RADICAL WORDSWORTH
The Poet Who Changed the World
Jonathan Bate

Copyright

William Collins

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WilliamCollinsBooks.com

This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2020

Copyright © Jonathan Bate 2020

Cover: Wordsworth portrait: Getty Images; Trees: Flickr Creative Commons.

Cover design by Jack Smyth

Jonathan Bate asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780008167424

Ebook Edition © April 2020 ISBN: 9780008167431

Version: 2020-03-11

Dedication

for Mark Lussier

In one of those excursions (may they ne’er

Fade from remembrance!) through the Northern tracts

Of Cambria, ranging with a youthful friend,

I left Bethgelert’s huts at couching-time,

And westward took my way, to see the sun

Rise from the top of Snowdon …

and Christopher Ridgway

beloved Friend,

When, looking back, thou seest in clearer view

Than any sweetest sight of yesterday

That summer when on Quantock’s grassy hills

Far ranging, and among the sylvan coombs

Thou in delicious words with happy heart

Didst speak …

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Map

List of Illustrations

Preface

PRELUDE

1. The Epoch

PART ONE

1770–1806: BLISS WAS IT IN THAT DAWN TO BE ALIVE

2. A Voice that Flowed Along my Dreams

3. Fostered

4. There was a Boy

5. Walking into Revolution

6. Two Revolutionary Women

7. But to be Young was Very Heaven

8. Stepping Westward

9. A New Spirit in Poetry

10. The Banks of the Wye

11. The Experiment

12. Lucy in the Harz with Dorothy

13. By W. Wordsworth

14. Home at Grasmere

15. The Child is Father of the Man

EXCURSION

16. From New School to Lake School

PART TWO

1807–1850: WORDSWORTH’S HEALING POWER

17. Surprised by Grief

18. This will never do

19. Among the Cockneys

20. The Lost Leader

21. A Medicine for my State of Mind

RETROSPECT

22. A Sort of National Property

23. Love of Nature Leading to Love of Mankind

Picture Section

Chronology

Suggestions for Further Reading

Footnote

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by Jonathan Bate

About the Publisher

MAP

WORDSWORTH’S LAKE DISTRICT

ILLUSTRATIONS
FRONTISPIECE

Early twentieth-century map of ‘Wordsworthshire’ (author’s collection)

PORTRAITS

Wordsworth in 1798, the year of Lyrical Ballads, portrait by William Shuter (Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library)

Wordsworth around the time of the completion of The Prelude, pencil drawing by Henry Edridge (by permission of the Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere)

Wordsworth in 1817, portrait by Richard Carruthers (by permission of the Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere)

Wordsworth in Benjamin Robert Haydon’s Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem, beside Newton and Voltaire, with Keats behind (photograph from the author’s collection)

Wordsworth on Helvellyn, painted by Benjamin Robert Haydon in 1842 (© National Portrait Gallery, London)

Max Beerbohm, Wordsworth in the Lake District, at Cross-purposes (author’s collection)

PLACES

Birthplace: the family home in Cockermouth as it is today (author’s collection)

Jean Duplessis-Bertaux, Storming of the Tuileries Palace on 10 August 1792: Wordsworth witnessed the aftermath (public domain)

Alfoxden as it is today (author’s collection)

Dove Cottage as it was when Wordsworth lived there (by permission of the Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere)

Rydal Mount in Wordsworth’s time (photograph from the author’s collection)

PEOPLE

Annette, presumed miniature portrait (photograph from the author’s collection)

Dorothy as a young woman, miniature portrait (photograph © Bonhams)

Dorothy in old age, portrait by Samuel Crosthwaite, photographed in the early twentieth century by Christopher Wordsworth (courtesy of the Wordsworth family, Rydal Mount)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, portrait after James Northcote (by permission of the Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere)

The New School: detail from James Gillray’s caricature New Morality (author’s collection)

The wedding ring and Dorothy’s journal entry for her brother’s wedding day (by permission of the Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere)

Charles Lamb by William Hazlitt (© National Portrait Gallery, London)

The lost children: presumed drawing of Thomas and Catharine (by permission of the Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere)

William and Mary in old age (by permission of the Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere)

POEMS AND THEIR INSPIRATION

Title page of Lyrical Ballads, 1798 (public domain)

The Quantocks today, with thorn tree, lonesome road and view towards the Bristol Channel, from where it was feared that the French might invade (author’s collection)

Symonds Yat today, a few miles above Tintern Abbey, with woods, sylvan river, steep and lofty cliffs (author’s collection)

Wordsworth’s skates (by permission of the Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere)

‘Perfect Contentment, Unity entire’: the vale of Grasmere (© Kevin Eames / Dreamstime.com)

Sir George Beaumont’s painting of Piel Castle (by permission of the Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere)

Original Goslar manuscript of ‘There was a Boy’ (by permission of the Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere; photograph by the author)

Title page of first American edition of The Prelude, 1850 (author’s collection)

PREFACE

Rádical. adj. [radical, Fr. from radix, Latin.]

1. Primitive; original.

2. Implanted by nature.

3. Serving to origination.

(Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, 1755)

I first went to the Lake District for a family holiday in 1969, when I was eleven. My favourite photograph in the family album is a faded Kodak snapshot in which I am grinning beside my brother and my father (sprightly, happy and youthful-looking, though nearly sixty) on top of Helvellyn, the third-highest mountain in England, with the precipitous Striding Edge snaking below us. The next day we visited Dove Cottage, a few miles down the road in Grasmere. That was my introduction to William Wordsworth. I was amazed that anyone could live and write in rooms so small and dark. A few years later, at school, where I was privileged to have great teachers, we studied the ‘Lucy’ poems and ‘Tintern Abbey’. I worked my way through my father’s blue hardback Oxford edition of the complete poems, purchased in 1939, not long before he went from schoolmastering to soldiering. It had tiny print in double columns and a curious arrangement in categories such as ‘Poems referring to the Period of Childhood’, ‘Poems founded on the Affections’, ‘Poems on the Naming of Places’, ‘Poems of the Fancy’ and ‘Poems of the Imagination’.

I discovered that Wordsworth had written a vast number of poems. Every now and then I would find a sequence or a single image that made my heart leap up. But there were great swathes of pomposity and turgidity. I asked myself how a poet who could be so good could also be so bad. Later, I would discover and relish a sonnet by Virginia Woolf’s cousin J. K. Stephen, an underrated poet who suffered, like her, from what we now call bipolar disorder. Parodying a grandiloquent sonnet by the man himself which begins ‘Two voices are there; one is of the Sea, / One of the Mountains; each a mighty Voice’,[1] Stephen identified a distinctly bipolar quality in Wordsworth’s imagination:

Two voices are there: one is of the deep;

It learns the storm-cloud’s thunderous melody,

Now roars, now murmurs with the changing sea,

Now bird-like pipes, now closes soft in sleep:

And one is of an old half-witted sheep

Which bleats articulate monotony,

And indicates that two and one are three,

That grass is green, lakes damp, and mountains steep:

And, Wordsworth, both are thine.[2]

‘Articulate monotony’ is a brilliant phrase. Start with the wrong Wordsworth poems and he will indeed seem ponderous, pedantic, verbose. You will never want to read him again. Do not on any account begin with ‘To the Spade of a Friend’ or the Ecclesiastical Sonnet on American Episcopacy.

Meanwhile, I puzzled over some of those categories: what was the difference between the Fancy and the Imagination? My teacher told me that the answer to that question was to be found in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, and soon the figures of Wordsworth and Coleridge became inseparable in my fancy, as they have been in the imagination of generations of readers. Then at university, when I reread Wordsworth’s poems in chronological order, I began to see that the tangled history of his relationship with Coleridge might provide a large part of the answer to my question of how someone who was so good could be so bad.

During the 1980s, I wrote a doctoral thesis about Wordsworth and Coleridge, and their successors Keats and Hazlitt, as readers of Shakespeare. I also had the good fortune to be a tutor on the Wordsworth Summer Conference, the brainchild of Richard Wordsworth, an actor best known for his role in the cult 1950s science fiction horror film The Quatermass Xperiment. He was the poet’s great-great-grandson. This was a conference unlike any other: it lasted for two weeks and, while the mornings and early evenings were devoted to suitably academic lectures, seminars and learned papers, the afternoons were spent hiking the fells. As a tutor, one had to be as adept with a compass and an Ordnance Survey map as with an edition of Wordsworth and the latest literary theoretical jargon. Every morning at 7.30 there was a brisk three-mile walk around Grasmere lake, led by Richard, as fleet of foot in his seventies as my father had been in his sixties and as Wordsworth himself must have been when he ascended Helvellyn at the age of seventy.

I had one frustration as a tutor then, and I still have it today: the desire to give to students – and indeed to anybody who raises an eyebrow when the poet’s name is mentioned and the only word that comes to mind is ‘daffodils’ – a not overlong and not overspecialized book that would make them excited about Wordsworth. He has always lacked the glamour of Coleridge, De Quincey and Byron: he was neither opium addict nor ‘mad, bad, and dangerous to know’.[3] He lacked, too, the pathos of Keats, Shelley and John Clare: he failed to make the romantic career move of dying young or going mad. If you try to read a comprehensive account of his entire fourscore years, the chances are that you will lose the will to live somewhere around the halfway mark. Two of the more recent biographies of him, published in 1998 and 2000, are each 1,000 pages long – and one of them covers only the first half of his life.[4] For all their scholarship and their sympathy, they reproduce one of Wordsworth’s faults, namely the prolixity that was mocked by Lord Byron:

And Wordsworth, in a rather long ‘Excursion’

(I think the quarto holds five hundred pages),

Has given a sample from the vasty version

Of his new system to perplex the sages.[5]

The book I wanted to share was one that was not 1,000 pages long and that explained several things at once, without getting bogged down in too much detail: how the first half of Wordsworth’s life was such an extraordinary adventure and the second half so dull; why the poetry of the first half is so memorable, that of the second so forgettable; why William Hazlitt called his genius ‘a pure emanation of the Spirit of the Age’; why he provoked both excoriation and adulation in the next generation; why the Victorians had no hesitation in regarding him as the only modern poet to stand in the company of Shakespeare and Milton. A book, above all, about how Wordsworth made a difference.

After all these years I have still not found a book that not only outlines the story of the man and examines the best of his work, but also places him in the context of his revolutionary age and traces the vicissitudes of his reputation. So I have attempted it myself, in the belief that a selective account of the journey from the visions and experiences that made him a poet to the rays of influence that made him a force in cultural history will reveal why his words are still worth reading two and a half centuries after his birth.

The role of literary as opposed to historical biography should be to discern and seek to explain the distinctive qualities of the subject’s imaginative power. Why else should one bother to write, or read, the life of a poet? Wordsworth’s best early readers, most notably Coleridge in his Biographia Literaria; or, My Literary Life and Opinions and William Hazlitt in his essays, recognized this and accordingly mingled biographical recollection with literary critical analysis, supported by ample quotation. Some of Hazlitt’s essays and reviews give more space to the words of his subject than to his own opinions. I have followed the example of these two in quoting amply from Wordsworth, not only because they wrote as eyewitnesses but also because they are my touchstones of literary insight. I therefore have, to adopt a phrase that Wordsworth used in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads, ‘one request I must make of my reader’. Sometimes when we encounter blocks of indented quotation as we read a biography or historical work, we skate past them or half-consciously speed the reading eye. When you come in this book to a passage of Wordsworth’s poetry or his sister Dorothy’s prose, or of Coleridge or Hazlitt, please do the opposite: slow down and savour their words. Better still, read them aloud. And, as Wordsworth asked, in ‘judging these Poems’, decide by your ‘own feelings genuinely, and not by reflection upon what will probably be the judgement of others’.[6]

*

He was always a mountaineer, so perhaps the conquest of some vast peak is the best metaphor for his life story. Imagine it as thirty-six years of arduous but exhilarating ascent to the summit that was reached with the completion and reading aloud of the epic work that he called his ‘Poem to Coleridge’ and that his family would publish as The Prelude. After a moment of rest, there would be forty-four years of crawling descent. Any fell-walker will tell you that the joy of the downward journey comes from its speed – as a young man I used to run down the scree slopes, footpaths and sheep-mown grass of Wordsworth’s native hills. There is nothing more boring than a gradual decline. So it is that the long life of Wordsworth tails off into monotony.

This book accordingly offers only a lightning sketch of the second half of Wordsworth’s life. In the spirit of The Prelude, it concentrates on the formative years of youth. For this reason, my title is Radical Wordsworth. The word ‘radical’ is derived from Latin radix, a root. In Wordsworth’s time, it denoted the essential nature of a thing: this book is a quest for the roots, the fundamentals, of Wordsworth’s genius. An organic metaphor is fitting for the man who was more rooted in the natural world than any previous poet. Also fittingly, the word ‘radical’ began to take on a new meaning in the early nineteenth century: it became a synonym for ‘Jacobinical’, used (pejoratively) to denote an English supporter of the French Revolution.

There are other biographies – I especially recommend those of Mary Moorman and Stephen Gill[7] – that walk through his whole story in a straight line from womb to tomb in a steady tread reminiscent of the way in which, according to William Hazlitt’s account, he composed his verse: ‘Coleridge has told me that he himself liked to compose in walking over uneven ground, or breaking through the straggling branches of a copse-wood; whereas Wordsworth always wrote (if he could) walking up and down a straight gravel-walk, or in some spot where the continuity of his verse met with no collateral interruption.’[8] The gravel-walk suited the steady beat of Wordsworth’s blank-verse iambic pentameter, but he did not think that human life progresses in a straight line. One of his controlling metaphors in the poem to Coleridge and elsewhere is that of the river or stream, flowing onwards but sometimes looping back on itself, sometimes meandering while at other times rushing in a torrent. A Wordsworthian biography of Wordsworth will be more like a stream of consciousness than a march from cradle to grave.

It will also acknowledge that his life – any life – is shaped more by key moments than quotidian routine. As he explained in The Prelude,

There are in our existence spots of time

Which with distinct pre-eminence retain

A fructifying virtue, whence, depressed

By trivial occupations and the round

Of ordinary intercourse, our minds

(Especially the imaginative power)

Are nourished, and invisibly repaired.[9]

Too often, biographies of Wordsworth have been depressed by trivial occupations and the round of ordinary intercourse. Those are not the things that inspire great poetry. This biography, by contrast, focuses on the spots of time which with distinct pre-eminence fructified, nourished and repaired his imaginative power. It is deliberately fragmentary, momentary, selective. It seeks to open what in book eleven of the poem to Coleridge, which concerns ‘Imagination, how impaired and restored’, he called ‘the hiding-places of my power’.[10]

PRELUDE

A sort of experience like the effect of lightning …

(Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Notebooks, late December 1806)

1
THE EPOCH

Christmas 1806. Coleorton, Leicestershire.

He was a long way from the rivers, lakes and mountains of his northern boyhood. A long way, too, from the rolling green hills of the West Country Quantocks where he and his new friend had planned the collection of poems that would come to mark a turning point in literary history. The eastern Midlands of England, all coalfields and low-lying farmland, was not his natural domain. He was there with his family – wife Mary, sister Dorothy, sister-in-law Sara, son Johnny, daughter Dora and new baby Tommy – at a place called Hall Farm. A generous patron, Sir George Beaumont, had given him a sanctuary for the winter of his thirty-seventh year.

Just before Christmas, the friend arrived. Samuel Taylor Coleridge: overweight, addicted to opium and alcohol, he had recently returned from a long stint in a warmer climate where he had sought to repair his health. He was in the midst of a marital crisis. After weeks of characteristic procrastination, he had left his wife Sara and two young children at the home in the Lake District that they shared with fellow poet Robert Southey and his family (Southey’s wife Edith was Sara Coleridge’s sister). Coleridge was magnetically drawn to the Wordsworth household not only because of the friendship that had led to the co-written poetry collection Lyrical Ballads, but also because he was irredeemably and unrequitedly in love with Sara Hutchinson, William’s sister-in-law.

Now he was here at Hall Farm, bringing along his eldest child, ten-year-old Hartley, named after the philosopher David Hartley. There was room enough. The house had three bedrooms on the first floor, and more on the second. The five adults and four children shared a spiced pudding on Christmas Day, Dorothy’s birthday.

Wordsworth had a treat for Coleridge and the three women, all of whom loved him in different ways. On the twelve days of Christmas, and for one day beyond, the family gathered around the fireplace in the drawing room to the right of the front door and listened to him reading a blank-verse composition in thirteen books, dedicated to his newly returned friend.[1] It was unlike anything heard before in the history of poetry.

The oldest and most revered form of Western poetry is epic. This is where Western culture began: the stories of the demigods in Gilgamesh, of the heroes in The Iliad and The Odyssey. This was the great tradition in which students were drilled through the centuries: the origins of ancient Rome in the Aeneid of Virgil, the myths of antiquity in the Metamorphoses of Ovid, the Fall of Man in the Paradise Lost of John Milton. In what may well have been the boldest act of chutzpah in literary history, Wordsworth wrote his epic poem not about heroes and gods, not about his nation, not about the spiritual story of humankind from Genesis to Revelation, but about himself. The most ancient of poetic forms was made new and made personal, turned inward to address the growth of the poet’s own self.

An epic customarily begins in medias res, in the middle of things. Our story accordingly begins at this moment, with the poem ready to be shared. Imagine that we are listening to Wordsworth’s voice as he reads his newly minted work to his immediate circle. See them gathered around the fire on a winter evening, deep in the English countryside: the women who have supported him and who are contributing so much to his vision, and the troubled friend who has inspired him to tell in verse the story of his early life.

A new year is about to dawn, but a special trust is about to die.

*

Wordsworth spoke with ‘a deep guttural intonation, and a strong tincture of the northern burr, like the crust on wine’.[2] He began:

Oh there is blessing in this gentle breeze

That blows from the green fields and from the clouds

And from the sky: it beats against my cheek

And seems half conscious of the joy it gives.[3]

The breeze was like an instrument carrying the music of nature to his inner self. Soon he was transporting them back from the eastern lowlands to the Lake District in the north-west of England that was their spiritual home.

In the first two books he told of childhood and school time, of stealing eggs from the nests of birds, of rowing an illicitly borrowed boat beneath a towering crag, and of his skates hissing along the polished ice of a lake at night. Then, in the third to fifth books, of university, summer vacation and the influence of books. In the sixth he recalled a walking tour that had taken him across the Alps and in the seventh he tracked his residence in London after going down from Cambridge. Book eight was a philosophical retrospect, entitled ‘Love of Nature leading to Love of Mankind’.

