JOURNALISM

Wordsworth’s Lakes

This piece was the lead story for a feature on the Lake District in the British Tourist Authority’s magazine
In Britain. Because it was aimed at tourists who weren’t necessarily poetry lovers, I thought I’d better use the poet’s most famous poem as a starting point. After that it was fairly plain sailing because I know both the poetry and the Lakes fairly well…

More than any other English poet, the work of William Wordsworth is associated with one area – the Lake District. In fact his influence in promoting the popularity and allure of this district has been so powerful that, were he alive today, there’s no doubt that he would be able to earn a comfortable living working for the local Tourist Board.

Of course, to the intense, radical young poet whose work proved so inspirational, the idea would have been preposterous. Yet his best poetry is infused with an almost evangelical zeal to recapture and share the joyful experiences of his Lakeland childhood. He wanted to show that, when deeply felt, the nature of this dramatic and beautiful countryside goes far beyond the simply picturesque into a magical realm whose lingering power can be both uplifting and restorative.

For most readers the doorway to an understanding of Wordsworth’s world is the justly famed though over-quoted, I wandered lonely as a cloud… It was certainly the first Wordsworth poem that I ever read, though as a child just coming to terms with the fact of my famous ancestor, The Daffodils became for me, something of a millstone. On the one hand adults expected word-perfect recitals, on the other, school friends would gleefully trot out vulgar parodies!

But despite all this, The Daffodils is still the easiest way into Wordsworth’s central philosophy. It encapsulates the twin ideas of firstly delighting in an experience and subsequently recalling it in a moment of tranquillity:

For oft, while 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.

The original incident, which occurred during a visit to Ullswater, is also recorded by the poet’s devoted sister Dorothy in her Journal. The weather, it seems, on Thursday April 15th 1802, was not clement: “The wind seized our breath and the Lake was rough,” Dorothy wrote. But later came the revelation. “I never saw daffodils so beautiful, they grew among the mossy stones about and about them, some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness and the rest tossed and reeled and danced and it seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the lake, they looked so gay ever glancing ever changing…”

Though not intended for publication, Dorothy’s Journals paint an exquisite picture of the life and times of the Wordsworths and their talented circle – which included the poet Robert Southey, the writers Thomas de Quincey and Charles Lamb, and above all, fellow Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whom Wordsworth described as “the most wonderful man I ever knew.” As well as the dazzling descriptions, the Journals contain a wealth of domestic detail and – very necessary for a family that spent so much time outside – constant reports on weather conditions.

For the Wordsworths and Coleridge were fine examples of the outdoor life. Quite simply, they walked everywhere. When STC lived in Keswick, some 13 miles from their home at Dove Cottage in Grasmere, the Wordsworths made frequent visits, there and back on the same day. And there were walking trips to almost every part of the Lake District, most of which made their mark on both the Journals and William’s poetry.

Even the mysterious Lucy poems, which were written during a walking holiday in Germany, feel deeply rooted in the Lakeland experience:

A slumber did my spirit seal;

I had no human fears:

She seemed a thing that could not feel

The touch of earthly years.

No motion has she now, no force;

She neither hears nor sees;

Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course,

With rocks, and stones, and trees.

Coleridge too, responded to the magic of the Lakes, though perhaps in a slightly more literary manner. In one of his most beautiful poems, Frost at Midnight, he predicts that, unlike himself who was reared in “the great city, pent ‘mid cloisters dim”, his sleeping child will…

… wander like a breeze

By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags

Of ancient mountains, and beneath the clouds,

Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores

And mountain crags…

But despite this romantic picture, life at Grasmere in the early 1800s was not easy for the Wordsworths. Money was scarce, food very basic and their health often suffered. The Journals are full of references to William, Coleridge or herself being “unwell” and to William’s persistent insomnia. On the simplicity of their diet there is a rather unkind story concerning a visit by Sir Walter Scott – a man of considerably greater means than the poet. Tired of a constant diet of porridge, yet unwilling to offend the Wordsworths, Sir Walter climbed out of the window early one morning to sneak a hearty breakfast at the local inn, before returning unnoticed to his bed!

Today, conditions in the Lakes are rather less Spartan and transportation is certainly easier. Most of the important houses in the poet’s life still exist and many are open to the public. They also provide excellent staging points for deeper forays into Wordsworth’s beautiful countryside.

For the poet’s best memorial lies in the poetry itself and in the hills and lakes, skies and streams which inspired it. For William, the urge to wander had started young. In The Prelude, he writes:

… My morning walks

Were early – oft before the hours of school

I travelled round our little lake, five miles

Of pleasant wandering. Happy time!

Later in the same passage he seeks to rediscover this state of happiness:

How shall I seek the origin? Where find

Faith in the marvellous things which then I felt?

For me, The Prelude is the key to a deeper understanding of Wordsworth’s poetry. Started in the 1790s and continually revised throughout the poet’s life, it’s an extraordinary poem, perhaps unique in its exploration of a poet’s emotional and creative development. It’s also full of vivid descriptions:

…a boy I loved the sun

Not as I since have loved him…

But for this cause, that I had seen him lay

His beauty on the morning hills, had seen

The western mountains touch his setting orb

In many a thoughtless hour, when from excess

Of happiness, my blood appeared to flow

For its own pleasure and I breathed with joy.

Earlier in the poem Wordsworth rejoices that he is now away from the “vast city, where I had long pined”….

Free as a bird to settle where I will.

What dwelling shall receive me? In what vale

Shall be my harbour? Underneath what grove