Literary landscapes: Wordsworth poetic prophet of Lakeland England
Stuart MillsonStuart Millson is a writer based in Kent, UK.
Keywords: Literature, Poetry AbstractThe poet William Wordsworth was one of the leading English exponents of the Romantic Movement in European literature and the arts. As a philosophy, Romanticism was at once radical and conservative: radical in that it challenged political, economic and artistic privilege, but conservative in its reverence for nature and its critique of industrialism. The author seeks to integrate these two strands in Wordsworth's literary life, and place his writing in a wider historical context. In its diversity – national and regional – Romanticism did much to shape modern European thought, and continues to do so today.
I wandered lonely as a cloudThat floats on high o'er vales and hills,When all at once I saw a crowd,A host of golden daffodils …(William Wordsworth).
The English Lakeland is one of our country's most stirring and uplifting landscapes. The haunt of Wainwright, the genial fell-walker and illustrator; an inspiration to modern writers, such as Richard Adams; and a place of repose and refreshment for seekers of solitude, the Lakes represent an England very different to the gentle order of the Midlands and fruitful South.
Here, in the magnificence and loneliness of the North-West, stone walls criss-cross the hilly farmland – the grazing sheep and the domain of the farmer giving way to untamed upland fells that reach on and on under ever-changing skies. In the shadow of the stupendous hills dwell the Lakeland communities – Penrith, Grasmere, Ambleside, Hawkshead, Cockermouth –towns which owe their special character to the spirit of the district, and whose granite stone and sturdiness evoke "Northern England". Yet they also have another strong evocation, this time a poetic one, for this is the country of William Wordsworth – one of England's greatest and most honoured cultural figures, and a celebrant of the beauty of his country.
And it was not just clear, obvious, physical glory – "golden daffodils", "steep hills and woods embosomed" – which the poet saw. A visionary, Wordsworth seemed to detect spirits beyond what we see and know – his "ghostly language of the ancient earth", "human forms with superhuman powers" – leading us toward something higher,greater and older than we could ever imagine. He even felt "low breathings"coming after him in the primeval solitude of the darkening Northern English hills – perhaps the same "moaning Nature voices" which the composer Percy Grainger identified in the twentieth century.
To sense such things, the artist needs to be rooted in a place; born and bred, and influenced and shaped by land, people and dialect. Just as the poetry of Dylan Thomas is infused with Celtic melancholia, so the words of William Wordsworth are informed by the might and grandeur of those ancient hills. We have in our minds the romantic image of the poet and Englishman striding over great ridges, obsessed with finding the truths of poetry and the soul. And Wordsworth was very much like this in reality: a man indissolubly linked to that particular land, who spent hours drawing in the special nature of its splendours.
Yet his firm roots in the Lake District enabled Wordsworth to be inspired by many things, and this gift allowed him to invest the most pedestrian of scenes with piercing beauty. Who can fail to be affected by his vision of London from Westminster Bridge?
Earth has not anything to show more fair:Dull would he be of soul who could pass byA sight so touching in its majesty:This City now doth like a garment wearThe beauty of the morning; silent, bare.Ships,towers, domes, theatres and temples lieOpen unto the fields and to the sky,All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Here the far-seeing eyes of the fellsman, gazing at distant horizons, cut through the grime and clatter of the metropolis, and see only the grandeur of the city.
The poet's famous friendship with Samuel Taylor Coleridge was to be nurtured,not in the Lake District, but on the Quantock Hills of Somerset, with William moving down in 1797 to the village of Alfoxden, close to Coleridge's home. And Wordsworth's special gift of extracting particular beauty from a landscape, far from the Lakes, is again exemplified in the following lines:
Five years have passed; five summers, with the lengthOf five long winters! and again I hearThese waters, rolling from their mountain springsWith a sweet inland murmur – Once againDo I behold these steep and lofty cliffs … … How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee,O sylvan Wye! Thou wanderer through the woods,How often has my spirit turned to thee!
William Wordsworth was born on the 7 April 1770 at the town of Cockermouth on the River Derwent – not far from Keswick. His parents were John and Ann– John holding the occupation of law agent to the local dignitary, Sir James Lowther. The family lived in the house which was built in 1745 for the Sheriff of Northumberland, and it was to prove a well-loved home and anchorage for the five Wordsworth children. Nourished by his father's extensive library and his mother's love of nature, the young William flourished in an atmosphere where learning and the spiritual life were never far away. It seemed to be a comfortable childhood, with a literary talent and artistic temperament forming in William's personality from the earliest age. Even as a young schoolboy,John's clever son was able to recite lengthy passages from Shakespeare and Milton – a talent which could not have passed unnoticed among William's schoolmasters.
