspirational, or at least informative. Most of all I hope that's it's motivated you to go walking, or, if you're walkers already (which I know many of you are), to go walking even more. It's a land without class, without prejudice, without materialism, without competition, without complication, without compromise, without celebrity culture, without bonds. Rousseau famously wrote at the beginning of The Social Contract: Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains. Why don't you throw off those chains, and start walking?



Caparra, Via de la Plata, Spain



Here's the Roman arch at Caparra in the Spanish region of Extremadura. I walked under it nearly a year ago on my pilgrimage along the Via de la Plata. Why don't you join me as I step beneath it again, right now? Let's walk together towards those distant hills, that blue horizon. You never know what we might find... 

Caparra, Via de la Plata, Spain

Walking As A Cultural And Aesthetic Act (8)

Camino, Spain

Nowadays we take it for granted that walking is a laudable pastime and recreational activity. We tend to give a positive nod to the walkers we see: they are taking exercise, they are getting out in the fresh air, they are enjoying being part of nature. All Good Things. It was not always thus.

Up until the late eighteenth century no one walked unless they could help it, unless they were poor and could not afford horse, carriage or coach. And, for the ubiquitous poor, walking was not always a pleasurable pursuit. It was a means to an end, not an end in itself - the practical, indeed the only way to drive cattle and pigs to market, to reach crops grown on feudal agricultural strips, to visit friends and family. Beyond the village, routes were uncertain, if not dangerous. Highwaymen and footpads roamed the highways and byways, and folk in other settlements could be suspicious of, or downright hostile to, strangers. Even as late as 1782 the German minister Carl Moritz, walking across England, found himself abused by innkeepers, and ejected from hostelries where he wished to spend the night. His crime? He was on foot! He wrote: A traveller on foot in this country seems to be considered as a sort of wild man, or an out-of-the-way being, who is stared at, pitied, suspected, and shunned by everybody that meets him.

But, by the early nineteenth century, all of this had changed. Influenced by the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who originated the idea of the 'noble savage' living free and uncorrupted in the wild, poets and writers like William Wordsworth and Henry David Thoreau wholeheartedly embraced the cultural, aesthetic and moral value of nature. And, to get close to nature, you had to walk through it. Thoreau's two-year sojourn in a hut by Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, is well known. He wrote: When we walk, we naturally go to the fields and the woods: what would become of us, if we walked only in a garden or a mall?

And Wordsworth - often accompanied by his sister, Dorothy, or fellow Romantics like Coleridge or De Quincey - must have walked tens of thousands of miles during his lifetime. He would regularly cover fifteen or twenty miles a day, and, even when at home in his Lakeland cottage, would stride endlessly up and down the garden in a creative reverie. Walking in nature gave him solace and inspiration, and he would commonly compose his poems while walking, rather than at his desk. To return to Thoreau, Thoreau also wrote: When a traveler asked Wordsworth's servant to show him her master's study, she answered, 'Here is his library, but his study is out of doors.' Wordsworth's masterpiece of a poem, The Prelude, is really just a long walk in words. 

Throughout the nineteenth century, this walking lark really caught on. Tourism was invented - helped by the boom of the railways - and people travelled further, and walked further, to admire and be awestruck at picturesque views, raging cataracts and terrifying mountain scenery. Hikers and climbers started to explore the European Alps and other mountain chains. Souvenirs were manufactured, and cameras began to record it all. The activity of walking also began to appear in the literature of the day. If you read Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice or Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles, you'll find they are full of people walking.

The Person From Porlock

On the second day of my walk along England's South West Coast Path I passed through Porlock and down to Porlock Weir (see photo). The Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge used to live not very far away - in the village of Nether Stowey between Minehead and Bridgwater to be exact - and he and his friends William Wordsworth, Wordsworth's sister Dorothy, and the poet and essayist Thomas de Quincey, used to take frequent long walks in the surrounding hills of Exmoor and the Quantocks. What lively, literary conversations they must have had! Or do you think they must have just grumbled about the weather and the state of their feet, like most walkers? (Though actually we know both from Wordsworth and from William Hazlitt that Coleridge was a brilliant conversationalist.)