And then he plunged into an account of how he had literally walked into the French Revolution and become an ‘enthusiast’ for the cause. By that winter of 1806–7, however, he had lost faith in the radical politics of his youth. One motivation for writing the poem to Coleridge was to capture before it faded into total oblivion the feeling of hope, of a blissful new dawn for society, that had animated him back in the early 1790s.

On he read, night after night, by firelight and flickering candle, concluding with a vision beheld on the summit of mount Snowdon in North Wales. This climactic memory led into an address to Coleridge asserting that the two of them, these young poets, their art still barely tested in the marketplace, would one day come to be seen as ‘Prophets of Nature’ with the power to offer humankind ‘A lasting inspiration sanctified / By reason and by truth’, a philosophy of the love of nature, and a blueprint for ‘how the mind of man’ may become ‘A thousand times more beautiful than the earth / On which he dwells’.[4]

Coleridge replied with a poem of his own. In his manuscript he called it ‘To W. Wordsworth. Lines Composed, for the greater part on the Night, on which he finished the recitation of his Poem (in thirteen Books) concerning the growth and history of his own Mind, Jan. 7, 1807, Cole-orton, near Ashby de la Zouch’.[5] It is a poem that makes astonishingly high claims for the work of his friend. Wordsworth is lauded as the first to tell in poetry of ‘the foundations and the building up / Of a Human Spirit’. The first to tell of how we are shaped by our childhood environment. Of how we emerge into political consciousness. And, in a magnificent phrase, of how we are eventually summoned homeward ‘From the dread watch-tower of man’s absolute self’ to a place in nature, a vision of the divine, and a sense of community. When ‘the long sustainéd Song finally closed’ and Wordsworth’s ‘deep voice’ fell silent, Coleridge looked at his friend, and at the three women gathered ‘round us both / That happy vision of beloved faces’, and then he rose and found himself ‘in prayer’. Poetry had taken on the holiness that had traditionally belonged to religious faith.

Wordsworth had three names for his work: ‘The Poem to Coleridge’, ‘The Poem on my own Life’ and ‘The Poem on the Growth of my own Mind’. But he never gave it a title and never published it. He continued to tinker with it for half a century between its modest beginnings in 1798 and his death at the age of eighty in 1850. For a long time, he conceived it to be a mere overture to a still longer work, which he never completed. That was why when his family saw it into print soon after he died, they gave it the title that has stuck: The Prelude. ‘The prelude to what?’, students will sometimes ask. The old joke among Wordsworthians is that he wrote a Prelude to his epic work and an Excursion from it, but never wrote the thing itself.

The alternative descriptions recorded on the title page of the first edition when it was finally published are more apt than the lead title: The Prelude, or Growth of a Poet’s Mind; An Autobiographical Poem. The growth of the subject’s mind: that is the most interesting dimension of any biographical endeavour. And an ‘autobiographical’ poem: the very word had been coined only a few years before. We might say that Wordsworth’s exploration of the growth of his own mind was and remains the original, the exemplary autobiographia literaria.

*

Wordsworth and Coleridge both began writing their best poetry when they met each other. They both stopped writing their best poetry when they fell out with one another. When and why did it all begin to go wrong?

Something else happened during that Christmas and New Year visit to Coleorton. Or may have happened. Coleridge scrawled an entry in giant capital letters in his notebook: ‘THE EPOCH’. He then gave a date and a place: ‘Saturday, 27th December, 1806 – Queen’s Head, Stringston, ½ a mile from Coleorton Church, 50 minutes after 10.’[6] It would appear that he had left Hall Farm in horror, crossed the fields and ended up in a pub in the village of Thringstone, where he sat down to drink and to write about what had happened. He was disorientated: I have followed in his footsteps across the fields to Thringstone from the church of St Mary the Virgin, Coleorton (which nestles beside Hall Farm) and it is a walk of three miles, not a mere half.

You can tell from the manuscript that Coleridge’s hand was shaking as he wrote. The following three leaves, which would have been densely written in his rapid penmanship, were later ripped from the notebook and destroyed. But their content can be inferred from a notebook entry written some months later, after Coleridge awoke from a dream of tears and an ‘anguish of involuntary Jealousy’. He poured out his unrequited love for ‘Asra’, Sara Hutchinson, describing it as the very ground of his identity: ‘Self in me derives its sense of Being from having this one absolute Object.’ Then he wrote of his thoughts of suicide. And then this:

O agony! O the vision of that Saturday Morning – of the Bed / – O cruel! is he not beloved, adored by two – & two such Beings – / and must I not be beloved near him except as a Satellite? – But o mercy mercy! is he not better, greater, more manly, & altogether more attractive to any the purest Woman? … W. is greater, better, manlier, more dear, by nature, to Woman, than I – I – miserable I! – but does he – O No! no! no! he does not – he does not pretend, he does not wish, to love you as I love you, Sara! – he does not love, he would not love, it is not the voice, not the duty of his nature, to love any being as I love you.[7]

Was it not enough for Wordsworth to be adored by his wife Mary and his sister Dorothy? Was he to be the lodestar of his sister-in-law Sara, too?

Some months later, Coleridge wrote again of ‘that miserable Saturday morning’. The thunderclouds had been gathering over his relationship with the Wordsworth household. The dreadful possibility that Asra might have been in love with William: he had been staring it in the face, then averting his eyes from it. Did she not brush off Coleridge when they were physically close to each other? ‘But a minute and a half with me and all the time restless & going.’ But with him: ‘An hour and more with Wordsworth – in bed – O agony!’[8] Wordsworth’s name was written here in a cipher using Greek characters, Coleridge’s way of shielding himself (and prying eyes) from intimate matters. The rest of the notebook entry is scored out.

Around the same time, Coleridge wrote a poem in Latin called ‘Ad Vilmum Axiologum’. ‘Ad Vilmum’: to William. ‘Axiologum’: a Latinized play on the Greek words for ‘words’ (logoi) and ‘worth[y]’ (axios). Like the generous verses written on hearing the recitation at Hall Farm, this is a poem ‘To William Wordsworth’. But it is very different in tone. A translation of the opening lines might read

Do you force me to endure Asra’s forgetting,

Make me see how she turns her eye from me,

Make me know that the one I’ll always love

Is false and cruel?

And the end: ‘My life is finished. Asra lives on, forgetting me.’[9] Thanks to Wordsworth, Asra is shown to be an ‘empty’ woman. She who was Coleridge’s everything has become nothing. In common with many of Coleridge’s poems, this one stitches together an assortment of literary borrowings, in particular some virulent and unpleasant lines about sexual infidelity from the Italian Renaissance poet Ludovico Ariosto.[10] It is hard to read the poem as anything other than an accusation against Wordsworth and Sara.

Could it really have been so? Perhaps the image of the pair of them in bed together was a bad dream or an opium-induced vision? That was how Coleridge rationalized it many years later: ‘Did I believe it? Did I not even Know, that it was not so, could not be so?’ Maybe the ‘horrid’ vision was ‘a mere phantasm’. ‘And yet what anguish, what gnawings of despair, what throbbings and lancinations of positive Jealousy.’[11] Many more years later, the image was still with him: one night in 1819, he dreamed of ‘Wordsworth and SH’ together, her ‘most beautiful breasts exposed’.[12] The frenzied exit to Thringstone and the enduring force of the memory feel too vivid for the whole thing to have been a mere imagining. Nor is it plausible that he was under the delusional influence of opium at the time: Dorothy had made a point of ensuring that there was no brandy in the house, so that Coleridge would not have the opportunity to mix a tincture of laudanum. It was presumably in order to find alcohol in which to dissolve a dose of opium that he headed across the fields to the tavern.

We will never know what Wordsworth and Sara were doing in bed together.[13] The innocent explanation would be that, though the weather that Christmas was unseasonably mild, Hall Farm was a chilly house. Bed was the obvious place to be on a December morning, in order to read together or look through the manuscript of the long autobiographical poem which Wordsworth was preparing to read aloud that evening. Sara had wonderfully clear handwriting and wrote the fairest copies of William’s poems. Coleridge did not stop to think that they might have been working together; instead, his memory fixated itself on Sara’s beautiful naked breasts.

Wordsworth was a man of strong passions, but there is no external evidence to support Coleridge’s perception that he had an affair with his sister-in-law, just as there is no warrant for the idea promoted by some modern critics that the love he bore for Dorothy might have been incestuous. Coleridge’s problem was that he could think of love only as something all-consuming. His own insecurity led to his self-perception as a mere ‘Satellite’ in the sphere of Wordsworth and the three women who supported him in his work. In a letter to his friend Henry Crabb Robinson, a poetry-loving lawyer who got to know nearly all the major authors of the age, Coleridge wrote that ‘Wordsworth is by nature incapable of being in Love, tho’ no man more tenderly attached – hence he ridicules the existence of any other passion than a compound of Lust with Esteem & Friendship, confined to one Object, first by accidents of Association, and permanently, by the force of Habit & a sense of Duty.’[14] Though the tone of this is negative, Coleridge grants that a compound of lust with esteem and friendship is actually an excellent recipe for an enduring relationship. The Wordsworthian attitude whereby initial sexual desire is subsequently married to respect and companionship will, Coleridge continues, make for ‘a good Husband’ and a happy life. That is indeed what Wordsworth achieved. Perhaps, though, at the cost of his continued creativity.

There is, says Coleridge, contrasting his own state of mind to Wordsworth’s tender attachments, ‘such a passion as Love – which is no more a compound than Oxygen’. Coleridge was in close touch with the science of his time: only a few years had passed since Joseph Priestley had demonstrated that oxygen was not a compound and Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles, had popularized its chemical name in his poem The Botanic Garden. For Coleridge, love was oxygen, a pure element, uncontaminated by anything so mundane as ‘Esteem & Friendship’. One of his poems was called ‘Constancy to an Ideal Object’, another ‘Love and Friendship Opposite’. He wanted Asra, his ideal object, to be constant to him as he vowed he would be to her (having failed to be constant to his wife, the other Sara). And he wanted her to be an all-consuming lover, not a friend. He wanted all or nothing. To use the terms of the novel that Jane Austen published during the very year of this letter to Crabb Robinson, Coleridge was in thrall to ‘sensibility’, whereas Wordsworth lived and loved with ‘sense’. Coleridge was Marianne Dashwood to Wordsworth’s Elinor.

Aching with his passion for Asra, Coleridge could not abide the sight of Wordsworth so ‘tenderly attached’ to his wife, his sister, his sister-in-law and his children. But he was again and again drawn back to the home and family that they offered him. Later in the day, he returned from the Queen’s Head. The Wordsworths, for now, were patient. There were probably some stern words, or at least looks, with regard to his drinking and his moodiness. But nothing seems to have been said about the morning encounter, if indeed it ever happened. Over the following evenings, they huddled together around the fireplace in the drawing room and listened to the poet as, with his North Country burr, he read the 8,000 lines of the

POEM

TITLE NOT YET FIXED UPON

BY

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

ADDRESSED TO

S. T. COLERIDGE

A breach had been opened in the friendship, but for now it was healed by the sharing of poetry as together they inaugurated an epoch in the history of the modern self.

PART ONE
1770–1806: BLISS WAS IT IN THAT DAWN TO BE ALIVE

Mr Wordsworth’s genius is a pure emanation of the Spirit of the Age

(William Hazlitt)

2
A VOICE THAT FLOWED ALONG MY DREAMS

The poem he read to Coleridge on those winter nights in Sir George Beaumont’s farmhouse had its origin some eight years earlier. Wordsworth, his sister Dorothy and Coleridge had gone to Germany, ostensibly to learn the language. Coleridge had been urging Wordsworth to write a philosophical epic. Wordsworth was meditating upon his poetic vocation. The question of his destiny led him to think of his origins, and that was where he began:

Was it for this

That one, the fairest of all rivers, loved

To blend his murmurs with my nurse’s song,

And from his alder shades and rocky falls,

And from his fords and shallows, sent a voice

That flowed along my dreams?[1]

Wordsworthian questions may convey a sense of doubt and hesitation, a sense of wonder and surprise, or sometimes both at once. Was it for this? Negatively: for being stuck in Germany, far from home, suffering from writer’s block on a project that I don’t really believe in, but that I cannot give up on because Coleridge believes that it is my destiny to be the greatest philosophical poet of the age, the true successor to John Milton. Positively: perhaps it was for this, the act of writing, the very thing that I am writing now, that I was born. A poetic vision that would indeed become philosophical, but that begins in memory, in home, in nature and in childhood.

A vision that begins with the river Derwent flowing beside the garden wall of the house in Cockermouth where he was born. With the musical murmur of that river. If you are lucky enough to be born beside a river – especially in a world without the hum of traffic and electricity, let alone the white noise of modern communications – the sound of its water will be a constant under-presence to your childhood, heard below the bedtime lullabies, through the drift into sleep and on into your dreams. The river speaks and asks the nascent poet to respond in lines that will flow in blank verse across the line endings: ‘Was it for this / That’, ‘loved / To blend’, ‘a voice / That flowed’. The river Derwent was his first muse.

His birthplace, now owned by the National Trust, is elegant and imposing, Georgian architecture at its best, bathed in light by way of eight large sashed windows on the lower floor and nine on the upper. There were spacious, wood-panelled rooms and ample quarters for family servants. The children’s bedroom was at the back of the house, looking out on the well-stocked garden that led down to a terraced path by the Derwent. When you open the window, you hear the water. There is a rocky patch on the bed of the river as it flows past the house, causing the water to eddy and to murmur a little louder.

A new build in an old community, this was, and still is, the most handsome dwelling on the main street of Cockermouth, an ancient market town on the north-west fringe of the English Lake District, dominated by a partially ruined Norman castle. The house belonged to a man said to be the richest landowner in England: Sir James Lowther. He was variously known as ‘Wicked Jimmy’, ‘the Bad Earl’, the ‘Tyrant of the North’ and ‘Jimmy Grasp-all, Earl of Toadstool’. As well as his rural estates, he owned whole towns, coal mines and the harbour at Whitehaven, the second-busiest port in the land and an engine room of the northern economy. He was master of all he surveyed, exercising control over nine seats in Parliament.

Wordsworth’s grandfather Richard had been law-agent for Lowther’s properties and dealings in Westmorland until Richard’s death in 1760. Wordsworth’s father John followed in the family footsteps, training in the law and then entering the service of the Lowthers. In 1764, John Wordsworth was made responsible for their estates in Cumberland (the Lake District is now in ‘Cumbria’, but it was then two counties, Westmorland on the Pennine side, Cumberland towards the sea). Lowther installed his agent in the impressive house on Cockermouth high street so that everybody would know that his man was someone to be reckoned with.

Eighteenth-century England was a place where property was power. Without it, you couldn’t even vote. If you committed a crime against property – poaching, trespass, petty theft – your punishment would be severe. Most of the English land was owned by the all-powerful families of the aristocracy and the gentry, though with some important exceptions, among them the remoter parts of the Lake District. The traditional role for the steward and law-agent of a great landowner was to oversee the estates, collect rents and handle disputes. But John Wordsworth was also tasked with the work of ensuring that eligible voters turned out to support the Lowther interest at election time. To maintain the family’s supremacy in the region, it was necessary to keep all those parliamentary boroughs in their pocket. Some votes were openly bought, but most were ‘canvassed’ by way of the supply of free alcohol. The biggest election expense was the reimbursement of innkeepers, who provided drinks on the house through the several days of polling, in return for the assurance of a vote for their patron. Following the 1774 election, John Wordsworth had to settle a bill just a few shillings short of £200, for ‘Victuals and Liquor consumed during the course of the poll’.[2] That is about £30,000 or $40,000 in today’s money.

The role of Lowther’s agent did not make for popularity. When John Wordsworth’s only daughter was a teenager, she complained that ‘it is indeed mortifying to my Brothers and me to find that amongst all those who visited at my father’s house he had not one real friend’.[3] The only callers were there on business or trying to gain influence with Lowther. One would have expected Mr Wordsworth to be well remunerated for such work. He was not. The house came rent-free, but he had no formal contract or salary. Instead, he was rewarded with interests of his own, such as the tolls on cattle gates and rents on small parcels of land. His financial dependence on his master would become a huge problem for his children.

The year after arriving in Cockermouth, John Wordsworth, now twenty-five, married eighteen-year-old Ann Cookson, daughter of a linendraper from another market town, Penrith, in the east of Cumberland. Within six years, there were five children: firstborn son Richard, the responsible one, destined to become a lawyer like his father; William, born two years later, on 7 April 1770, a temperamental child, the only one his mother ever worried about; Dorothy, the only daughter, born on Christmas Day of 1771; the following December, John, adored by William and Dorothy, ‘from his earliest infancy of most lonely and retired habits’, and therefore known by his father as ‘Ibex’, after ‘the shyest of all the beasts’;[4] then finally, in 1774, Christopher, the scholarly one, who would rise to the supreme position in the academic world, master of Trinity College, Cambridge.

The woman’s role was to nurture her children in the Christian faith. At Easter, they would troop to church to say their catechism, dressed in fresh clothes. One of William’s few memories of his mother had her pinning to his breast a nosegay of flowers that she had picked and bound for the occasion. With her husband away from home, riding the county on Lowther business, Ann often sent the children to relatives for a change of air. John’s elder brother, Richard, was Collector of Customs in the port of Whitehaven. On their first sight of the sea, little Dorothy wept. In old age, William would say that this was the first sign of her remarkable ‘sensibility’.[5] On the beach, they picked up shells and took them back to Cockermouth, holding the hollows to their ear and hearing the sound of the sea.