A year after William had come into the world, his sister Dorothy was born,and it proved to be an extremely close relationship, interrupted only when William married in 1802. Brother and sister were to live together and share the same interests, with Dorothy helping William with his poetry, keeping house, and deriving the same stimulation from their literary friendships. This unusually close tie between brother and sister must have derived from the tragedies which struck the happy Wordsworth home in the years 1778 and 1783: the deaths of their mother and father respectively, and the breaking up of the family.
Unable to cope with the demands of a young family after Ann's death, John Wordsworth sent all four of his boys away to school at Hawkshead, and astonishing though it may seem, William would not see his sister for several years. The young man immersed himself in his books, and Hawkshead became very dear to him – an institution that assumed the roles of mother, father,guardian and mentor. It was also to provide a solid educational grounding, with William gaining a place at Cambridge as a result. But conventional, cloistered academic life was not entirely to his taste, and he began to look at the wider world, seeking out the excitement and stimulation of revolutionary France –a romantic image of equality and liberty – and of the great scenic vistas of Europe. He was enthralled by what he saw, and later fell in with political figures such as Thomas Paine, author of The Rights of Man, a text that was then considered dangerous and seditious propaganda.
By 1798, Wordsworth and Coleridge had published their Lyrical Ballads,which came to symbolise the creed of the new generation of poets. Both men wanted to turn their backs on what they regarded as the emotionally suppressed world of the eighteenth century. In their preface to this work, they stated that the poet must choose "incidents and situations from common life", and that poetry needed to draw inspiration from the natural and rustic. Wordsworth's decision to embrace this philosophy has supplied us with a body of work which includes poems of transcendent beauty, as well as the familiar and colloquial. Take, for example, an extract from The Waggoner, which describes a pub landlord and his sign:
Who does not know the famous SWAN?Object uncouth! And yet our boast, for it was painted by the Host;His own conceit the figure planned,'twas coloured all by his own hand;And that frail Child of thirsty clay,Of which I sing this rustic lay,Could tell with self-dissatisfactionQuaint stories of the bird's attraction!
The subject of the common man is handled with affection and amusement; but it is when Wordsworth raises his eyes to the fells that he truly achieves immortality:
The solid mountains shone, bright as the clouds,Grain-tinctured,drenched in empyrean light;And in the meadows and the lower groundsWas all the sweetness of a common dawn.
In 1799, Coleridge, Wordsworth and his sister were living at what has become the best known of Wordsworth's homes, Dove Cottage, Grasmere. The intense friendship caused Dorothy to describe them as "three persons and one soul",but the spell was to be broken in 1802 when William married Mary Hutchinson– a girl who had actually been at school with him in Penrith. Dorothy was greatly affected by this and did not even attend the marriage ceremony. A year later, a child was born to William and his young wife – the first of five. It could have been that the new domestic life diluted elements of Wordsworth's earlier romanticism, not to mention his deep attachment to Coleridge – that great relationship finally dissolving in 1810 when it became clear that Samuel was destroying himself through drug addiction. Yet friendships related to poetry and literature were still vitally important, as Wordsworth's growing contacts with Scott and Southey (later to be Poet Laureate) clearly testified.
In 1804 Wordsworth received a devastating blow, which dramatically affected his radical beliefs. Napoleon had crowned himself Emperor of France, and in so doing had betrayed the faith of many young artists across Europe. The act was enough to cause Beethoven to tear the dedication to Napoleon from the score of the Third Symphony. Gradually, Wordsworth returned to his true roots, to a sense that the tried and tested (if imperfect) order was better than heady revolutionary theory – itself imperfect and unnatural. Could it have been that the memories of his school, his Lakeland childhood, and the settled order of his surroundings were among the subtle forces that pointed him towards a more conservative path? If so, the importance of landscape and personal memory to the creative process cannot be underestimated, a fact which many have discerned in The Prelude – a work which drew on Wordsworth's earliest experiences of life.
Wordsworth was to leave Dove Cottage, three years later, later settling at Rydal Mount, Ambleside, and he became every inch the conservative English countryman. He even took the post of Distributor of Stamps for Westmorland, his new persona causing much amusement and dismay among the radical circles in which he once moved! As middle-age approached, Wordsworth became even more of an establishment figure, gaining an Honorary Doctorate from Oxford University,meeting members of the Royal Family, and in 1843 succeeding Southey as Poet Laureate.
Wordsworth died in 1850, and Matthew Arnold declared: "The last poetic voice is dumb". But his poetry speaks to us today, and that is because its original inspiration is timeless. He moved in disparate circles, and received much information about the political and artistic movements of his day. Times change and these things are dust, but because he loved the landscape and had such great skill in divining its essence, any person that loves England is immediately inspired by his poetry.