Of course, the name of 'Porlock' resounds in the literary imagination because of Coleridge's famous story about being interrupted by a 'Person from Porlock' while feverishly writing his visionary poem Kubla Khan. Whether Coleridge was struggling to finish it, or whether his juices were in full creative flow, we will never know. Whether the 'Person from Porlock' really existed, or whether this was a fiction invented by Coleridge to excuse the fragmentary nature of his poem, we will also never know. But what is certain is that only fifty four lines were ever completed - out of a projected two to three hundred. And what is also highly probable is that the poem was composed in an opium-induced trance. For Coleridge was addicted to laudanum (an easily obtained, readily prescribed pain-killing drug at the time) - as were many of his friends and contemporaries, including Thomas de Quincey (whose book Confessions Of An English Opium-Eater I strongly recommend; it makes wonderful reading.) Indeed, some scholars believe that the actual 'Person from Porlock' was Coleridge's physician, Dr P Aaron Potter - who had called unexpectedly on that day in 1797 to supply Coleridge with his fix, thus diverting him from one of his wildest visions. Anyhow, the term 'Person from Porlock' has been alluded to by many poets and novelists ever since to mean any unwelcome visitor or unwanted intruder.

On a wider note, all this got me thinking about 'unfinished' art in general. Creative works may be 'unfinished' for many reasons: the death of the artist, the deliberate wish of the artist, the interruption of the artist. Consider the great 'unfinished' masterpieces: Jane Austen's Sanditon, The Mystery Of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens, Schubert's Unfinished Symphony, Coleridge's Kubla Khan. Does the fact that they're 'unfinished' really matter all that much? Personally I feel it matters not one jot. Indeed, for me, some works of art are all the better for being 'unfinished'. Perhaps this is why I like so much some of the suggestive, seemingly unpolished drawings and sketches by artists like Constable, Van Gogh and many others. Perhaps this is why I like so much the fragmentary nature of a poem such as Kubla Khan, with its half-fulfilled desires and half-complete visions. Sometimes the 'unfinished' work of art reflects more truly the life we really live. We can fill in any gaps and omissions and endings in our own imaginations.

Back at Porlock Weir, this family's having a good time crabbing and messing about by the boats ...

But this couple's striding off rather purposefully towards ... what ..? I leave this unfinished, as I don't know the answer myself ...

(If anyone is interested in the relationship between opium and English Romanticism, try reading Alethea Hayter's terrific book Opium And The Romantic Imagination, a book I read and enjoyed many years ago.)

The Politics Of Springtime: New Beginnings

Although I declared this blog an election-free zone a few weeks ago, I just have to break my pledge (very political, that!) and comment on the sudden, unforeseen rise to prominence of the Liberal Democrats. Thanks to a couple of live TV election debates between the leaders of all three main political parties (a first for British politics - though I should probably say English, as Scotland and Wales weren't represented at all), and thanks also to a confident and charmingly persuasive Nick Clegg whose face, even if it won't ever launch a thousand ships, is rather more than presentable (at least according to the women I've talked to), it appears that the Lib Dems now have a real chance of making their mark on this election and of holding the balance of power in a possible 'hung Parliament' scenario ('hung Parliament': a Parliament where no party holds the overall majority of seats). Despite some dodgy policies.

All this against a backdrop of one of the most glorious springtimes I can ever remember. The cottage gardens and the enfolding countryside look radiant. The blackthorn blossom has never looked whiter, the magnolia flowers never creamier, the tulips never redder, the new foliage never softer or greener. And yet, as one gets older, doesn't every springtime seem more glorious than the one before? I think it's a lot to do with age. As children we're barely conscious of time. We're absorbed in the serious play of our lives, naturally focused on each lived-in moment. The seasons seem almost stationary. My friends and I used to run through the woods and fields like heathens, cycling the country tracks and lanes, making dens and camps, having mock-serious fights and battles in the spirit of Bevis and Co in Richard Jefferies' immortal, eponymous book. We were glowing in 'the glory and the freshness of a dream'.