The children also made long visits to Penrith, staying above the linen shop with their mother’s parents, whom they found grumpy and critical. This encouraged a rebellious streak in William. He had a temper. Once, he recalled, he was so angry at being told off for some trivial offence that he went up to his grandparents’ attic and picked up one of the swords that he knew were kept there, with the intention of killing himself. On another occasion, he and his older brother Richard were whipping their spinning tops on the bare boards of the drawing-room floor. The walls were hung round with family portraits. ‘Dare you strike your whip through that old lady’s petticoat?’ asked William. ‘No, I won’t,’ was goody-goody Richard’s inevitable reply. ‘Then,’ said William, launching his whip, ‘here goes.’[6]

William was christened and Dorothy baptized at the same time.[7] They became inseparable. Their favourite place was the terrace by the river at the bottom of the garden, which commanded a fine view of Cockermouth Castle and the hills beyond. Sparrows built their nests in the closely clipped privet and rose hedge that covered the terrace wall. Tearaway William chased butterflies, while sensitive Dorothy feared to brush the dust from their wings.[8]

Standing at the confluence of the river Cocker and the Derwent, the town has always been prone to flooding: in 2009, Wordsworth’s birthplace was temporarily inundated by his beloved river. His own earliest memory, he claimed, was of total immersion in the Derwent’s crystal water. The first self-image in the first draft of his autobiographical poem is of a naked four-year-old boy making ‘one long bathing of a summer’s day’, basking in the sun, plunging into the stream. And then, when the rain comes pouring down, as sooner or later (usually sooner) it always does in the Lake District, standing alone like ‘a naked savage’ framed against crag, hill, wood and ‘distant Skiddaw’s lofty height’.[9]

He would always be pulled back to these mountains, rivers and lakes. But he was also born with the restless spirit of a wanderer. From an early age, his eye would be drawn to a road that led over the hill above the town and on into an unknown distance. Few things, he claims, pleased him more than a ‘public road’, a sight that

Hath wrought on my imagination since the morn

Of childhood, when a disappearing line,

One daily present to my eyes, that crossed

The naked summit of a far-off hill

Beyond the limits that my feet had trod,

Was like an invitation into space

Boundless.[10]

Wordsworth loved space. He did not want to be bound. At least in retrospect, he imagined himself being called from his home to a vagrant life. He loved nothing more than to walk. Thomas De Quincey, one of his disciples, reckoned that in the course of his life Wordsworth walked some 175,000 miles. The on-the-road conversation with a beggar, a discharged soldier, a dispossessed woman, an impoverished leech gatherer, a shepherd bearing the last of his flock: this would become a hallmark of his poetry.

*

William and Dorothy periodically attended a ‘dame school’ (kindergarten) in Penrith, where among the fellow pupils was Mary Hutchinson, his future wife, and her sister Sara. At the age of six, William entered the grammar school in Cockermouth. The master spent half a year trying fruitlessly to teach him Latin. But then Wordsworth was educated into strong feeling by harsh experience. Nearly all his greatest poetry is pervaded by a feeling of loss: the loss of childhood, of freedom, of the unmediated relationship with nature symbolized by the four-year-old child plunging naked into the Derwent. For a psychological explanation of this, we need look no further than a day one month before his eighth birthday.

His mother returned from a visit to friends in London. She had been accommodated in the so-called ‘best bedroom’, that is to say a guest room reserved for special occasions and therefore not regularly aired. The bed was damp. She caught a cold, which turned to a ‘decline’, probably pneumonia. Soon after her return to her parents’ house in Penrith, she died. The seven-year-old William’s ‘last impression’ of his mother was ‘a glimpse of her on passing the door of her bedroom during her last illness, when she was reclining in her easy chair’.[11] She was buried at Penrith on 11 March 1778.

He readily admitted that he remembered very little of his mother, yet he firmly believed that it was from her that he learned his love of nature. ‘Blest the infant babe’, he wrote, as he embarked on his project to use his ‘best conjectures’ to ‘trace / The progress of our being’: the baby nursed in its mother’s arms or sleeping on its mother’s breast is blessed because it is learning the experience of sympathy, the force of love. It is through the bond with our mothers in our infancy that we first claim ‘manifest kindred’ with a soul other than our own. As the baby at the breast gazes into the mother’s eye, it has its first experience of feeling. The reciprocal exchange of ‘passion’ is like an ‘awakening breeze’ that in time will extend its force and bind us to our natural surroundings, irradiating and exalting ‘All objects through all intercourse of sense’:

Along his infant veins are interfused

The gravitation and the filial bond

Of Nature that connect him with the world.[12]

The baby feels safe when ‘by intercourse of touch’ it holds ‘mute dialogues’ with the ‘mother’s heart’. That is the sensation needed to secure the self in the world. This ‘infant sensibility’ is the ‘Great birthright of our being’. So Wordsworth argues, innovatively using poetry to invent a theory of infant psychological development.

But what happens if the mother is lost, the child ‘left alone / Seeking this visible world, not knowing why’? How will the sense of Self and Other develop if the ‘props’ of the ‘affections’ are removed?[13] Wordsworth writes of the baby in his mother’s arms, ‘No outcast he, bewildered and depressed’. He is reaching back to that unconscious early memory – or perhaps clutching at the beautiful belief of belonging – because his mother’s death occurred when he was at a highly sensitive age. The loss made him an outcast, bewildered and depressed.

3
FOSTERED

Dorothy was only six when their mother died. Three months later, she was separated from her brothers. A poignant note in the family account book, now held in the Wordsworth Library at Dove Cottage, reads: ‘Dolly Left Penrith for Halifax in a Chaise with Mr Threlkeld and Miss Threlkeld on Saturday 13th June 1778. Mr Cookson gave Miss Threlkred 5 gns towards her conveyance etc.’[1] The Threlkelds, brother and sister, were cousins of Mrs Wordsworth; Mr Cookson, who gave the five guineas for expenses, was William and Dorothy’s maternal grandfather. As far as is known, during the next ten years Dorothy never returned from Yorkshire to the Lake District. Nor did her father ever visit her. Many years later, she still held the bitter memory of never being invited to spend ‘a single moment under my Father’s Roof’.[2] Unlike her brothers, she did not return home annually at Christmas, even though it was also her birthday.

Initially, the brothers remained in Penrith. A year later, the two eldest, Richard and William, were sent to the Free Grammar School at Hawkshead in the vale of Esthwaite. Young John joined them in 1782. The brothers lodged, at a cost of ten guineas each per year, with Hugh (a joiner) and Ann Tyson, whom William would come to regard as a foster mother. William remained in Hawkshead during term time for eight formative years; halfway through his education, he moved with the Tysons from the little town itself to a nearby hamlet called Colthouse. In the summer vacations, as well as at Christmas, the boys returned to Cockermouth or Penrith.

The move to Hawkshead took them from the northern corner of the Lake District to the more mellow landscape of its southern edge. Gently sloping fells led down to the woodland around the lake. Here the seeds were sown for the growth of the poet’s mind, as he was fostered daily by beauty and sometimes by fear:

Fair seed-time had my soul, and I grew up

Fostered alike by beauty and by fear,

Much favoured in my birthplace, and no less

In that beloved vale to which erelong

I was transplanted.[3]

*

One of the most evocative exhibits in the Wordsworth Museum at Dove Cottage is a pair of ice skates that belonged to the poet. They inspired an exquisite poem by Seamus Heaney.[4] They consist of steel blades hinged onto a wooden bed shaped to fit the foot, with spikes to attach them to the skater’s footwear and leather ankle straps to secure them. At the rear, there is a braking mechanism: rock back upon the heels and the wood will come down on the steel, bringing you to a sliding halt. For many readers and students, Wordsworth at first seems a staid figure, as plodding as his later verse. To imagine him on those skates is to set him in motion, to conjure him back to youth, speed and joy.

Such images were among the most forceful of his recollections of his early years. In the memories of ‘Childhood and School-time’ that begin The Prelude, he remembers the ‘thundering hoofs’ of his horse as he and his friends galloped over Levens Sands, moonlight gleaming in the sea, as they headed home from an excursion to the ruins of Furness Abbey. At such moments, he recalls, he sensed a ‘spirit’, some form of sublime presence emanating from the rocks and streams.[5]

He felt this spiritual ‘transport’ again when skating on the lake at twilight in the frosty season. The village clock tolls six as ‘All shod with steel / We hissed along the polished ice in games / Confederate’.[6] The sibilance of ‘shod’, ‘steel’, ‘hissed’, ‘polished’ and ‘ice’ brings the very sound of the skates to life. And then the boy Wordsworth veers away from the noisy crowd of schoolmates, swerving into silent reverie as he cuts ‘across the image of a star / That gleamed upon the ice’. In a rare example of a late revision improving The Prelude, the final version of the text has ‘the reflex of a star’ instead of ‘the image’. With ‘reflex’ it is as if an X doubly marks the spot: the star reflected in the ice below the criss-cross of skate trails.[7]

Then he would lean back into a moment of giddy delight:

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.[8]

His body is still but in his head he is moving with the earth, as if he were one with the mysterious force to which, as he moves from narrative to philosophizing, he gives a sequence of names: ‘Presence of Nature’, ‘visions of the hills’, ‘souls of lonely places’.[9] This will not be the only time that something profound, simultaneously comforting and terrifying, is conjured by Wordsworth’s collocation of those words ‘earth’, ‘rolled’, ‘motion’, ‘diurnal’ and ‘round’.

He must have known that the skating scene was one of his best and most characteristic passages because it was one of the few sequences of his verse autobiography that he brought into print. It appeared in 1809 in the – suitably wintery – Christmas issue of Coleridge’s magazine The Friend. Wordsworth then reprinted it among the ‘Poems referring to the Period of Childhood’ in his collected poems of 1815, with the title ‘Influence of Natural Objects in calling forth and strengthening the Imagination in Boyhood and early Youth’. An explanatory subtitle gestured towards the work that had been in progress for a decade and a half: ‘From an unpublished poem’. The descriptive sequence is preceded by a verse paragraph addressed to the ‘Wisdom and Spirit of the universe! / Thou Soul, that art the Eternity of thought!’ This spirit is said to be the force that gives ‘breath’ and ‘everlasting motion’ to forms and images. Working in conjunction with sublime landscapes, it purifies ‘The elements of feeling and of thought’, bringing us to a recognition of ‘A grandeur in the beatings of the heart’.[10] The shift of gear between vivid recollection of childhood and high spiritual-philosophical theory is another Wordsworthian hallmark.

Winters were cold through most of his childhood. There was a particularly prolonged and severe frost in his fifteenth winter, during which not only little Esthwaite Water but even large parts of the vast lake of Windermere were frozen over with thick ice. He often skated in this and other frosty seasons. Several of his peers were very accomplished skaters, though it was always a dangerous sport – one of the best of them, Tom Park, died on Esthwaite when he went through the ice in his twenties.[11]

There is no reason to doubt the autobiographical inspiration of The Prelude’s skating scene. At the same time, though, it should be recognized that skating scenes were much favoured in the poetry (as in the painting) of the eighteenth century, so Wordsworth was entering into a literary tradition as well as remembering his own past. The passage was drafted in Germany shortly after he and Coleridge visited the aged poet Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock. This grand old man of German letters was famous for his odes, one of which, ‘Der Eislauf’, is an energetic evocation of the art of skating, at which Klopstock excelled. He twists and turns and plays poetically with the sound of skate on polished ice. It was reported that when he met Goethe, Germany’s other great poet, they talked about skating more than literature. Both Coleridge and Wordsworth left accounts of their visit to Klopstock, which appears to have been rather disappointing to the young English poets who were so excited to meet the old master. Skating is not mentioned in their recollections, but we cannot rule out the possibility that this encounter was one of the factors that led Wordsworth to turn his own memories of evenings on the ice into poetry.[12]

*

Wordsworth attaches the word ‘oftentimes’ to the skating scene. This was not a one-time memory. For the most part, we remember our formative years as a blur. In retrospect, each day is very like the next – save for the distinction between schooldays and holidays. We remember long hot summers, freezing cold mornings, the excitement of the first fall of snow. Day upon day, year upon year, of friendship and games, of laughter and tears, will merge together. But if we were fortunate enough to build dens in the woods, skate on frozen ponds and run hallooing in the mountain breeze, then our abiding memory will be of air and light, of the wind upon the face and the arching sky above.

Sometimes, though, we remember in singular flashes. Particular adventures and misadventures become part of family lore. And particular incidents take on symbolic force. These are what Wordsworth called the ‘spots of time’ that shape our identity. He coined the phrase towards the end of the first part of the autobiographical ‘Poem to Coleridge’ that he began in late 1798 and early 1799. ‘Such moments’, he wrote, ‘chiefly seem to have their date / In our first childhood’. The very act of recall gives them significance, makes them into the joints and the musculature of the self. Often they come at transitional moments, between light and darkness, marking ‘The twilight of rememberable life’.[13] Wordsworth was the first master-poet of memory. That very word ‘rememberable’ belongs distinctively to him.[14]

At the same time, he was aware of the tricks of memory. His past has ‘self-presence’, another newly minted turn of phrase, in his heart and yet there is such a gap – a ‘vacancy’ – between the lived experience of the child and the mind of the poet as he nears the age of thirty and begins to write down his memories that ‘sometimes when I think of them I seem / Two consciousnesses – conscious of myself, / And of some other being’.[15] The notion of two ‘consciousnesses’ was discussed by various eighteenth-century philosophers writing in response to John Locke’s theory of human understanding, but the tendency was to argue for the unity of the past and present selves, not a fracture between them. So, for example, Bishop Joseph Butler in his highly influential The Analogy of Religion argued that thinking about the relationship between one’s past and one’s present inevitably raises ‘the Idea of personal Identity’ and may create the anxiety that we do not have a single stable self, that ‘the Consciousness of our own Existence in Youth and Old-age’ could constitute ‘different successive consciousnesses’. Butler answers the problem by saying that if we are capable of recognizing that we may look at the same thing at different times and have different feelings about it while still knowing that it is the same thing, then we can be confident in the continuity of the self: ‘The person of whose existence the consciousness is felt now, and was felt an hour or a year ago, is discerned to be, not two persons, but one and the same.’[16] Wordsworth, by contrast, was interested in exploring his sense of uncertainty about his ‘personal Identity’, not in the provision of neat logical answers. The question is inevitably raised each time he summons up the remembrance of things past: to which consciousness does the emotional response to the moment belong, that of the original child or that of the adult attempting to piece together the story of the growth of his own mind?

The particular example he gave when defining his idea of ‘spots of time’ was one of his first horseback rides – he was probably only five – in the company of a servant or groom called James. They became separated on the moors. Afraid, the boy dismounted and with stumbling step led his horse down into a gloomy valley where he saw the mast of an old gibbet upon which a wife-murderer had been hanged years before. The rest of the execution structure was long gone; all that remained was ‘a long green ridge of turf’ in a shape that resembled a grave.[17] Hurrying away from the sinister spot, the child went back up the hill only to see a ‘naked pool’ and a prominent stone signal-beacon on the summit. Then he noticed a human figure:

A girl who bore a pitcher on her head

And seemed with difficult steps to force her way

Against the blowing wind. It was in truth

An ordinary sight but I should need

Colours and words that are unknown to man

To paint the visionary dreariness

Which, while I looked all round for my lost guide,

Did, at that time, invest the naked pool,

The beacon on the lonely eminence,

The woman and her garments vexed and tossed

By the strong wind.[18]

Wordsworth makes the ordinary seem extraordinary. ‘Visionary’ moments and the ‘dreariness’ of the everyday ought to be opposites, but the power of memory and imagination ‘colours’ the monochrome of the scene.

Why did Wordsworth choose such a bleak ‘spot’ to illustrate his proposition that ‘There are in our existence spots of time’ that fructify, nourish and repair our minds and ‘Especially the imaginative power’? The presence of the gibbet, the grave-shaped mound of turf, the Stygian pool and the sepulchral beacon suggest that the girl with the pitcher on her head, buffeted by the wind, is struggling through life, walking towards death.

Wordsworth was much possessed by death. In the first version of the ‘Poem to Coleridge’, the spot of time immediately before this one tells of how, just after being taken to live in the Vale of Esthwaite at the age of nine, he was walking by the lake and found a pile of clothes on the shore. Despite watching for a full half-hour, he could not see a bather. Shadows fall on the lake, with only the occasional plop of a leaping fish disturbing its ‘breathless stillness’. (Poetic convention would advise against the juxtaposition of ‘less’ and ‘ness’, but here the image of momentary suspension perfectly captures the mix of calm and foreboding.) The next day, a group of men rowed out to sound the depths of the lake with iron hooks and long poles.

At length the dead man, ’mid that beauteous scene

Of trees and hills and water, bolt upright

Rose with his ghastly face.[19]

It is a moment of horror like something out of a Jacobean tragedy – and indeed in the next line Wordsworth quotes (or rather, slightly misquotes) a phrase that Shakespeare gave to Othello, ‘moving accidents by flood and field’. The high drama of the Shakespearean stage is replaced by local ‘Distresses and disasters, tragic facts / Of rural history’. We, the people of northern England, Wordsworth is implying, are not the kings, heroes and nobles of traditional tragedy, but we have profound travails of our own and our stories merit the telling. And, as with the girl walking against the wind on the bleak hill, the ‘ghastly’ – ghostly – face of the dead man, a local schoolmaster who drowned in June 1779 while bathing in Esthwaite Water, impresses itself upon the young Wordsworth’s mind and is in later years recalled with very different feelings.

These two spots of time are followed by a third one, in similar vein. This one is a memory of a winter’s day when Wordsworth was thirteen. It is the end of school term. He and his brothers are going home for Christmas. Horses are being sent for them. They wait at a crossroads. Once more, it is a threshold moment. Unsure as to which of the two roads will bring the horses, William leaves his brothers and climbs up a crag onto a ridge in order to look out for them. It is cold and sleety, with mist intermittently obscuring the view. Huddled against a drystone wall, the boy finds himself in the company of a solitary sheep and a bare hawthorn bush that is bristling and whistling in the wind. The moment is implanted in his mind, mixing the ‘anxiety of hope’ (anticipation of the horses and of Christmas) with a peculiar sense of ‘chastisement’ arising from the event that followed: ten days later, between Christmas and New Year, his father died. Thirteen, the onset of adolescence, was as bad a time to lose a father as seven, the onset of enduring childhood memory, had been to lose a mother.

Again and again, especially when the rain batters his roof on stormy nights, this spot of time comes back to haunt him, but also, paradoxically, to refresh him:

And afterwards the wind, and sleety rain,

And all the business of the elements,

The single sheep, and the one blasted tree,

And the bleak music of that old stone wall,

The noise of wood and water, and the mist

Which on the line of each of those two roads

Advanced in such indisputable shapes,

All these were spectacles and sounds to which

I often would repair, and thence would drink

As at a fountain.[20]

Sigmund Freud would have called this sequence of The Prelude a ‘screen memory’. ‘There are some people whose earliest recollections of childhood are concerned with everyday and indifferent events which could not produce any emotional effect even in children, but which are recollected (too clearly, one is inclined to say) in every detail’, Freud wrote in his essay ‘Screen Memories’: ‘what is recorded as mnemic image is not the relevant experience itself [but] another psychical element closely associated with the objectionable one’.[21] By placing himself in the craggy wintery landscape of the pre-Christmas journey home, Wordsworth is evading the actual moment of his father’s death. A literary-minded psychoanalyst would, however, tease out an unconscious memory of the dead father in the animation of the scene, not only because of the ghostliness of the figures in the mist, but also because the phrase ‘indisputable shapes’ is an inversion of the words that Hamlet, literature’s most famous son, speaks to the ghost of his dead father: ‘Thou com’st in such a questionable shape’.[22]

The primal image of the girl battling against the wind near the gibbet, the drowned schoolmaster seen soon after the move to Hawkshead consequent upon his mother’s death, and the ‘waiting for the horses’ scene just before his father followed her to the grave are defining examples of how Wordsworth’s way of dealing with loss was always to find restorative power in nature, however bleak the scene. At the same time, like many children who have lost their parents, he often feels a sense of guilt. Was it somehow my fault that they died? Did some transgression or inadequacy of my own precipitate their absence?

It is perhaps for this reason that, though Nature in the early books of Wordsworth’s autobiographical poem is usually his guardian, nurturing him by her beauty, she is also sometimes a figure who admonishes, fostering him with fear and trembling. In the earliest notebook of manuscript drafts for what became The Prelude, there is a memorable passage composed in the autumn of 1798, which was duly incorporated into book one of the full-length poem. It describes an occasion during a summer holiday ramble when, without permission, he unmoored a shepherd’s boat and set out across Ullswater by moonlight. In remembering the night, his art of observation does not fail him: there is an exquisite image of how, on either side of the boat, the oars left upon the water

Small circles glittering idly in the moon

Until they melted all into one track

Of sparkling light.[23]

He fixed his gaze on the ridge that formed his horizon, with nothing but the stars above. As he rowed further from the shore, a higher hill, which seemed to the child’s eye like ‘a huge cliff’, reared into sight, blocking out the stars and seeming to pursue him ‘like a living thing’. He turned the little boat and stole his way back to the willow tree where it had been moored. For many days thereafter, he writes, ‘my brain / Worked with a dim and undetermined sense / Of unknown modes of being’. He was haunted by an inner darkness that turned the familiar shapes of trees and sky and green fields to ‘huge and mighty forms that do not live / Like living men’. These spectral shapes ‘moved slowly through my mind / By day, and were the trouble of my dreams’.[24] The vividness and intensity of the writing are testimony to the persistence of the memory and the weight with which anxiety pressed upon him, however mysterious – undetermined, unknown – its meaning.

After describing the days and nights of fearful visions, Wordsworth tries to identify their origin. Who or what is the spirit that haunts him? In the two-part Prelude of 1799, he imagines some combination of the localized nature gods of pagan antiquity and the sprites of native folklore. He begins his invocation: ‘Ah! not in vain ye Beings of the hills! / And ye that walk the woods and open heaths / By moon or star-light’.[25] In the more finished Prelude of 1805, he elevates this force into something grander. The ‘Beings of the hills’ are replaced by what can only be described as a world-soul:

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 starlight 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 recognise

A grandeur in the beatings of the heart.[26]

It is through his sense of the uncanny that he comes to believe that he has penetrated to the heart of the mystery of being: the human soul is only fully made when, instead of assuming that man is the master of all, we interwine our selves with the ‘enduring things’ of the natural world.

4
THERE WAS A BOY

In school, he began with Latin. Out of school, with fishing. The usher (deputy to the headmaster) taught him more in a fortnight than he had learned in all his time in Cockermouth. Once fluent in Latin, he took special delight in the Metamorphoses of Ovid, with its panoply of mythological tales of humans being transformed into rivers, rocks, flowers, trees and stars. He grew to love and respect the headmaster, Reverend William Taylor, Cambridge-educated, appointed headmaster of Hawkshead at the age of twenty-five, passionate about poetry and described by another poet as a man of ‘sound judgment, a modest demeanour and unblemished morals’.[1] Taylor became a substitute father, as Ann Tyson became a second mother.

There was brotherhood too. Not only with Richard and John, but also with schoolfriends. William and an older boy called Philip Braithwaite carved their names in a window seat in Ann Tyson’s cottage. The son of a hatter, Braithwaite had a limp, later exacerbated by an accident when he was apprenticed to a local farmer. This did not stop him from accompanying Wordsworth on long walks. On one occasion they crossed Windermere ferry and explored an unknown valley, where they found an abandoned charcoal-burner’s hut. They wondered about spending the night there but thought better of the plan. In the autumn, they would go into Graythwaite woods to gather hazelnuts. As an old man, Braithwaite remembered how William was always asking him questions, eager to learn of the world. When Braithwaite returned from a trip to London, in connection with family legal business, Wordsworth quizzed him about the great city – and was disappointed not to see some visible sign of how his friend might have been transformed by the experience.[2]

Another boy, Thomas Maude, described Wordsworth as ‘the uneasiest bedfellow I’ve ever had’.[3] This chimes with the poet’s own memory of nocturnal restlessness. He writes in The Prelude of how, when a student at Cambridge, he went home for the summer vacation and lodged again with Ann Tyson, taking comfort in his return to

That bed whence I had heard the roaring wind

And clamorous rain, that bed where I so oft

Had lain awake on breezy nights to watch

The moon in splendour couched among the leaves

Of a tall ash, that near our cottage stood,

Had watched her with fixed eyes, while to and fro,

In the dark summit of the waving tree,

She rocked with every impulse of the wind.[4]

Sometimes he would walk out alone at night.

Then there was John Fleming, who also loved poetry. The two teenage boys would get up at sunrise and, before the beginning of school, walk around the lake, reciting lines of rural description from James Thomson’s The Seasons, the most popular long poem of the eighteenth century. Wordsworth was becoming a voracious reader. During the Christmas and summer vacations, he worked his way through his father’s library, especially enjoying ‘on the road’ novels such as Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, Alain-René Lesage’s The Adventures of Gil Blas in Tobias Smollett’s translation, and, father of them all, the Don Quixote of Cervantes. In later school years, his teacher lent him all the latest poetry: the meditative Task of William Cowper; the Scottish ballads of Robert Burns and the English ones of Thomas Percy’s Reliques; the pseudo-medieval effusions of the boy wonder Thomas Chatterton; the elegiac sonnets of Thomas Warton and Charlotte Smith; and The Minstrel of James Beattie, in which the rise and progress of poetical genius was expounded in florid stanzas filled with Gothic imagery.

These loans came from a new headmaster, because Taylor died, aged just thirty-two, in the summer of 1786. Eight years later, Wordsworth visited his grave near the sea at Cartmel Priory. It was inscribed with lines from Thomas Gray’s renowned poem ‘Elegy written in a Country Churchyard’, chosen by the master himself. Wordsworth, in his habitual guise of a returning wanderer, recalled how, about a week before his death, Taylor had said to him ‘My head will soon lie low.’ As Wordsworth looked at the turf on the grave, ‘those words’,

With sound of voice, and countenance of the man,

Came back upon me, so that some few tears

Fell from me in my own despite. And now,

Thus travelling smoothly o’er the level sands,

I thought with pleasure of the verses graven

Upon his tombstone, saying to myself

‘He loved the poets, and if now alive

Would have loved me, as one not destitute

Of promise, nor belying the kind hope

Which he had formed when I at his command

Began to spin, at first, my toilsome songs.’

It was indeed Taylor who had set him the exercises that became his first poems: verses on ‘The Summer Vacation’ (to which the precocious William added a sequel called ‘Return to School’) and an ode on the power of education, written in commemoration of the bicentenary of the school’s foundation.

As Wordsworth approached his father’s death obliquely by way of the ‘waiting for the horses’ passage in The Prelude, so he faced the memory of losing Taylor indirectly in a sequence of poems in Lyrical Ballads that take the form of dialogues with a teacher called ‘Mathew’. The figure was, Wordsworth acknowledged, an amalgam of several schoolmasters and other villagers whom he had known. ‘Mathew’ is an old man, in contrast to the Taylor who was cut down in his prime. He was partly based on a figure known in Hawkshead as ‘Mr John’: John Harrison, who for many years kept a small primary (junior) school in the village and who was a keen fisherman. The composite ‘Mathew’ is a representative of the teacher as father figure.

The finest poem in the group, ‘The Two April Mornings’, describes how the poet and the schoolmaster go for a walk at sunrise on a beautiful spring morning. ‘Mathew’ suddenly looks sad. The poet asks him why. He says it is because he has noticed the particular slant of purple light across a cloud over the mountaintop and it has reminded him of another April morning, thirty years ago, when he saw exactly the same fall of light crimsoning a field where the corn was just beginning to show above the ground. On that occasion, he was out with his fishing rod and, passing the churchyard, he stopped to visit the grave of his daughter, who had died at the age of nine. He felt that he had never loved her, or indeed anyone, so much as at that moment:

Six feet in earth my Emma lay,

And yet I lov’d her more,

For so it seem’d, than till that day

I e’er had lov’d before.

He then narrates how, as he turned from the grave, he saw a girl in the full bloom of youth, her flowing hair glistening with the morning dew. She is carrying a basket on her head, tripping along without a care in the world. Mathew sighs with grief as he thinks of his own lost daughter, but then he looks at the girl a second time ‘And did not wish her mine’. He accepts his own loss and rejoices instead that life goes on, that the sun comes up another day on another child. Wordsworth ends the poem by reverting to his own memory:

Mathew is in his grave, yet now

Methinks I see him stand,

As at that moment, with his bough

Of wilding in his hand.[5]

The poem peels away layers of memory. Wordsworth wrote it when he was far from home, in Goslar, Germany, in the depths of the freezing winter of 1798–9. The memory of a conversation with an old schoolmaster becomes a memory of his young schoolmaster; when Mathew remembers the earlier April morning, he remembers his dead child and when Wordsworth remembers the conversation, he brings Mathew back to life in his mind’s eye, with the fishing rod, cut from the branch of a young tree, that he was carrying not on the morning when he walked with the poet, but when he saw the girl dancing away from the graveyard. And this brings back other memories: not only of the two schoolmasters, but also of that other girl with a pitcher on her head in the screen memory of Wordsworth’s mother’s death.

Furthermore, the girl who died when ‘Nine summers had she scarcely seen’ – a similar age to that of Wordsworth at the time of his mother’s death – is called Emma. ‘Mr John’ had a daughter of that name who died as a child, but it was also the name that Wordsworth substitutes for that of his beloved sister Dorothy in several other poems written around the same time. Among these is another spring poem, ‘It was an April morning’, one of his ‘Poems on the Naming of Places’ in which he dedicates a secluded dell with lush foliage to ‘Emma’, making it his ‘other home’, ‘My dwelling, and my out-of-doors abode’.[6] As will be seen, Coleridge thought that the mysterious ‘Lucy’ poems, also written during the winter in Goslar, were Wordsworth’s fearful imaginings of his sister’s death. To have been bereaved of her as well as of his mother and father would have been unbearable. By imagining the worst, he was staving off that fear. During the Hawkshead years, his sister was indeed lost to him – she was far away in Yorkshire. Their reunion was one of the most joyful days of his life, and thereafter they would live together for the rest of his days. Symbolically, the joyful girl dancing away from the grave is not only an image of new life, but a figuration of Dorothy brought back from absence into presence.

Wordsworth’s acute memory and extraordinary ability to make imaginative connections just below the level of overt consciousness extended from his own experience to his literary inheritance. The carefree girl in the graveyard ‘whose hair was wet / With points of morning dew’ seemed, he writes, ‘as happy as a wave / That dances on the sea’. During his childhood, Wordsworth had seen dancing waves on the coast that edges the Lake District and on more than one occasion prior to the writing of the Mathew poems he had ridden the waves of the English Channel on his way to France. But his choice of simile also came from his reading.

The April morning of the poem is characterized by rebirth: the spring sunshine warms the earth and the fresh corn emerges. For centuries, poets have taken comfort in the cycle of the seasons: human life is linear, leading to the grave, but in the natural world new life comes every spring. At school and then university, Wordsworth read deeply in the classics. A fragmentary manuscript survives in which he translates a passage from Virgil’s telling of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice – a tale of a poet’s attempt to bring his beloved back from the grave. But the Roman poet whom the young Wordsworth especially loved was Shakespeare’s favourite, Ovid. This is hardly surprising: Ovid’s Metamorphoses is a storehouse of wonder-filled imaginings of the inseparability of the human and the non-human, in which people are transformed into natural objects. It was in Ovid that Wordsworth found the archetypal story of how, as Shelley would put it some years later, ‘If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?’[7] The lovely girl Proserpina, daughter of the goddess of grain and fertility, is abducted by Pluto, god of the underworld, but allowed to return every spring. Her story is an allegory of the seasons.

William Shakespeare was in William Wordsworth’s bloodstream, as he was in almost every aspect of the culture of the age.[8] ‘Shakespeare’, says Henry Crawford in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, ‘is part of an Englishman’s constitution’: ‘His thoughts and beauties are so spread abroad that one touches them everywhere.’ Crawford’s rival Edmund Bertram agrees and is more exact: ‘we all talk Shakespeare, use his similes, and describe with his descriptions’.[9] Wordsworth was no exception. In The Winter’s Tale, a play about dead children and second chances, the abandoned and adopted daughter Perdita compares herself to Proserpina. This was Shakespeare’s way of indicating that the bleak drama of winter in the first half of the play is turning to joyous spring in the second. In reply to Perdita’s invocation of Proserpina, Florizel, in love with her, says ‘when you do dance, I wish you / A wave o’ the sea, that you might ever do / Nothing but that’.[10] ‘As happy as a wave / That dances on the sea’: the contextual parallel fleetingly turns the girl in the graveyard in Wordsworth’s Mathew poem into Perdita, the lost one who is found.

*

Wordsworth’s poetry of memory sought to reanimate the life of childhood, to recover the sensations that fade as we grow to adulthood. In another fragment in his first notebook of jottings towards his long poem of personal memory, he wrote of the early beginnings of his love affair with nature, of the strange affinity he felt between his own existence and ‘existing things’, of ‘The bond of union betwixt life and joy’. ‘Yes’, he continues, remembering how at the age of ten he

Held unconscious intercourse

With the eternal beauty, drinking in

A pure organic pleasure from the lines

Of curling mist, or from the smooth expanse

Of waters coloured by the cloudless moon.[11]

He calls this sensation the ‘tranquillizing power’ of Nature. It is as if he is her child, drinking nourishment from her smooth breast. Inevitably, though, there is a gulf between the sensations of the ten-year-old child gazing at the lake by moonlight or at the morning mist rising over the hills and the reflective language of the twenty-eight-year-old poet, who was by then both widely read and under the spell of the prodigious intellect of Coleridge. These few lines are very typical of Wordsworth in that they juxtapose precise observation of nature – the curling of the mist, the mirror-like smoothness of water lit by moonlight on a clear night – with abstract, philosophical terms.

‘Unconscious intercourse’ is a phrase that had never appeared in print before. Eighteenth-century philosophers were very interested in the unconscious workings of the human mind, especially the way in which sense perceptions were organized through a process of mental association. The word ‘intercourse’ was generally used to refer to social relations, but did sometimes occur in spiritual contexts as a term for communion with the divine. To yoke the two words and attach them to the youthful Wordsworth’s communion with a trick of light or a meteorological phenomenon was to imply that children – or at least this child – have an innate sense of natural religion. Similarly, ‘eternal beauty’ is a phrase that was common in religious works with titles such as The Practice of Piety: directing a Christian how to walk, that he may please God.[12] To apply it to a landscape was to venture towards the realm of pantheism, the belief that the divine is to be found immanently in nature, not in some transcendent supernatural realm.

What did Wordsworth mean by his third abstract phrase, ‘a pure organic pleasure’? I suspect that he derived the term from one of the most influential books of the Scottish Enlightenment, Lord Kames’s Elements of Criticism. Published in 1762, this was a pioneering work of aesthetics, a newly emergent field of intellectual inquiry that asked such questions as ‘what is the nature of beauty?’ and ‘what constitutes good taste?’ The treatise went through eight editions in twenty years. Kames begins his introduction with a discussion of pleasure, in order to lay the ground for an argument that the best gardening, architecture, painting, sculpture, music and poetry give tasteful human beings their most enduring delights. Pleasure, he argues at the outset, comes from gratification of the sense organs. The pleasures (and displeasures) of three of our senses – touch, smell and taste – are intense and instant because they are felt directly upon the organs that receive the impressions of external things (skin, nose, tongue). For the same reason, such pleasures are ephemeral: ‘Organic pleasures have naturally a short duration; when prolonged, they lose their relish; when indulged to excess, they beget satiety and disgust.’ The pleasures of eye and ear, by contrast, are felt in the mind; they are of a higher order, occupying a rich holding ground between the organic and the intellectual. For this reason, they may be described as therapeutic: ‘being sweet and moderately exhilarating, they are in their tone equally distant from the turbulence of passion, and the languor of indolence; and by that tone are perfectly well qualified, not only to revive the spirits when sunk by sensual gratification, but also to relax them when overstrained in any violent pursuit’. Our first perceptions, Kames argues, are of external objects, and our first attachments are to them. ‘Organic pleasures take the lead’, but as we mature we graduate to the higher pleasures of the eye and ear working upon the mind.[13]

Wordsworth makes this philosophical argument tangible. He imagines his childhood self drinking in pleasure from the lines of mist, as if feeling the impression of nature upon the tongue. In emphasizing the smooth expanse of waters, he metaphorically touches the surface of the lake. These childhood pleasures are thus made into physical sensations; they are purely organic, without reliance on the conscious mind. Hence the ‘unconscious intercourse’, of a kind almost analogous to a sexual union – intriguingly, the Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest record of the use of ‘intercourse’ in a sexual sense is Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population, published in this same year of 1798.

Where Wordsworth departs from Kames is in his mourning for the loss of the child’s pure organic pleasure in the landscape. For Kames, the aesthetic sense is a stepping stone that takes the rational man from the baser passions of the body to the higher pleasures of the intellect and ultimately to the realm of reason and morality. For Wordsworth, growing up is a growing away from the child’s unmediated unity of self, body and environment. The adult can recapture that primal spirit in moments of memory, but the quest to preserve it in writing requires the intervention of the conscious mind and the working intellect, tainting the purity of the organic pleasure. This in a nutshell is the difference between the Enlightenment philosopher and the Romantic poet.