Gradually, because of the stress and pressure of adult life - jobs, families, motorways, deadlines - we stop living in the unconscious present and start living by our diaries. Suddenly we find our real lives, our important soul-lives, have drifted away, lost somewhere between out latest marriage and the Watford Gap Motorway Service Station. But, maybe around our late 40s or early 50s, we realise, if we're lucky, that it's not actually too late to recapture some of that early joy and spontaneity, that moment-by-moment freshness.

I think it's reflections like these, such recollections from a standpoint of maturity, which cause us to count our blessings, to be acutely aware that time is precious, and life even more so, and to appreciate the beauties of the spring, a spring that becomes more and more glorious each year.

Whither is fled the visionary gleam? / Where is it now, the glory and the dream? WILLIAM WORDSWORTH Ode

A Camino Sonnet

It's too late now. There is no turning back.
I am no saint. But sinner's near the mark,
Counting my errors on this endless track,
Counting my failures in this endless dark.
The world is too much with us, someone said,
Nasty, brutish and short, it's been portrayed,
A daily grind to earn our daily bread,
A pitiable, heartless, sad parade.
Surely there's something more than grief and strife?
Some gleam of grace, some glimmer of shook foil,
Some chink of light, a glimpse of some bright life,
Before we shuffle off this mortal coil?
There's no success like failure. Through the hail
And rain I quest, the better for to fail.

The italicized quotes in my sonnet come from William Wordsworth, Thomas Hobbes, Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Shakespeare and Bob Dylan respectively. The last line refers to Samuel Beckett's famous remark: Ever tried. Ever failed. No Matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

Though at first glance this sonnet may seem despairing, it's really about searching and questing; and I think there's some redemptive hope in the last two lines.

(Posted from Puebla de Sanabria, on the Camino Sanabrés, Spain.)

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

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.

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.

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.

The Inward Eye

William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge are my 2 favourite English Romantic poets. I've been reminded of Wordsworth this springtime by the lavish displays of daffodils in park, orchard and garden; and by the yellow-and-green woodland carpets of the shyer, more retiring lesser celandine. Wordsworth wrote poems about both flowers, though his 3 poems on the celandine are perhaps less memorable than his justly famous and much quoted poem about the 10,000 daffodils dancing in the breeze: I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud. This is as perfect a poem as you might ever wish for. It's very familiar, I know - but just read it again, as if for the first time, without any clouding thoughts or prejudice, and I think you'll find it a pure delight:

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the Milky Way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed - and gazed - but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

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.

This was one of Wordsworth's poems (there were big chunks of other poems of his too) I had to learn by rote as a teenager at school in the 1960s. (I've written before about learning poems off by heart here.) I've loved his poetry ever since, even though you sometimes have to sift through reams of more uneven and pedestrian material to find the real thing. This can often be the case with prolific poets - for, even if they show a rare poetic genius, they can't be first-rate all the time. It's rather comforting to know that a genius is only human after all. But I digress.

Wordsworth penned some exquisite short poems (eg Song and Stepping Westward) and sonnets (eg The World Is Too much With Us and Composed Upon Westminster Bridge), and a variety of longer, more discursive poems which are nothing short of sublime (eg Ode and Lines Written A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey). The best passages in his best poems remain unsurpassed by any poet - except Shakespeare (and no one can surpass Shakespeare). The magnificent, long, autobiographical poem The Prelude is his masterpiece, a poem I dip into for inspiration time and again.

You sense in many of his poems (eg The Solitary Reaper, The Ruined Cottage, The Old Cumberland Beggar) that Wordsworth identified strongly and sympathetically with pedlars, beggars, shepherds, poverty-stricken cottagers, and other solitaries and vagrants; I think he wrote somewhere that, if fate had turned out slightly differently, he could easily have been one of society's outsiders like them, poor in coin but not deprived in spirit, full of fortitude and a secret wisdom such as that shown by the leech-gatherer in the poem Resolution And Independence.