‘But the downward glide / and bias of existing wrings us dry’, wrote Robert Lowell, a later poet deeply versed in the Romantic tradition, ‘Always inside me is the child who died’.[14] Wordsworth’s poetry is essentially elegiac in spirit not only because of the actual deaths that afflicted him in childhood, but also because he knew that he could never recover the child’s untrammelled and untroubled unity with the natural world. In another fragmentary recollection in the notebook in which he began working up scenes for what became The Prelude, he places himself beside Windermere or Esthwaite at twilight. The sequence begins in the third person, detaching the remembering adult from the experiencing child: ‘There was a Boy …’ For a moment, the reader wonders who this boy might have been, but as the writing draws the poet fully into the memory, the voice shifts from ‘he’ to ‘I’, ‘his’ to ‘my’. The childhood self has come back to life:

… would he stand alone

Beneath the trees or by the glimmering lakes,

And through his fingers woven in one close knot

Blow mimic hootings to the silent owls,

And bid them answer him. And they would shout

Across the wat’ry vale, and shout again,

Responsive to my call, with tremulous sobs

And long halloos, and screams, and echoes loud,

Redoubled and redoubled – a wild scene

Of mirth and jocund din. And when it chanced

That pauses of deep silence mocked my skill,

Then often in that silence, while I hung

Listening, a sudden shock of mild surprize

Would carry far into my heart the voice

Of mountain torrents; or the visible scene

Would enter unawares into my mind

With all its solemn imagery, its rocks,

Its woods, and that uncertain heaven, received

Into the bosom of the steady lake.[15]

(I have italicized the pronouns to emphasize the shift towards the self.) Coleridge, who knew Wordsworth’s poetic voice more intuitively than anyone other than Dorothy, wrote in a letter: ‘Had I met these lines running wild in the deserts of Arabia, I should have instantly screamed out “Wordsworth!”’[16] In both style and content, he is sure, this is his friend at his very best, his most characteristic. Let us pause for a moment to test the claim.

Thanks to the influence of Shakespeare, Milton and James Thomson, the supple iambic pentameter blank-verse line – ten syllables, five beats, unstressed, stressed, unstressed, stressed, with rhythmic variation but no neat chime of rhyme – was the favoured medium for meditative poetry in the later eighteenth century. The clipped couplets and urbane wit of Alexander Pope were falling out of favour. Instead, poets such as the manic depressive William Cowper reflected on the solace of rural life in lengthy verse-paragraphs, the fluidity of thought running the sentences across the line endings, setting up a creative tension between the metrical and the syntactical movement. Wordsworth’s blank verse moves in the same vein, so why was Coleridge so sure that ‘There was a Boy’ could have been written only by his friend? What is the difference between Wordsworth and Cowper, whose work was more admired at the time?

In Wordsworth’s twenties, when he lived ‘Among the fretful dwellings of mankind’ in London and Paris, the memory of the river Derwent running beside his earliest home gave him ‘A knowledge, a dim earnest, of the calm / Which nature breathes among the fields and groves’.[17] The restorative power of nature was the central theme of his autobiographical epic. This thought was by no means original. The solace of the country as a bulwark against the stress of the city was an ancient poetic theme. ‘This is the life which those who fret in guilt, / And guilty cities, never knew’, wrote Thomson in The Seasons, that paean to rural scenes which was so widely read throughout the eighteenth century.[18] When Wordsworth was fifteen, Cowper published his long blank-verse poem The Task, which extolled the virtues of country walks and the sounds of nature that ‘exhilarate the spirit’ in contrast to the vices of city life. The most famous line in the poem was ‘God made the country, and man made the town’: for Cowper this distinction explained why ‘health and virtue’ were to be found in ‘fields and groves’.[19]

Wordsworth acknowledged that The Task was a significant precedent for his own project. He described Cowper’s work as a ‘composite’ of ‘idyllium’ (which he defined as observation of ‘the processes and appearances of external nature’), didactic poem (offering ‘direct instruction’ to the reader) and ‘philosophical satire’. His own longer works were just such composites.[20] But there was a key difference. Thomson and Cowper always proceeded from natural description to moral generalization. Wordsworth inherited their art of sermonizing about nature. What he added was a much more individual voice and, above all, a particularity lodged in personal memory. Cowper had his local affections, but the perambulations of The Task have a generic quality. The poet could be leading the reader through any English field or grove, whereas when Wordsworth begins his epic task, the starting point is specifically the Derwent of his first home, the alder tree bending into his father’s garden, the sound of the river merging into his dreams as he falls asleep as a child and as he dreams that childhood back to life in the act of writing poetry. The power of the unconscious, as manifested in memories and dreams; the child as father of the man: these are not ideas to be found in the ‘loco-descriptive’ verse of Wordsworth’s predecessors.

Cowper’s verse moves at a leisurely pace, so in order to make a fair comparison we need to settle into an extended quotation, ideally reading it aloud, imagining ourselves sitting on a sofa by the fire on a winter’s night in an English country parsonage:

Nor rural sights alone, but rural sounds

Exhilarate the spirit, and restore

The tone of languid Nature. Mighty winds,

That sweep the skirt of some far-spreading wood

Of ancient growth, make music not unlike

The dash of ocean on his winding shore,

And lull the spirit while they fill the mind,

Unnumbered branches waving in the blast,

And all their leaves fast fluttering, all at once.

Nor less composure waits upon the roar

Of distant floods, or on the softer voice

Of neighbouring fountain, or of rills that slip

Through the cleft rock, and, chiming as they fall

Upon loose pebbles, lose themselves at length

In matted grass, that with a livelier green

Betrays the secret of their silent course.

Nature inanimate employs sweet sounds,

But animated Nature sweeter still

To soothe and satisfy the human ear.

Ten thousand warblers cheer the day, and one

The livelong night: nor these alone whose notes

Nice-fingered art must emulate in vain,

But cawing rooks, and kites that swim sublime

In still repeated circles, screaming loud,

The jay, the pie, and even the boding owl

That hails the rising moon, have charms for me.

Sounds inharmonious in themselves and harsh,

Yet heard in scenes where peace for ever reigns,

And only there, please highly for their sake.[21]

‘Languid’ is the word. These lines are comforting, but never startling. Granted, there are many elements that anticipate Wordsworth in both form and substance: the running on of the sentences across the line endings (‘roar / Of’, ‘voice / Of’, ‘slip / Through’, ‘fall / Upon’), the attunement to sounds as well as sights, the sense of harmony in the natural world (‘the secret of their silent course’), the movement between precise description (‘loose pebbles’, ‘matted grass’) and a general concept of ‘animated Nature’. But when it comes to the owl whose nightly note ‘Nice-fingered art must emulate in vain’, there is no personal connection, no specific memory, no sense of the inner being of the child in the landscape. Although the words ‘secret’ and ‘sublime’ are used, they have none of the strangeness and fear that animate the Wordsworthian landscape. Cowper finds composure in listening to the wind, the rill and the birdsong, whereas in Wordsworth something much more mysterious occurs.

We may see this by making another comparison. It is possible that some time before writing ‘There was a Boy’ Wordsworth read a collection of verse dramas by Joanna Baillie, a writer whom he later befriended and for whose work he expressed considerable admiration. In one of her plays, De Monfort, he would have found a twilight scene:

Enter Rezenvelt, and continues his way slowly across the stage, but just as he is going off the owl screams, he stops and listens, and the owl screams again.

REZENVELT: Ha! Does the night-bird greet me on my way?

How much his hooting is in harmony

With such a scene as this! I like it well.

Oft when a boy, at the still twilight hour,

I’ve leant my back against some knotted oak,

And loudly mimick’d him, till to my call

He answer would return, and thro’ the gloom

We friendly converse held.[22]

Wordsworth, clearly, was not the first to make poetry out of the memory of a boy mimicking the hoot of an owl in fading evening light. The difference is that in Baillie’s play the memory is of ‘friendly converse’ with the bird, whereas in Wordsworth the thing that makes the memory a ‘spot of time’ is the moment when the owls do not reply. It is signalled by one of his most characteristic line endings: at ‘hung / Listening’, the pause of the beat enacts the suspension of sound. And in that moment, the ‘shock of mild surprize’ at not getting a conscious answer from Nature in the form of a response from the owls is transformed into a mystical union in which the voice of water running from the mountains is carried far into his heart, and the sky reflected in the lake enters unawares into his mind.

Coleridge was one of the most astute readers of poetry ever to walk the planet: he was confident that, should he have encountered these lines running wild in the deserts of Arabia, he would have recognized them as Wordsworth’s rather than Cowper’s or Baillie’s not only because of the personal voice and the sense of mystery, but also because no poet before Wordsworth (other than Shakespeare) had made small words such as ‘far’ and ‘unawares’ do such profound work. When Thomas De Quincey, another highly astute reader, analysed the poem as an example of Wordsworthian psychology at its most characteristic, he noted that ‘This very expression, far, by which space and its infinities are attributed to the human heart, and its capacities of re-echoing the sublimities of nature, has always struck me as with a flash of sublime revelation’.[23]

Given that these lines were so admired by Coleridge and that they were among the earliest fragments of what became The Prelude, we might feel a gentle shock of mild surprise on discovering that they do not appear in the opening books of the poem devoted to ‘Childhood and School-time’. Wordsworth published them independently, as a short poem in the second volume of Lyrical Ballads. Later, he included them in book five of The Prelude, which is devoted mainly to the influence of books. And he made a significant revision: the first-person pronouns were removed. The switch to the self has disappeared, leaving the boy a ‘he’ throughout. Furthermore, a coda was added:

Fair are the woods, and beauteous is the spot,

The vale where he was born: the Church-yard hangs

Upon a slope above the village school,

And there along that bank when I have pass’d

At evening, I believe, that near his grave

A full half-hour together I have stood,

Mute – for he died when he was ten years old.[24]

In the final 1850 Prelude, the age of death is changed to twelve. Wordsworth once told a relative that the grave was of a Hawkshead boy named John Tyson who had been a playmate of his, and whose grave in the churchyard does indeed say that he died at the age of twelve. It is not known whether Tyson excelled at owl-hooting, an art for which Wordsworth’s schoolmate William Raincock was renowned.

The coda answers the moment of silence when the boy ‘hung / Listening’ by way of the image of the churchyard hanging on the slope above the school and the adult Wordsworth standing mute in contemplation of the grave. By transposing what was originally written as his own experience to that of an unnamed boy who died while still a child, Wordsworth transforms the incident into a symbol of how something dies in all of us when we reach our teens and grow into self-consciousness.

This poem was of great importance to Wordsworth. When he gathered his poems for a collected edition in 1815, giving them a distinctive thematic arrangement, he chose to place ‘There was a Boy’ at the head of ‘Poems of the Imagination’, the section that included many of his greatest poems, including the ‘Lucy’ elegies, ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’, ‘Resolution and Independence’, and ‘Tintern Abbey’. In his preface he explained that this was because it represented ‘one of the earliest processes of Nature’ in the development of the faculty of imagination. He describes that process as ‘a commutation and transfer of internal feelings, co-operating with external accidents, to plant, for immortality, images of sound and sight, in the celestial soil of the Imagination’. The key, he suggests, is the surprise felt at the moment when the ‘intenseness’ of the boy’s mind is ‘beginning to remit’. The pattern recurs at several other peculiarly Wordsworthian moments in which intensity is achieved in a moment of relaxation, for example when he realizes that he has crossed the highest point of the Alps without noticing and when he is ‘Surprised by joy’ while immersed in grief.

On one occasion, he gave his disciple Thomas De Quincey a masterclass in the process: he told of how he would put his ear on the road to listen intently for the sound of an approaching carriage, but then ‘at the very instant when the organs of attention were all at once relaxing from their tension, the bright star hanging in the air above those outlines of massy blackness fell suddenly upon my eye, and penetrated my capacity of apprehension with a pathos and a sense of the infinite, that would not have arrested me under other circumstances’.[25] Though a loquacious raconteur, De Quincey was also a good listener. He absorbed the idea and adapted it to his own purposes in his ‘Essay on the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth’, where he suggests that the moment of most heightened tension in Shakespeare’s play comes not with the murder of King Duncan but with the breaking of the silence in its aftermath.

*

One day early in 1783, two of Wordsworth’s fellow pupils at the grammar school were scrambling on Yewdale Crags, not far from the village, when they saw a raven’s nest high on a ledge. The black raven is a bird with vicious talons and bill, readily capable of pecking out the eyes of a lamb. There was accordingly a bounty on its head, a ‘Varmen [vermin] Reward’ of fourpence a bird. Wordsworth remembered seeing bunches of unfledged ravens suspended in the churchyard at Hawkshead. For schoolboys, eggs were both a trophy and a contribution to pest control.

The boys went back to the town and found two friends who were accomplished climbers. They took a look: the nest was perched very near the top of the crags, accessible only by a dangerous rope climb. Back they went to town. A lad employed to build drystone walls had a rope and a hook, and was willing to accompany them. A gaggle of other boys went along, including the one they called Bill Wordsworth. They all clawed their way up the crag. Then John Benson, the boy who was supposed to be the best climber, set off along the precipitous ledge, held by a rope and with a satchel on his back to gather the eggs. He got very close to the nest but was then impeded by the overhang of the rock above the ledge. He froze. They tried to talk him down, but he could not make himself move. Some of the boys, among them the two youngest – Bill Raincock and Bill Wordsworth – were sent to get help. It took a long time coming, but eventually a great hulk of a man called Frank Castlehow, together with his equally athletic son Jonathan, scaled the crag, all the way to the top, and Jonathan went down on the ledge to haul up the terrified Benson. Wordsworth’s friends the Raincock brothers never went raven’s nesting again.[26]

The Prelude has a vivid account of the thrill of such a climb:

Oh, when I have hung

Above the raven’s nest, by knots of grass,

Or half-inch fissures in the slipp’ry rock,

But ill sustained, and almost, as it seemed,

Suspended by the blast which blew amain,

Shouldering the naked crag, oh at that time,

While on the perilous ridge I hung alone,

With what strange utterance did the loud dry wind

Blow through my ears! the sky seemed not a sky

Of earth, and with what motion moved the clouds![27]

Benson was stuck below the nest, beneath a jutting rock, and with a gang of boys, whereas Wordsworth in this scene is above and alone, clinging to a clump of grass. We can be fairly sure that in Benson’s case the lad was merely holding on for dear life, but it is impossible to know whether Wordsworth’s sensation of some mystical union with the wind, sky and clouds was felt at the time or imposed in the retrospect of memory. We cannot even be sure that he did ever hang along on a perilous ridge, and that this spot of time is not a fiction embroidered from his recollection of the Benson incident, which became the talk of the town.

Wordsworth himself was eminently aware of the possibility that the act of memory creates rather than recreates a feeling. ‘Of these and other kindred notices’, he observes at one point in The Prelude,

I cannot say what portion is in truth

The naked recollection of that time

And what may rather have been call’d to life

By after-meditation.[28]

Again, writing about ‘the impression of the memory’, he suggested to himself that things remembered idly ‘half seem / The work of Fancy’.[29] And, in a passage that echoes the emphasis in ‘There was a Boy’ on the scene reflected in the lake, he compared memory to the way that if you lean out of a slow-moving boat on a still clear surface of water and look down to see ‘weeds, fishes, flowers, / Grots, pebbles, roots of trees’, you will have difficulty in separating ‘The shadow from the substance’, differentiating the things that are really in the depths from the reflection of the world above. This double vision is, he suggests, exactly what happens when we scan ‘the surface of past time’.[30] These intuitions do indeed anticipate, with remarkable prescience, the conclusions of modern psychologists and cognitive scientists about the nature of memory.[31]

On a series of manuscript pages, replete with half-starts, crossings out, repetitions and variations, Wordsworth argued with himself about how he had been trying to write ‘A history of love from stage to stage / Advancing hand in hand with power & Joy’, but also to capture the ‘reverse’ feeling of ‘sad perplexity’.[32] He imagines himself plumbing the depths of the ‘mystery of man’ and comes to the conclusion that ‘something of the base’ of the human spirit is to be found in ‘simple childhood’. In remembering his own childhood, the ‘very fountains’ of his powers ‘seem open’, but as he approaches them ‘they close’. It is then that he realizes that ‘general feelings’ are insufficient. Particular ‘incidents’ must be ‘culled’ in order to explain ‘the hiding-places’ of his power and the capacity of memory to offer ‘restorations’. These ruminations formed the basis of a passage that he would eventually include between those two key spots of time – the girl with the pitcher on her head, which I have linked to his mother’s death, and waiting for the horses, which he explicitly linked to his father’s – at the climax of the book within his verse autobiography that he called ‘Imagination, How Impaired and Restored’:

The days gone by

Come back upon me from the dawn almost

Of life: the hiding-places of my power

Seem open; I approach, and then they close;

I see by glimpses now; when age comes on

May scarcely see at all, and I would give,

While yet we may, as far as words can give,

A substance and a life to what I feel:

I would enshrine the spirit of the past

For future restoration.[33]

Not ‘to what I felt’ at the time – how can an adult really be sure of what they felt at particular moments when a child? – but ‘to what I feel’. The purpose of the writing is to preserve not the letter but the spirit of the past, as a way of securing a sense of identity for the present and the future by locking in a personal story before memory vanishes with age.

Sometimes when Wordsworth was a child he had to reach out and touch a tree in order to reassure himself that he actually existed. As an adult he held on to his half-invented memories of being fostered alike by beauty and by fear as a way of giving ‘a substance and a life’ to his being in the world.

5
WALKING INTO REVOLUTION
14 JULY 1790

Two Cambridge undergraduates were walking through France. They had hatched a summer vacation scheme that their friends thought was ‘mad and impracticable’: an Alpine walking tour with hardly any money in their pockets and complete uncertainty as to the welcome they would receive. They had crossed from Dover and spent a night in Calais. They were wearing matching coats, purposely made for the journey before they set off from Cambridge. Each of them carried an oak walking stick and bore a bundle of possessions on his head, every bit in the manner of the girl in the mountains carrying the pitcher of water on hers. This, reported one of them to his sister, excited ‘a general smile’ as they passed through village after village.[1]

As they got into their stride, they would often travel thirteen leagues – about forty miles – a day (a ‘league’ was originally defined as the distance you could walk in an hour, so roughly three miles). But on this, their first day on French soil, they covered just ten miles, frequently stopping to absorb the festive atmosphere. They had walked straight into a revolution.

It was the first anniversary of the storming of the Bastille. A National Constituent Assembly had been formed and the powers of the monarchy had been curbed. Communities had begun to form democratic fédérations. There was genuine hope of a peaceful transition from the tyranny of absolute monarchy to a new regime with a mixed constitution, similar to that in Britain. On both sides of the political spectrum, it was agreed that there should be a fête to cement national unity. A day of celebration. The main event was on the Champ de Mars at the edge of Paris, bringing together the king and the royal family, the deputies of the Assembly, delegates from across the nation, and overseas representatives – including John Paul Jones and Thomas Paine from the youngest nation on earth, with its model constitution. They brought along the Stars and Stripes, the first time it was flown outside the United States.

Across the land, each town or village was encouraged to mount its own fête. As the two Cambridge students – William Wordsworth and his Welsh friend Robert Jones – walked the ten miles from Calais to Ardres, they encountered people in festive dress, smiling and singing, on their way to celebrate in one town or the other. They spent the night in Ardres and as they journeyed south over the coming days, they would meet many people returning from celebrations elsewhere, including delegates who had been to the great event in Paris. They ate and danced with them, the spirit of hope in the air.

Wordsworth caught the feeling beautifully in the first eight lines (the ‘octave’) of a sonnet written when he returned to northern France twelve years later. The poem is entitled, with characteristic precision, ‘To a Friend, Composed near Calais, on the Road leading to Ardres, August 7th, 1802’:

Jones! when from Calais southward you and I

Travell’d on foot together; then this Way,

Which I am pacing now, was like the May

With festivals of new-born Liberty:

A homeless sound of joy was in the Sky;

The antiquated Earth, as one might say,

Beat like the heart of Man: songs, garlands, play,

Banners, and happy faces, far and nigh!

In July 1790, Wordsworth was twenty. He had just completed three years at university. He was with his best college friend. He was on foreign soil for the first time in his life, anticipating new adventures and picturesque sights. And now he was witnessing a new dawn in human history. In remembering the day, he projected the joy that beat in his heart onto the earth and the sky. In 1802, the circumstances, both political and personal, were very different, as the last six lines (the ‘sestet’) of the sonnet reveals:

And now, sole register that these things were,

Two solitary greetings have I heard,

‘Good morrow, Citizen!’ a hollow word,

As if a dead Man spake it! Yet despair

I feel not: happy am I as a Bird:

Fair seasons yet will come, and hopes as fair.[2]

He refused to be cast down, but, as will be seen, his hopes were now more personal than political. By this time, ten years of bloodshed across France and Europe had hollowed out the dream of liberty, equality and fraternity. Even if that had not been the case, he would still have sensed that the youthful joy of July 1790 could never return, which was all the more reason to preserve it in poetry.

*

He had left Hawkshead just over three years earlier, in June 1787, clubbing together with fellow pupils to present some books to the school library. Back in Penrith with his grandparents, the Cooksons, he was at last reunited with his sister Dorothy. They spent much of that summer together, walking and sightseeing, sometimes in the company of her friend Mary Hutchinson. Dorothy wrote to another close friend in Halifax, where she had been living with her late mother’s cousin, telling of her joy at seeing her brothers for the first time in nearly ten years: ‘They are just the boys I could wish them, they are so affectionate and so kind to me as makes me love them more and more every day.’ She thought that William and Christopher were very clever; young John, who was to be a sailor, was less bright, but with ‘a most excellent heart’. She went on to describe their misery in the household of their cold-hearted grandparents and the malice of their uncle Christopher Crackanthorpe Cookson. They lived in a perpetual atmosphere of sourness and endured countless petty acts of cruelty and neglect. Dorothy was candid in her letters to her Halifax friend Jane Pollard, who had been like a sister to her. ‘Many a time’, she wrote, ‘have Wm, J, C, and myself shed tears together, tears of the bitterest sorrow, we all of us, each day, feel more sensibly the loss we sustained when we were deprived of our parents.’[3] Feel more sensibly: for some writers in the ‘age of sensibility’ powerful feeling was a performance conjured onto the page, whereas for William and Dorothy Wordsworth it was known in the heart, shaped by the experience of being orphaned and then separated from each other.

More prosaically, their dependence on those cruel relatives was absolute, because of the chaotic state of their father’s financial affairs at the time of his death. His executors had spent three years putting together a claim that old John Wordsworth’s employer Sir James Lowther (now raised to the peerage as the first Earl of Lonsdale) owed his estate more than £4,500. William’s awareness of this lengthy legal battle may have been one reason why he announced to his siblings that he wanted to be a lawyer if his health permitted. He was being troubled by ‘violent headaches and a pain in his side’.[4]

The good news was that he had won a place as a ‘sizar’ – a student in receipt of financial aid – at St John’s College, Cambridge, where his uncle was a tutor. Almost everyone who has been to college or university has a vivid memory of their arrival and first few weeks. Wordsworth was the first to capture in autobiographical poetry the combination of excitement and apprehension at such a time. His recollections of undergraduate life are gathered in books three and six of The Prelude, with intervening memories of his first ‘Summer Vacation’ (book four) and of the influence of ‘Books’ (book five).

He went up in October, accompanied by a cousin who had been admitted to the same college. They travelled via York, where they stayed with the cousin’s sister. On the journey south via the Great York Road, he saw a prostitute for the first time, a harbinger of his loss of innocence upon entering into the world. His sensitivity was such that he claimed in The Prelude that the sight created within him a sense of a ‘barrier’ between the spirit of ‘humanity’ and the human body, ‘splitting the race of Man / In twain, yet leaving the same outward shape’.[5] He would always be a man of strong sexual passions, nearly always repressed or displaced from the ‘outward shape’ of his poems.

Grey fenny weather. A shiver of delight at the first glimpse of Cambridge’s most famous sight, the roof of King’s College Chapel. Then, outside the carriage window, a student striding hurriedly along ‘in Gown and tassell’d Cap’. Across Magdalene Bridge. Another river along which memories would flow: the Cam. Into the famed university town. The Gothic architecture of the three quadrangles (‘courts’) of St John’s, one of the largest and most prestigious of the colleges.

His first-year room was small, tucked away in an obscure nook of the college, above the noisy kitchens. There were sounds, too, from Cambridge’s grandest college, Trinity, which stood next door and which his room overlooked: the clock striking every quarter of an hour, day and night, and the organ bellowing out during divine service or when the scholar was practising. The one good thing about the location was that at night, by moon or starlight, he could gaze down from his bed and see the statue of Sir Isaac Newton in the Trinity antechapel, prism in hand, face rapt in contemplation, ‘The marble index of a Mind for ever / Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone’.[6] The statue at once invoked the awe-inspiring quality of intellectual inquiry and projected the freshman’s loneliness onto an embodiment of genius.

He began to get to know his fellow students. A handful were familiar from school, but as a ‘a mountain Youth’ – a ‘northern Villager’ – it felt almost dreamlike to be in Cambridge. ‘Questions, directions, warnings, and advice’ flowed in from all sides. Preparation for that nervous first tutorial. Settling into a routine of compulsory chapel and morning lectures. Becoming master of your own budget: going to buy an academic gown, which had to be worn whenever out and about, but also a silk dressing gown for posing in one’s rooms. ‘Invitations, suppers, wine and fruit.’ He slicked his hair in the fashionable style, so that it glittered like frost on a tree. Often, though, he would leave the student throng and walk alone across the flat fields, the fenland landscape so different from his own. His communion with the simple, solid things of nature was as much a part of his education as the lectures and tutorials:

To every natural form, rock, fruit or flower,

Even the loose stones that cover the high-way,

I gave a moral life, I saw them feel,

Or link’d them to some feeling: the great mass

Lay bedded in a quickening soul, and all

That I beheld respired with inward meaning.[7]

Where Newton had explained the physical forces of nature, the student Wordsworth tried to discover the agency that binds human feelings to nature. In so doing, his mind turned in on itself, cleaving him to ‘Solitude’. He did not seek out some kindred spirit to share his inner quest – that would come later, when he met Coleridge. Instead, he threw himself into casual friendships, lazy reading in ‘trivial books’ that had nothing to do with the syllabus, riding across the fields or floating down the Cam. He was supposed to be studying classical texts, mathematics and philosophy with a theological slant. He enjoyed geometry and the translation of Latin poetry, but devoted more time to private study of the great English poets who had Cambridge associations – Chaucer, who had set his Reeve’s Tale down the road in Trumpington village; and Spenser and Milton, who had been students at the university.

When he returned home for the summer vacation at the end of his freshman year, Wordsworth realized how much he loved his native place. Climbing over a bare ridge, he looked down on Windermere, the lake resembling ‘a vast river stretching in the sun’:

With exultation at my feet I saw

Lake, islands, promontories, gleaming bays,

A universe of Nature’s fairest forms

Proudly revealed with instantaneous burst,

Magnificent and beautiful and gay.[8]

He was far more comfortable among the woodmen, shepherds and village ‘dames’, or listening to the life story of a skeletal and impoverished discharged soldier who had once served in the tropics, than in the academic world of Cambridge.

Back he went for his second year. At this point in The Prelude’s narrative of his university years, Wordsworth inserts a dream. In the final version published shortly after his death in 1850, he tells of how, sitting in a rocky cave by the seaside on a still summer day, he had been reading Cervantes’ Don Quixote, one of the favourite books of his youth. He looked out to sea and began reflecting upon poetry on the one hand and ‘geometric truth’ on the other. Drifting into sleep, he dreamed that he was in the desert of the Middle East. A figure resembling ‘an Arab of the Bedouin Tribes’, carrying a lance, rode towards him, perched high on the back of a dromedary. This is clearly a dream version of Don Quixote on his rickety horse Rocinante. The Arab has a stone tucked under the arm that holds his spear. In his other hand, he holds a shell. Glad to have found a guide to lead him through the desert, the dreamer questions the arrivant and is told that the stone is Euclid’s Elements but the shell, beautifully shaped and brightly coloured, is ‘something of more worth’. The dreamer is told to hold it to his ear, and when he does so he hears, in an unknown language which he mysteriously understands, ‘articulate sounds’,

A loud prophetic blast of harmony –

An Ode, in passion uttered, which foretold

Destruction to the Children of the Earth,

By Deluge now at hand.[9]

The Arab then says that he is going to bury his books, presumably so that they would survive the impending deluge. In classic dream fashion, the dreamer has no difficulty in perceiving the stone and the shell as books even as they remain stone and shell. By the same account, the figure remains the Arab but now explicitly becomes Don Quixote as well. He rides on, with the dreamer initially keeping pace. Then the Arab looks back over his shoulder, sees a glimmer of light and says that it is the waters of the deep gathering upon them, causing him to speed his camel into the distance across the desert sands, ‘With the fleet waters of the drowning world / In chace of him’. At which point Wordsworth awakes in terror, and sees the real sea in front of him, his copy of Don Quixote beside him. He then interprets his own dream: it will be his destiny to follow the example of the Arab and ensure that the great books of the past will survive beyond the catastrophe that he sensed was about to engulf the present. He would hold in his hand a book by Shakespeare or Milton (‘Labourers divine’) and imagine it as an ‘earthly casket of immortal Verse’. Rather than burying it beneath the desert sand, it would be his task to absorb the spirit of the mighty dead into his own poetry and so to keep their legacy alive.[10]

Wordsworth’s placing of the dream at this point in his autobiographical narrative, together with the image of the prophetic ode being of more worth than Euclid’s mathematical textbook, might be read as a moment of awakening akin to that in the oft-recounted dream of a later Cambridge student who would eventually follow in Wordsworth’s footsteps as Poet Laureate: Ted Hughes. In his dream, Hughes is slaving over a literature essay late at night in his room at Pembroke College when a tall figure, half-man, half-fox, comes through his door, puts a burning paw-mark on the essay and tells the writer that by engaging in critical analysis he is killing the thought-creatures of his imagination. Hughes interpreted this as a call to switch his degree from English to Archaeology and Anthropology. In the spirit of Wordsworth’s line ‘We murder to dissect’, Hughes determined to abandon literary criticism and turn instead to a rich body of mythological and ritualistic lore that would provide him with raw material for poetic creation. By analogy, the Arab is telling Wordsworth to become a visionary poet instead of following in his uncle’s footsteps and remaining in academe (which is what his brother Christopher did, with such success that he eventually rose to the pinnacle of becoming master of Newton’s college). In his second and third years at Cambridge, Wordsworth did indeed begin to believe that it was his vocation to become a poet. He grew in confidence that the past masters could be as friends rather than inhibiting shadows:

Those were the days

Which also first encouraged me to trust

With firmness, hitherto but lightly touch’d

With such a daring thought, that I might leave

Some monument behind me which pure hearts

Should reverence. The instinctive humbleness,

Upheld even by the very name and thought

Of printed books and authorship, began

To melt away; and further, the dread awe

Of mighty names was soften’d down, and seem’d

Approachable, admitting fellowship

Of modest sympathy.[11]

The fellowship of the literary tradition instead of the College Fellowship that was the ambition of many of his contemporaries and the expectation of his relatives: a symbolic licensing of this vocation seems to have been Wordsworth’s intention in claiming the Arab dream for himself in the final version of The Prelude.

But this was a trick: in the original version of the poem, it is a ‘studious friend’ who has the dream and narrates it to Wordsworth. The friend is not identified. It is not Coleridge, to whom The Prelude is addressed – as when, directly after the narration of the Arab dream, Wordsworth writes ‘O Friend! O Poet! Brother of my soul, / Think not that I could ever pass along / Untouch’d by these remembrances’.[12] The strong likelihood is that it was the third Lake Poet, the exceptionally ‘studious’ Robert Southey, who became close to Wordsworth in the early 1800s, when The Prelude was being drafted, and who at exactly this time was having terrifying dreams of the world being engulfed by a deluge. Indeed, Southey contemplated writing an epic poem on the subject.[13] Poems, like dreams, absorb and conflate different sources and memories, so other influences were also at work, including that of a very unusual man whom Wordsworth would meet in France.

*

He didn’t do badly at Cambridge. In the college exams at the end of the first term of his second year, he was among ‘those who did not go thro’ the whole of the examination and yet had considerable merit’ – that is to say, he ran out of time, but did well on the questions that he succeeded in answering. When it came to the end-of-year exams, he was unclassed but got a distinction in the Classics paper. A year later, in June 1790, he was again unclassed but showed ‘considerable merit’ in the subjects that he undertook.[14] He was content to get by. He knew by this time that he would not be seeking to stay on and gain a Fellowship. For all his love of books and his breadth of reading through his teenage years and at Cambridge, he always knew that his greatest inspiration was what John Keats would call ‘the poetry of earth’.

Immediately after the passage in The Prelude where he recalls the sense of vocation that grew during his time at Cambridge, he tells of how he found happiness in ‘loveliness of imagery and thought’. At dusk, he would walk in the groves along the Backs of the colleges until he heard the porter’s bell summoning him to the nightly curfew. He remembers looking intensely upon a single ash tree lit by moonlight on a sharp frosty evening:

Up from the ground and almost to the top

The trunk and master branches every where

Were green with ivy; and the lightsome twigs

And outer spray profusely tipp’d with seeds

That hung in yellow tassels and festoons,

Moving or still.[15]

There is a natural historian’s precision in the art of observation here, combined with a poet’s gift for the choice of animating words. He was beginning, as he would put it in ‘Tintern Abbey’, to ‘see into the life of things’.

His love of nature meant that his summer vacations were his most joyful months. Doubly so, because he was with Dorothy, and sometimes Mary Hutchinson as well. They wandered through their native ground, into Dovedale and across into the Yorkshire Dales. By the end of his third year, though, he was ready to broaden his horizons. It was time to witness Nature in her grander aspect. He came up with the idea of walking to the Alps. He had made a good friend in a fellow grammar-school boy from the north, Robert Jones, son of a Welsh lawyer. Though of very different temperaments, they were drawn together by a love of mountain terrain and a passion for walking. Wordsworth – tall, with a long face and a serious expression – was ‘apt to be irritable in travelling’, and in Jones – tubby, round-faced and red-cheeked – he was lucky enough to find a companion who was ‘the best-tempered Creature imaginable’.[16] The Welshman was game. They had crossed the Channel before Wordsworth wrote to tell his family where he was.

*

Casting off the burdens of academe, they strode through France. In just over a week, they were at Troyes in the Loire Valley, in another at Chalon on the river Saône, where they embarked on a boat to Lyons, along with a group of delegates returning from the festivities in Paris.

Three years later, Wordsworth published an account of their journey under the title Descriptive Sketches. In Verse. Taken during a Pedestrian Tour in the Italian, Grison, Swiss, and Savoyard Alps. In the poem’s dedication to Jones, Wordsworth wrote of how two travellers plodding along the road side by side ‘each with his little knapsack of necessaries upon his shoulders’ will inevitably have a closer bond – ‘more of heart’ between them – than ‘two companions lolling in a post-chaise’. Walking also grounds the pedestrian more firmly in the landscape. Moving at human pace and without the sound of hoof or wheel, walkers see and hear their surroundings more fully, more immediately, than travellers borne at speed to their destination.

Wordsworth and Jones were following in the tracks of a pair of student adventurers sixty years before, the Etonian poet Thomas Gray and his intimate friend the novelist Horace Walpole – though they had gone by carriage and sometimes horse, not on foot. Following Gray’s death in 1771, his letters home describing their journey through France, over the Alps and into Italy had been published with his poems in 1775. His account of the approach to the monastery of the Grande Chartreuse high in the mountains of Savoy inspired generations of artists and students to head for the wild landscapes of the south:

It is six miles to the top; the road runs winding up it, commonly not six feet broad; on one hand is the rock, with woods of pine trees hanging over head; on the other, a monstrous precipice, almost perpendicular, at the bottom of which rolls a torrent, that sometimes tumbling among the fragments of stone that have fallen from on high, and sometimes precipitating itself down vast descents with a noise like thunder, which is still made greater by the echo from the mountains on each side, concurs to form one of the most solemn, the most romantic, and the most astonishing scenes I ever beheld.[17]

This is a highly influential early usage of the word ‘romantic’ to describe mountain scenery. It is also a classic instance of what Edmund Burke classified as a ‘sublime’ as opposed to a ‘beautiful’ scene, the distinction being that the sublime creates a reaction of awe with an element of fear, in this case created by the raging torrent, the noise resembling thunder, the echo from the mountain walls. For Wordsworth and Jones, as for Gray and Walpole before them, the approach to the Grande Chartreuse was one of the most ‘astonishing’ scenes that they ever beheld. Astonishment – being struck dumb with awe – was the hallmark of the sublime.