Finally, and returning again to I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud - if I had to point out one of Wordsworth's recurrent and major themes, it's encapsulated completely and unambiguously in this short, well known poem about daffodils. The theme concerns how you can have a direct, immediate, life-enhancing, joyful experience of nature (often when young and 'thoughtless'); and then how you might later recapture and relive the experience in comfortable solitude using one's imagination or 'inward eye'. This idea of the recollection and attempted recovery of past, quasi-mystical experiences (usually from one's childhood) is explored in many of Wordsworth's poems. But more of this in subsequent posts...

(Thanks to Riverdaze for being one of the inspirations behind this piece.)

Wasdale

On Monday, just after lunchtime, I arrived at the National Trust campsite in Wasdale and pitched my tent. It had taken all morning to get there. I'd set off from Nottinghamshire up the A1 stressed and uptight. Then, gradually, on the circuitous route to the western side of the Lake District, the cars thinned out. I began to unwind and relax. Slow down, I told myself. You can't go anywhere fast here. And why should you want to? I forced myself to adopt a slower pace and a less rigid mental attitude. By Wednesday I'd slowed down so much I knew it would be a shock to return to the 'real world' on Friday.

The western side of the Lake District is the connoisseur's part. Here you're a world away from the crowds at Keswick, Ambleside and Windermere. 5 lovely valleys radiate outwards like the spokes of a wheel, with the Sca Fell massif at its hub: counting clockwise, there's Dunnerdale or the Duddon Valley (about which I've written before); lush, green Eskdale; magnificent Wasdale, dominated by some of Lakeland's highest peaks; narrow, remote, high-sided Ennerdale, with its iconic Youth Hostel, Black Sail Hut, a former shepherd's bothy; and the gentle Vale Of Lorton, another of Wordsworth's favourite valleys.

Though I don't usually like campsites in July and August, there was plenty of space on this one and it was reasonably quiet - so long as you didn't pitch anywhere near the noisy generator in the toilet block. It was far less crowded than the National Trust campsite in busier and more accessible Langdale where I camped last year. I spent the afternoon and early evening sunbathing on the grass, walking to a nearby farm shop to buy milk, and meandering along local paths around Wasdale Head.

This campsite, like the one in Langdale, had been carefully landscaped among trees - you couldn't tell it was there from the road or from the fells above. As I prepared my evening meal, tame robins, chaffinches, dunnocks and thrushes approached for crumbs. Very tired, I crawled into my sleeping bag at 9 pm and slept solidly for 10 hours, waking only once.

My photo shows Wastwater in glaciated Wasdale, looking for all the world like a Norwegian fjord. The fells hemming in the head of the valley are Yewbarrow, Kirk Fell, Great Gable and Lingmell.

Half Revealing, Half Concealing

The sonorous, melancholy style of the 18th century poet Thomas Gray has brought to mind another poet, but a much greater one; one whose life spanned the subsequent century of the Victorian era: Alfred Lord Tennyson.

Can I make a plea for Tennyson? He's little read nowadays, I know. He's come to represent the royalty-loving, reactionary poet of literary convention, penning as Poet Laureate (he succeeded Wordworth to this post in 1850 and kept it till his death in 1892) swathes of verse on popular classical and mythological themes. Yet Tennyson deserves to be considered a little more deeply.

He was born quite near here in Somersby, Lincolnshire - a rector's son and the 4th of 12 children. His life was shattered when a close friend and fellow poet, Arthur Henry Hallam, died suddenly of a brain haemorrage in 1833. Also that same year his second volume of published verse had been critically savaged. He didn't write again for 10 years. But all this resulted in his greatest poem, the long and moving elegy In Memoriam A. H. H., which contains these wonderful 3 stanzas from Section V:

I sometimes hold it half a sin
To put in words the grief I feel;
For words, like Nature, half reveal
And half conceal the Soul within.

But, for the unquiet heart and brain,
A use in measured language lies;
The sad mechanic exercise,
Like dull narcotics, numbing pain.

In words, like weeds, I'll wrap me o'er,
Like coarsest clothes against the cold:
But that large grief which these enfold
Is given in outline and no more.

Tennyson is talking here about the inadequacy of words. This is a very modern preoccupation. As is Tennyson's obsession with dreams and trance-like states, found in poem after poem. On the surface not very Victorian at all - perhaps a precursor of all that came afterwards in Freud and Jung, Woolf and Lawrence - and just about everything in serious 20th century literature. The Unconscious was there all the time. It just needed to be discovered. Or rediscovered.

Many years ago, in my school days, there were 2 English teachers who held diametrically opposed views about Tennyson. The one loved him, and forced us to learn off by heart The Lotus-Eaters and Ulysses - which I still think are 2 of his finest poems. The other found in him all music and no meaning, all sound and no content. I disagree with this. As I've hinted above, if you read between the lines Tennyson's foot was tentatively and unconsciously wedging open the door into the 20th century (the word 'tentative' is not one you'd normally associate with Victorian poets!)

His religious doubts were also strikingly modern - he tended towards a kind of Pantheism - and he wrote that There lives more faith in honest doubt,/ Believe me, than in half the creeds (In Memoriam).

Yes, Tennyson (in common with most poets of any era) was occasionally pompous and sentimental, that's undoubtedly true. But we must be careful not to judge him out of context, from the standpoint of the cultural mores of our own vastly different times.

These are a few lines from the stirring Ulysses. This is the older Ulysses, made weak by time and fate, but still strong in will/To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. I identify with the following lines completely:

I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: all times I have enjoy'd
Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone...

The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

Do these sentiments remind anybody of the older Yeats, the Yeats who wrote An aged man is but a paltry thing,/A tattered coat upon a stick (Sailing To Byzantium) but who also wrote Why should not old men be mad? (Why Should Not Old Men Be Mad?) But I am not content (Are You Content?) and A foolish, passionate man (A Prayer For Old Age)?

I'll end with a quotation from the druggy, dreamy, hypnotic The Lotus-Eaters:

There is sweet music here that softer falls
Than petals from blown roses on the grass,
Or night-dews on still waters between walls
Of shadowy granite, in a gleaming pass;
Music that gentlier on the spirit lies,
Than tir'd eyelids upon tir'd eyes;
Music that brings sweet sleep down from the blissful skies.
Here are cool mosses deep,
And thro' the moss the ivies creep,
And in the stream the long-leaved flowers weep,
And from the craggy edge the poppy hangs in sleep.

Epiphany At Orrest Head

Saturday 11 August. In brief. Grasmere: Breakfast at Miller Howe café - where there's an Internet connection. Cotswold Rock Bottom Outdoors shop - bought bargain Teva sandals for £19. Wordsworth family graves in churchyard. Wordsworth's Dove Cottage, where he lived before Rydal Mount. Didn't go in. Ambleside: 3 bookshops - Wearings, Henry Roberts, Good Book Place. Went in. Also Public Library with Internet. No really outstanding pubs but The Golden Rule on Kirkstone Pass road is good "local" drinking pub - no bar meals, no pool, no music. Brotherswater (just south of Patterdale): walked from here to High Hartsop Dodd and back in rain. At spot by lake party had left beer cans, soft drinks bottles, plastic bags and, inexplicably, 2 perfectly good towels. Why do people have to leave rubbish in one of the most beautiful places in England? Beats me. Kirkstone Pass Inn: great pub dating from 1496. Windermere: circular walk taking in Orrest Head, where it all happened for Wainwright. Having visited his resting place on Haystacks earlier this year, thought it only proper I should pay tribute here too (see photos). Rain stopped. Great Langdale Camp Site: Uncle Ben's Express flavoured rice with diced-up vine tomatoes and boiled eggs. Yum. Watery sunset. Early night. Funny how it's much more exhausting on days when you're not climbing the big stuff!