They spent two days hosted by the monks, contemplating the ‘wonderful scenery’ with ever-increasing pleasure.[18] As they reached the mountainous terrain of the south, Wordsworth began to think about how to capture his sensual immersion in the landscape. There was a conventional language available to him in the form of the ‘picturesque’: literally, composing the scene as if it were a picture. He originally thought of calling his poem of the tour Picturesque Sketches, but came to the conclusion that ‘the Alps are insulted in applying to them that term’. ‘The cold rules of painting’ were an obstacle to the work of giving the reader an idea of the emotions which the Alps had ‘the irresistible power of communicating to the most impassive imaginations’. In describing a fiery sunset over the Swiss mountains after a storm, he refused to follow the picturesque convention of always mingling light with shade. Instead, he explained in a footnote to the poem, ‘I consulted nature and my feelings’: ‘The ideas excited by the stormy sunset … owed their sublimity to that deluge of light, or rather of fire, in which nature had wrapped the immense forms around me; any intrusion of shade, by destroying the unity of the impression, had necessarily diminished its grandeur.’[19] The key words here are ‘sublimity’ and ‘grandeur’.

Their next destination was Geneva, then the glaciers of the Alps, the Vale of Chamonix and the sight of snow-capped Mont Blanc. Wordsworth’s attempt to describe it in the poem of his tour was among his first efforts at rendering the sublime:

Alone ascends that mountain nam’d of white,

That dallies with the Sun the summer night.

Six thousand years amid his lonely bounds

The voice of Ruin, day and night, resounds.

Where Horror-led his sea of ice assails,

Havoc and Chaos blast a thousand vales.[20]

Constrained by his chosen form of rhyming couplets and reaching for hand-me-down abstractions out of the realm of Gothic (Ruin, Horror, Havoc, Chaos), the apprentice poet has not yet found a voice of his own.

Both his style and his emphasis were very different in The Prelude a decade later, when he once again reconstructed his walking tour in verse. This time his memory was of how his heart leapt up when he looked down into the Vale of Chamonix. The valley presented him with an image of what he calls a ‘green recess’ inhabited by an ‘aboriginal’ community of pastoral dwellers in simple huts resembling ‘Indian cabins’. He is conjuring up an image of humankind living harmoniously in what Jean-Jacques Rousseau, citizen of Geneva, called the ‘state of nature’. ‘The summit of Mont Blanc’, by contrast, offered ‘a soulless image on the eye’ that ‘usurped upon a living thought / That never more could be’. The limitation of the sublime, he implies, is that its power to astonish may erase the little things and ordinary working people that deserve the affections of the human heart. Looking down on Chamonix, he trained his eye on ‘small birds’ warbling in ‘leafy trees’, a reaper binding ‘the yellow sheaf’ and a young woman spreading a haystack in the sun.[21]

The literal high point of an Alpine tour was the moment when one reached the summit of the Simplon Pass. Wordsworth and Jones made their way up the ‘steep and rugged road’ in the company of a group of traders carrying their wares on mules. They all stopped for lunch. Their mountain guide wanted to get going, but the Englishman and the Welshman lingered a while. When they set off, they followed a path downwards until it came to a dead end by a stream. The only path now visible was on the other side of the stream, winding back up the mountainside. So they waded across and climbed quickly, trying to catch up with the group. Failing to find them, they began to panic. Fortunately, they met a mountain-dwelling peasant. He told them that they needed to go back down to the stream and to follow its course further downwards. They were puzzled and kept questioning him: shouldn’t they be going up, not down? The peasant was insistent. Comprehension then dawned. The language barrier was ‘translated by [their] feelings’: they realized ‘that we had crossed the Alps’.

It was a profound moment of anticlimax. But in The Prelude the mature Wordsworth would recuperate it by way of a reflection on the power of the human imagination.[22] In recollecting moments of sorrow or disappointment and turning them to poetry, we can remake them as visions of a better world. Human greatness, he proposes, resides in this capacity to transport us from what we see to what we desire. Paradoxically, it is as if a flash of mental lightning illuminates us in the very instant that physical light is darkened by a cloud: ‘When the light of sense / Goes out in flashes that have shewn to us / The invisible world’.[23] Our mental triumphs, Wordsworth argues, are in the anticipation and not the realization, the hope and not the achievement:

Our destiny, our nature, and our home,

Is with infinitude – and only there;

With hope it is, hope that can never die,

Effort, and expectation, and desire,

And something evermore about to be.[24]

In Wordsworth’s Christian society, most people hoped for – or were told to hope for – salvation and an eternity in heaven with Jesus. Wordsworth is saying, albeit less explicitly, something akin to William Blake’s provocative aphorism in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: ‘all deities reside in the human breast’. The human imagination is the only place where heaven is to be found on this earth.

Wordsworth was steeped in the poetry of John Milton. He was thrilled that one of his Cambridge friends was lucky enough to be bunked in rooms at Christ’s College that were once Milton’s. Some of the most glorious poetry in Paradise Lost occurs when Adam and Eve give voice to a morning hymn in which they exhort all living things to join them in praise of the goodness and power of God: ‘On Earth join, all ye creatures, to extol / Him first, him last, him midst, and without end.’[25] Wordsworth remembered and adapted these lines as he sought to prove his argument about the transformative power of imagination by turning the anticlimax of having missed the moment of crossing the Alps into a climactic vision of the divine power of the sublime landscape of the Ravine of Gondo, through which they subsequently passed:

The immeasurable height

Of woods decaying, never to be decayed,

The stationary blasts of waterfalls,

And everywhere along the hollow rent

Winds thwarting winds, bewildered and forlorn,

The torrents shooting from the clear blue sky,

The rocks that muttered close upon our ears –

Black drizzling crags that spake by the way-side

As if a voice were in them – the sick sight

And giddy prospect of the raving stream,

The unfettered clouds and region of the heavens,

Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light,

Were all like workings of one mind, the features

Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree,

Characters of the great apocalypse,

The types and symbols of eternity,

Of first, and last, and midst, and without end.[26]

Where Milton’s Adam and Eve praised an invisible transcendent God, Wordsworth finds the voice, mind, and face of the divine in the awe-inspiring environment of the ravine.

All this is part of the retrospective ordering of his narrative of the growth of a poet’s mind. At the time, crossing the Alps with Jones, he noticed the ‘Black drizzling crags, that beaten by the din’ of the waterfalls ‘Vibrate, as if a voice complain’d within’.[27] He did not, however, transpose the scene into an allegory of eternity or a vision of apocalypse now. Writing to Dorothy at the time, he took the more orthodox view that the wonders of nature were to be read as a sign of the power of God the Creator: ‘Among the more awful scenes of the Alps, I had not a thought of man, or a single created being; my whole soul was turned to him who produced the terrible majesty before me.’[28] Jones, no doubt, had similar sentiments: he went on to become a clergyman.

Throughout The Prelude, Wordsworth was writing in the aftermath of his disillusionment with the turn to violence taken by the French Revolution. In the summer of 1790, like many young political radicals, he dared to hope that the New Jerusalem was about to dawn, that heaven could be brought to earth through social justice. Looking back, more than a decade later, he could not prevent his memories from being contaminated by subsequent events. The night after the crossing of the Alps, Wordsworth lodged in an ‘alpine house’ called the Spittal of Gondo. He could not sleep. In The Prelude he described the lodging as

A dreary mansion, large beyond all need,

With high and spacious rooms, deafened and stunned

By noise of waters, making innocent sleep

Lie melancholy among weary bones.[29]

Something very strange happened thirty years later, when Wordsworth and Dorothy went on a continental tour. They visited the Spittal of Gondo, but Dorothy could not persuade her brother to go inside. They moved on, forced to lodge elsewhere.[30] Wordsworth’s phobic reaction has never been explained, but there may be a hint in that phrase ‘innocent sleep’. The description of the mansion, with its high-ceilinged bedrooms, bears an uncanny resemblance to another hotel where Wordsworth spent a sleepless night in Paris two years later. And that, as will be seen, was the moment when his dream of the dawn of the New Jerusalem was shattered.

*

‘I am a perfect Enthusiast in my admiration of Nature in all her various forms’, Wordsworth wrote to Dorothy from a village beside Lake Constance.[31] The rest of the tour was more watery than mountainous: Lake Maggiore, the Lake of Lugano, Como (where Wordsworth was mildly smitten by the sight of dark-eyed peasant girls dancing on the shore), the Lake of Zurich, the Lake of Lucerne, the Falls of the Rhine at Schaffhausen, the valley of Unterwalden, the mountains rising above Grindelwald, a boat bought in Basel and sailed along the Rhine to Cologne. There was the occasional adventure, for example a night in the woods when the two travellers were separated in a storm, but the landscapes of this second half of the tour conformed to the Burkean ‘beautiful’ as opposed to the ‘sublime’. Having sold the boat in Cologne, they continued on foot once again, past Aix-la-Chapelle and thence to the coast. They encountered some Belgian troops on the move, a military presence that cast the merest shadow of a cloud on the political horizon. They hurried their step, needing to get back to Cambridge to complete their degrees.

Wordsworth spent the week before his final exams reading Samuel Richardson’s novel Clarissa instead of revising. He sat the exams in the Cambridge Senate House in January 1791, duly scraping through his BA without distinction – he was classed among the hoi polloi.[32] He had no idea what to do next. Like many a graduand before and after, he drifted aimlessly to London. Book seven of The Prelude records his memories of being thrown into the vortex of the city: the crowds, the noise, ‘Stalls, barrows, porters, midway in the street / The scavenger that begs with hat in hand’, peep shows, street performers, hawkers shouting their wares, migrants from across the globe, the freak shows of Bartholomew Fair, a blind beggar propped motionless against a wall with a ‘written paper’ on his chest telling his story, ‘His fixed face and sightless eyes’ admonishing Wordsworth as if ‘from another world’.[33]

It was a lonely time. In May, however, he was reunited with Jones at his home Plas-yn-Llan, in the village of Llangynhafal in Denbighshire. A handsome redbrick house, long and with high windows, it rather resembled Wordsworth’s childhood home in Cockermouth. A letter of Dorothy’s suggests that her brother’s spirits were lifted by both the place and the company: ‘Who would not be happy enjoying the company of three young ladies in the Vale of Clwyd and without a rival?’ she joked, explaining that ‘His friend Jones is a charming young man, and has five sisters, three of whom are at home at present, then there are mountains, rivers, woods and rocks, whose charms without any other inducement would be sufficient to tempt William to continue amongst them as long as possible.’[34] Wordsworth would not have been the first young man to enjoy a little flirtation with his best friend’s sisters. Sadly, one of them, Margaret, died soon after, aged just sixteen. Years later, Jones, writing with regret that they had been out of touch for so long, mentioned another of the girls, who was two years older than Margaret: ‘Mary you may perhaps remember something of.’[35]

The two young men spent the whole summer together. They went off on another walking tour, covering much of North Wales. They climbed the precipitous mountain of Cader Idris, which had been made famous in a painting by the landscape artist Richard Wilson; they wandered by the winding river Dee. In Powys, a little further south, they visited the shrine of a female saint called Melangell and Wordsworth got into an altercation regarding the powers of the Welsh language that led to him being threatened with a carving knife by a local priest who had drunk too much strong ale.

The most memorable of these summer excursions was a midnight ascent of Snowdon, the highest mountain in Wales (higher, too, than any in England).[36] After taking supper in a rugged thatched cottage in a hamlet called Beddgelert, they proceeded to the foot of the mountain, where they roused a shepherd who supplemented his income by acting as a guide. It was a close warm night with a ‘dripping mist’ threatening a storm. They climbed through the fog, trusting their guide, whose sheepdog ran ahead of them, unearthing a hedgehog among the crags. As they got higher, ‘the ground appeared to brighten’. A flash of light illuminated the turf and, all of a sudden, the moon was out. Wordsworth looked down. They were above the mist, which now resembled a sea with the peaks of the surrounding mountains emerging like the backs of whales. In the distance, they saw the mist dipping and swirling into the real sea. And somewhere between the mountains and the sea, they spotted ‘a blue chasm, a fracture in the vapour’,

A deep and gloomy breathing-place thro’ which

Mounted the roar of waters, torrents, streams

Innumerable, roaring with one voice.

‘In that breach’, Wordsworth writes in The Prelude, ‘Through which the homeless voice of waters rose’, Nature had lodged ‘The soul, the imagination of the whole’.[37] This idea of the imagination filling a gap, emerging from an abyss of emptiness, and indeed of homelessness, is at the core of Wordsworth’s vocation. His poetry, the work of his imagination, filled the void of the losses – of parents, of home, of political ideals, and later of friends, siblings and children – that afflicted him.

Wordsworth then makes his habitual move from description to philosophizing:

A meditation rose in me that night

Upon the lonely Mountain when the scene

Had pass’d away, and it appear’d 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 whatsoe’er is dim

Or vast in its own being.[38]

Here there is a measured uncertainty as to whether the ‘underpresence’ – the gleam or intimation that in book two of The Prelude he called ‘an obscure sense / Of possible sublimity’[39] – is an epiphany of the divine or a recognition of the profundity of human potential. Is the ‘mighty Mind’ God’s or our own?

As with the crossing of the Alps in the middle of The Prelude, the cognitive conclusion drawn from the ascent of Snowdon at the poem’s climax may belong to the act of memory, not the moment itself. We cannot be sure that the meditation really did arise in him that night rather than in the act of remembering and writing about the night. Equally, although there is no reason to doubt that he and Jones had the experience of standing above the sea of mist, the language in which the scene is described bears an uncanny resemblance to that of the standard guidebook which they had almost certainly consulted in planning their picturesque tour. During their perambulations, they actually visited the book’s author, Thomas Pennant. It was his A Tour in Wales that had given them the idea of an ascent of Snowdon timed so as to see the sun rise from the summit. There Wordsworth would have read of how

A vast mist enveloped the whole circuit of the mountain. The prospect down was horrible. It gave an idea of numbers of abysses, concealed by a thick smoke, furiously circulating around us. Very often a gust of wind formed an opening in the clouds, which gave a fine and distinct visto [sic] of lake and valley. Sometimes they opened only in one place; at others, in many at once, exhibiting a most strange and perplexing sight of water, fields, rocks, or chasms, in fifty different places.[40]

*

Though Wordsworth frequently wrote in Rousseauistic terms about nature providing a better education than books, he was always hungry for books and gladly acknowledged that the development of his writing was dependent on his reading. His first extended poem, ‘The Vale of Esthwaite’, written during the summer holidays when he was just seventeen, borrows its language from James Beattie’s highly popular The Minstrel, while his first published poem, An Evening Walk, on which he worked during his long vacations from Cambridge, has the conventional vocabulary and perky rhyming couplets of a dozen other ‘loco-descriptive’ poems of the eighteenth century, not to mention classical sources and indeed guidebooks. Wordsworth acknowledged as much by adding footnotes along the lines of ‘from Thomson’ (that is to say, borrowed from Thomson’s The Seasons), ‘See Burns’ Cotter’s Saturday Night’, ‘See a description of an appearance of this kind in Clark’s Survey of the Lakes’, and ‘Much of this paragraph alludes to Horace’s beautiful ode to Bandusia of which the author has attempted a translation.’[41]

The now forgotten Beattie was one of the most important of these early influences. He anticipated Wordsworth in arguing for the power of places in summoning up memories:

The sight of a place in which we have been happy or unhappy renews the thoughts and feelings we formerly experienced there. With what rapture, after long absence, do we revisit the haunts of our childhood and early youth! A thousand ideas, which had been many years forgotten, now crowd upon the imagination, and revive within us the gay passions of that romantick period. And from these, and other associations of a like nature, arises in part the love of our country, our friends and fellow citizens, a fondness for the very fields and mountains, the vales, rocks and rivers which formed the scenery of our first amusements and adventures.[42]

Wordsworth’s early poems, notably his Evening Walk tracking his youthful perambulations around Derwent, Rydal, Grasmere, Esthwaite and Winander (Windermere), conform exactly to this model. And he did come to believe that love of country, friends and fellow citizens grew in part from love of nature.

But his most powerful memories – the windswept girl, the gibbet, the admonishing cliff rising over the stolen boat, the grip of the crag-fast boy, the thunderous sound of falling water in the Ravine of Gondo, the abyss below Snowdon – have a much darker and more mysterious tone than that suggested in Beattie’s evocation of the ‘gay passions’ of the ‘romantick period’ of childhood and early youth. Perhaps the first moment when Wordsworth found his own voice as a poet came in a passage of the ‘The Vale of Esthwaite’, which he never published, when he dispensed with the flummery of Gothic fantasia stitched from his reading – the style that dominates the poem – and summoned up that memory of the December day when, aged thirteen, he was waiting for the horses to take him home for the Christmas holiday during which his father followed his mother to the grave:

One Evening when the wintry blast

Through the sharp Hawthorn whistling pass’d

And the poor flocks all pinch’d with cold

Sad drooping sought the mountain fold

Long Long upon yon steepy rock

Alone I bore the bitter shock

Long Long my swimming eyes did roam

For little Horse to bear me home

To bear me what avails my tear

To sorrow o’er a Father’s bier.[43]

John Wordsworth, working on Lowther business, had ridden out to a far corner of Cumberland and lost his way home on a pitch-dark December evening. He spent the freezing night on Cold Fell and never recovered from the exposure. William followed his father’s ‘bier’ to the grave in Cockermouth churchyard on a day of snow and wind. The death of his parents, and his consequent separation from his sister, shaped his whole life. He remained a poet of twilight and mourning, long after the fading of the glad morning of hope that he experienced with Jones on the road to Ardres in July 1790.