Wonderful Walker

The Duddon Valley. One of the most entrancing, remote and unspoilt valleys in Lakeland. There's a narrow road running through it paralleling the river, and two hamlets: Ulpha with its small post office/shop and Seathwaite (not to be confused with the other Seathwaite in Borrowdale) with its 16th century Newfield Inn, the floor laid with banded, beautifully marked Walna Scar slate. And that's about it. Oh, apart from woods, waterfalls, rapids, gorges, packhorse routes, fells large and small, and peace and quiet. There are brown trout in the river, Herdwick sheep on the hillside and buzzards soaring above the trees. Evidence of early industry remains visible if you know where to look: slate quarry workings on the slopes, and "pitsteads" which were woodland clearances made by charcoal burners. The shapely pyramid of Harter Fell rises up near the head of the vale, and Cockley Beck at its very top links the lonely passes of Wrynose and Hardknott. This was Wordsworth's favourite valley. It inspired his River Duddon Sonnets (1820) and The Excursion (1814) which was partly about an 18th century parson, the Rev. Robert Walker, known as "Wonderful Walker", an educated man revered by the locals. He was both intellectual and practical, and famous for sitting on his own special "shearing stone" as he clipped sheep with great skill once a year at a nearby farm. This stone now lies at the entrance to the church porch in Seathwaite (see photo). My 2 and a half hour walk, on an overcast but warm Friday 10 August, took me from Seathwaite up the bridleway of Park Head Road, an old packhorse route, towards the Dunnerdale Fells. After a few miles I turned down Kiln Bank before crossing the Duddon on some stepping stones. The valley road brought me to Hall Bridge from where I followed a track to the foot of Wallowbarrow Crag and then through woodland and across 2 footbridges back to the village. And the pub. I think it would be good to come back here and slowly soak it all in - I noted there was camping at Turner Hall Farm.

Loughrigg

Just back from a wonderful week in the Lake District. The plan was: to camp in Langdale and to follow a pattern of 1 challenging high-level fell day followed by 1 or 2 days on easier lowland paths. Because of my left knee problem. I'm pleased to say this generally worked. Saturday 4 August at 11 pm found me in a rainy Ambleside. Slept in the car. I was on a budget, so that saved a night's campsite fee! And, surprisingly, I actually did sleep, curled crookedly on the back seat with a rug over and a window ever-so-slightly open. Early next morning I pitched at the National Trust Campsite in Great Langdale. I was eager for the fells, but wanted something to ease me in gently. Loughrigg seemed ideal - that fine and friendly, knobbly lump of a hill overlooking Ambleside, full of nooks and crannies, ferns, tarns, rocks, caves, marshy bits and magnificent viewpoints. One of Wainwright's favourites. And justifiably popular with everyone else that warm Sunday. I approached Loughrigg Terrace from the western end of Rydal Water. Great views of Grasmere, Helm Crag and Fairfield from the Terrace, raking at a very easy angle across the northern flank before meeting an obvious path on the left which climbed directly to the 335m summit (see 1st photo). Then a lovely, undemanding descent via Brow Head Farm and over the river Rothay to the northern fringe of Ambleside, picking up the track to Rydal Park and Rydal Hall (see 2nd photo) which began at a stone gateway just beyond Scandale Bridge. Rydal Hall and its adjacent buildings now house a Christian Community and Retreat. Formerly this area was of prime importance to the Lakeland poets and their notion of what constituted the picturesque. Close by I located Rydal Mount, Wordsworth's home from 1813 to 1859 (see 3rd photo). From Rydal a path contoured the lower slopes of Loughrigg above Rydal Water, passing 2 caves. These were man-made, part of the Loughrigg slate quarrying enterprise. The higher cave was very impressive. Dripping water and the cries of sand martins echoed spookily; and the spoil heap outside was covered in English stonecrop with its star-shaped white flowers and pink-tinged succulent leaves. Soon I was back at my starting point and contemplating a much bigger and grander walk the next day...