6
TWO REVOLUTIONARY WOMEN

The extended Wordsworth family was well embedded in the establishment of the Anglican Church. In September 1791, a cousin wrote to offer William a curacy in the south-east of England. Saying goodbye to Jones and his sisters, he travelled to London to explain that he was not of a legal age to enter Anglican holy orders. He was glad of the excuse. But he was still drifting. At the beginning of term, he went back to Cambridge. There was talk of him studying oriental languages, but he did not enrol. Instead, he returned to France. He intended to spend the winter in Orleans, perfecting his French. It was not quite clear how this would prepare him for the learning of biblical Hebrew that would be the next step in the event that the ecclesiastical plan should eventually come to fruition. Nevertheless, the family was willing to give him £40 to set him on his way.

By late November he was in Brighton, waiting four days for the wind to change so that he could embark for France. He took the opportunity to write to another college friend, William Mathews, complaining of his own lack of resolution with regard to a career: ‘I am doomed to be an idler throughout my whole life.’[1]

His host in the seaside town, sticking with him until the moment he left, was a fellow poet, Charlotte Smith, author of a volume of Elegiac Sonnets that he particularly admired. His connection came from the fact that her family lawyer, John Robinson, was a distant cousin of Wordsworth’s, who had worked as a clerk for Wordsworth’s grandfather and gained the patronage of Sir James Lowther. He had gone into politics while maintaining his legal career. He was not averse to the art of political advancement through the backhander – once, in the House of Commons, the supremely witty Whig politician and playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan spoke out against bribery and there were cries to name the chief instigator, to which Sheridan replied ‘I could name him as soon as I could say Jack Robinson.’[2]

Charlotte Smith, born in 1749, was a generation older than Wordsworth. The eldest child of a Sussex landowner, she was, as she put it, ‘sold into marriage’ at the age of fifteen to a man named Benjamin Smith. Violent and dissolute, Smith came from a family that derived their wealth from West Indian slave plantations. Charlotte bore him twelve children while he wasted the family fortune. In 1783, she spent several months with him in debtors’ prison. This was when she set to work on her Elegiac Sonnets in the hope of making some money. A few years later, she separated from her husband and began supporting her children through her pen. This led her to turn to the novel, which had a bigger market than poetry. In the summer of 1789, she published Ethelinde; or the Recluse of the Lake, a novel set in a Gothic house called Grasmere Abbey and containing many rhapsodic descriptions of Lake District scenery. The heroine Ethelinde wanders at dusk beside Grasmere lake, clutching her copy of the published letters of the poet Thomas Gray, ‘in which he with the clearest simplicity describes this small lake’: ‘she pursued her way, now over “eminences covered with turf, now among broken rock” till she reached the village which stands on a low promontory projecting far into the lake’.[3] This was the village that Wordsworth would one day call home, just as The Recluse was a title that he would one day seek (without success) to make his own. Late in life, he sometimes complained that tourists only wanted to see the site of Smith’s fictional ‘Grasmere Abbey’ – locals would tease them by directing them to a broken sheepfold on the hillside, perhaps the very one that inspired Wordsworth’s poem ‘Michael’.

The two poets would have talked not only of the Lakes in the north, but also of events across the English Channel. Everyone was talking politics, a national debate having been stirred by Edmund Burke’s admonitory Reflections on the Revolution in France and Thomas Paine’s pro-revolutionary reply The Rights of Man. Smith had spent the year 1791 researching a new novel, Desmond, which marked her entry into the arena of political controversy. She explained in a preface when it was published the following year that ‘the political passages dispersed throughout the work’ were ‘drawn from conversations to which I have been a witness, in England, and France, during the last twelve months … I have given to my imaginary characters the arguments I have heard on both sides.’[4] The novel accordingly includes many quotations from, and debates about, Burke’s attack on the revolution and Paine’s defence of it. Smith nailed her colours firmly to the radical mast. Indeed, the following year when news came of the slaughter of the personal bodyguards of King Louis XVI, Charlotte scandalized a gentleman who was visiting her in Brighton. ‘I liked her well enough’, he wrote, save for ‘a democratic twist (which I think detestable in a woman)’ – until ‘she disgusted me completely on the account arriving of the Massacre of the Swiss Guards at the Tuileries by saying that they richly deserved it’.[5] From this time forward, she was a marked woman.

In the course of her research for Desmond, she had even visited Paris, where she met with one of the leading figures among the revolutionaries: Jacques-Pierre Brissot. He had cut his political teeth writing anti-monarchical pamphlets and forming an anti-slavery group known as the Society of the Friends of the Blacks. When Smith met him in Paris in 1791, he was making speeches in the Jacobin Club, editing the Patriote français and writing for a newspaper called Le Républicain that he had established, along with Thomas Paine and the Marquis de Condorcet. At the time of the storming of the Tuileries, he headed the Legislative Assembly. From this point on, cracks were beginning to appear within the revolutionary leadership. They all wanted a republic to be proclaimed, but they could not agree over the fate of King Louis, Queen Marie Antoinette and the rest of the royal family. Should they be kept alive, under house arrest, or would that run the risk of a revival of the monarchy in the event of foreign invasion or counter-revolutionary reaction? The Jacobins argued for a final solution, whereas Brissot emerged as the leader of a more moderate faction, who became known as the Girondins because many of them came from the region of the Gironde – though they were often called the Brissotins.

Charlotte Smith gave Wordsworth a letter of introduction to Brissot. She also gave him one addressed to a fellow poet who was residing in Paris: Helen Maria Williams. This was a woman whose work Wordsworth admired even more.

Born in 1761, Helen Maria, together with her sister and half-sister, was raised by her mother in Berwick-upon-Tweed on the Scottish border after her father died while she was an infant. She wrote poems from an early age. Brought to London in 1781, she was taken up by a Presbyterian minister called Dr Andrew Kippis. He wrote a preface praising her first published poem, Edwin and Eltruda, published when she was just twenty-one years old. Set in the time of the English civil war, it tells the story of lovers whose families fight on opposite sides, ending with their tragic deaths.

Doomed or thwarted lovers of this kind were a favourite theme in the literature of the late eighteenth century. Romeo and Juliet was one of the most frequently staged of Shakespeare’s plays, while the bestselling secular book of the age was Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s novel La nouvelle Héloïse, which went through over seventy editions in print by 1800, besides being imitated in numerous other novels. It was so popular that publishers could not print enough copies to keep up with the demand, so they rented it out by the day or even the hour. Rousseau was overwhelmed with fan mail, telling him of the tears, swoons and ecstasies provoked in his readers. A modern reworking of the medieval story of Héloïse and Abelard, the novel tells the story of a passionate love affair that crosses the boundaries of class, religious piety and decorum. The full title was Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse, though when first published in Amsterdam in 1761 it was called Lettres de deux amans – ‘letters of two lovers, living in a small town at the foot of the Alps’. The lover is Julie’s tutor, Saint-Preux. Under the ancien régime a posh girl cannot marry her tutor, especially if he is a holy man. But living in the sublime landscape of the Alps and rowing on a beautiful lake, they cannot resist their passions. Their affair must, however, come to an end when upper-class Julie dutifully marries a baron chosen for her by her father. Saint-Preux goes off on a world tour. Six years later he returns and is employed once more, this time as tutor to Julie’s children. They live happily and virtuously together, enjoying a simple country life, all passion duly restrained. But Julie has an epiphany when her child almost drowns: she has never stopped loving Saint-Preux, and soon she expires as if from pure emotional excess, an extreme of what was known as ‘sensibility’ (the temperament anatomized by Jane Austen in the character of Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility). For readers, the book demonstrated the power of passion over the demands of duty and the social order. The Catholic Church duly placed it on the index of prohibited books. But, however often priests and moralists inveighed from pulpit and pamphlet against the dangers of novel-reading, especially for women, the authorities could not prevent the spread of the cult of ‘sensibility’ – and there was no literary form more suited to the expression of extreme emotion than poetry.

Helen Maria Williams’ particular gift was the transposition of a Rousseauistic narrative of passion into verse and into an English setting. The character of Eltruda in her poem is a young woman of extreme sensibility, whose sympathetic imagination extends to every living thing:

For the bruis’d insect on the waste,

A sigh would heave her breast;

And oft her careful hand replac’d

The linnet’s falling nest.

The naming of a specific species of finch and the tender care for a bird’s nest: such details prefigure the delicate poetic brushwork of the most sensitive of all poets of nature, John Clare. One may also see the young Helen Maria Williams anticipating Wordsworth at his best. Eltruda is compared to a ‘lonely flower’ that ‘smiles in the desert vale’.[6] That is a conventional enough image, an echo of Thomas Gray’s famous lines in his ‘Elegy written in a Country Churchyard’: ‘Full many a flower is born to blush unseen / And waste its sweetness on the desert air’. But in their rhythm of alternating tetrameters and trimeters (four- and three-stress lines), the following lines from Edwin and Eltruda feel very like a dry run for Wordsworth’s mysterious and mesmerizing ‘Lucy’ poems. Thus Williams:

So liv’d in solitude, unseen,

This lovely, peerless maid;

So grac’d the wild, sequester’d scene,

And blossom’d in the shade.[7]

And Wordsworth:

She dwelt among th’ untrodden ways

Beside the springs of Dove,

A Maid whom there were none to praise

And very few to love.

Women were cautious about exposing their identity in print. Like all the novels which Jane Austen would publish in her lifetime, Williams’ first book of poetry was anonymous. But in 1784 she boldly put her name on the title page of an epic poem called Peru. Two years later, she gathered her early works together with many new ones in a two-volume collection simply entitled Poems. It was published by the method of subscription, whereby purchasers paid up front to cover the cost of production. Over 1,500 people signed up, a remarkable number for a volume of poetry by a young woman.

In the spring of 1787, a London-based but cosmopolitan-inspired monthly journal called the European Magazine included in its poetry pages the first published work of a young man on the brink of his seventeenth birthday. It was entitled ‘Sonnet on seeing Miss Helen Maria Williams Weep at a Tale of Distress’. The octave reads as follows:

She wept. – Life’s purple tide began to flow

In languid streams through every thrilling vein;

Dim were my swimming eyes – my pulse beat slow,

And my full heart was swell’d to dear delicious pain.

Life left my loaded heart, and closing eye;

A sigh recall’d the wanderer to my breast;

Dear was the pause of life, and dear the sigh

That call’d the wanderer home, and home to rest.

These few lines epitomize the Rousseauist sensibility. ‘She wept’, as did so many readers of Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse, especially female ones. In connecting with a book – a tale of distress that might equally be a novel, a narrative poem or a true story – the reader also connects with the full tide of Life with a capital L. The heart reaches out in the spirit of fellow feeling with suffering humanity.

Extreme ‘sensibility’ of this kind was generally regarded as unmanly. Many readers of this sonnet in the European Magazine would have expected it to have been written by a woman. It was not. The poem was signed ‘Axiologus’, that classically inspired codename for Words-worth that Coleridge would use in his bitter poem about Sara Hutchinson. This was the teenage William’s first appearance in print. The sonnet is indeed a poem about the worth of words, the power of poetry. Wordsworth would go on, in company with Coleridge, to make unprecedented claims for that worth, for poetry as a form of salvation, a revolution of the self.

The sonnet’s key metaphor is that of a stream – a stream of consciousness, perhaps, that will eventually flow into the sea of the unconscious. The fluvial imagery is then internalized: the poet’s eyes swim with tears in sympathy with those of Miss Helen Maria Williams, as she in turn weeps in sympathy with the distress about which she is reading. Life flows along the bloodstream, ‘thrilling’ the veins. And then the pulse slows and the heart is swelled to ‘dear delicious pain’. Sympathy, or what we would now call empathy, brings, as a later and much greater Wordsworth poem would put it, ‘sensations sweet, / Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart’. Sensations, the swelling heart, the excited flow of blood in the veins, the beating of the pulse, the idea that pain might have something delicious about it, above all that verb felt: these are going to be key words in poetry for the next forty years. One might almost say that the entire sensibility of another precocious poet, John Keats, is bound within the nutshell of this cluster of images. One thinks of the ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ and its cry ‘Now more than ever seems it rich to die’. At the core of ‘Sonnet on seeing Miss Helen Maria Williams Weep at a Tale of Distress’ is the idea that a poem can offer a momentary ‘pause of life’. In momentarily suspending what a later sonnet would call the ‘getting and spending’ of daily routine in which we ‘lay waste our powers’, poetry can call the wanderer home, bring us ‘home to rest’. What we come home to is a bond, a sympathy for the still sad music of humanity.

He had not literally seen Miss Helen Maria Williams weeping at a tale of distress. He had read her poems and projected an image of her as the sympathetic poet. His sonnet was almost certainly inspired by a passage in Peru. Williams’ epic concerns the Spanish massacre of the Incas. It is a manifestation of her anti-imperial, pacifist sensibility. In a footnote, she expressed the hope, in anticipation of the coming revolutions such as that led by Toussaint L’Ouverture in the Caribbean, that ‘these injured nations may recover the liberty of which they have been so cruelly deprived’. ‘Liberty’ is another of the poetic watchwords of the age. At the climax of Peru, Williams introduced a personification of Sensibility, weeping for the Incas. A visionary figure descends from the clouds: ‘It lights on earth – mild vision! gentle form – / ’Tis Sensibility!’ Then, ‘Wet with the dew of tears’, the ‘ray of pity’ beaming from her eyes, she addresses

Ye to whose yielding hearts my power endears

The transport blended with delicious tears,

The bliss that swells to agony the breast,

The sympathy that robs the soul of rest.[8]

One can see the source of the language of Wordsworth’s sonnet. His clever device was to elide this figure with its creator: he makes Helen Maria Williams into the very embodiment of Sensibility. His reading is fully justified by the presence in her collection of a poem called ‘To Sensibility’, which argued – against the (nearly always male) critics who attacked what we might call the School of Sensibility – that strong emotion, weeping especially, is an essential part of what it is to be human because it answers to the moral imperative to feel for others and show benevolence towards them, or, as Wordsworth puts it in the closing line of his sonnet written in response to his reading of her, ‘To cheer the wand’ring wretch with hospitable light’.

In 1788, Williams published an anti-slavery poem, then early in 1790 her first novel appeared. Its very title, Julia, revealed the influence of Rousseau. In a digression in its second volume, Williams introduced a new poem of her own, under the pretence that it was written by a friend of the loser in the novel’s love triangle – written while he was in a terrible prison but dreaming prophetically of the destruction of that place. It was called ‘The Bastille, A Vision’.

Soon after her novel was published, Helen Maria Williams set off for France. She arrived in Paris on the very day that Wordsworth and Jones arrived in Calais on their student walking tour: the eve of the first anniversary of the fall of the Bastille. She had gone straight into the eye of the revolutionary storm. Later that year she published her Letters written in France, in the Summer 1790, to a friend in England; containing, various anecdotes relative to the French Revolution. ‘I arrived in Paris’, she began her first letter, ‘the day before the federation’ (the ‘Fête de la Fédération’ witnessed by those travellers whom Wordsworth and Jones met in the following weeks). She gave thanks for the good fortune of a speedy journey: ‘Had the packet which conveyed me from Brighton to Dieppe sailed a few hours later; had the wind been contrary; in short, had I not reached Paris at the moment I did reach it, I should have missed the most sublime spectacle which, perhaps, was ever represented on the theatre of this earth.’[9] Week by week, she reported from the front line, praising every aspect of the early days of the revolution:

It was the triumph of human kind; it was man asserting the noblest privileges of his nature; and it required but the common feelings of humanity to become in that moment a citizen of the world. For myself, I acknowledge that my heart caught with enthusiasm the general sympathy; my eyes filled with tears; and I shall never forget the sensations of that day.[10]

In the act of becoming one of her country’s few field correspondents at the scene of the epoch-making events, she moves her vocabulary of sensibility – heart, sympathy, tears, sensations – into the political arena.

Wordsworth, then, was on a mission, poetically, politically and in terms of his literal destination: his desire was to follow in the footsteps of Helen Maria Williams. He arrived in Paris by night, at the end of November, only to discover that she had moved to Orleans.

7
BUT TO BE YOUNG WAS VERY HEAVEN

Having missed Helen Maria Williams, Wordsworth activated the second letter of introduction provided by Charlotte Smith: to her friend Jacques-Pierre Brissot. This took him into the heart of the French Revolution. Brissot arranged for him to visit the National Assembly, where the deputies were remaking the government of the realm. He also attended a clamorous debate at the Jacobin Club, where he saw ‘the revolutionary power / Toss like a ship at anchor, rocked by storms’.[1] In the manner of a pilgrim, he visited the sites associated with the revolutionary events of the previous two and a half years: the Champ de Mars, where the Feast of the Federation had been held on his memorable first day in France back in 1790; the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, the quarter near the Bastille that harboured many of the most radical of the sans-culottes; the Panthéon, where Rousseau and Voltaire had been reburied in honour of their literary work as harbingers of the revolution. He sat among the dust in the Place de la Bastille,

And from the rubbish gathered up a stone,

And pocketed the relick in the guise

Of an enthusiast.[2]

‘Enthusiast’, like the term ‘patriot’, which he also applied to himself, was code for a passionate supporter of the revolution.

After a few days, he headed south to Orleans. Once he got there, he discovered that he had again missed Helen Maria Williams. He found lodging with a hosier, at eighty francs a month. His host was virulent in anti-revolutionary feeling, as were his fellow lodgers, who were cavalry officers. He met an Englishman, Mr Foxlow, who owned a cotton factory in the city. Just before Christmas, he fell in with a family called Dufour, together with a friend of theirs, a notary’s clerk called Paul Vallon. He was moving among respectable burghers, nearly all of them royalists.

Vallon’s sister Marie-Anne – known as Annette and four years older than Wordsworth – was visiting from the city of Blois, some forty miles further along the river Loire. Since Wordsworth was short of cash, he decided not to enrol with a professional tutor, but to improve his French by means of conversation with the Dufours and the Vallons. And since Annette was the one who did not have a job to go to, she became his de facto tutor: in an age when everyone knew Rousseau’s Nouvelle Héloïse, the intimacy of the tutorial was all too likely to light the fuse of romance. Early in 1792, Annette returned to Blois. And Wordsworth went with her. They had fallen in love.

*

In The Prelude there is an especially vivid memory of a member of the garrison in either Orleans or Blois fuming over the daily news from Paris that was read out in public. His voice was ‘disarmed’ and his ‘yellow cheek’ fanned ‘Into a thousand colours’. He denounced the deputies of the Assembly, even the moderate Girondins such as Carra and Gorsas, as ‘locusts’ devouring the land. Wordsworth listened to these military ‘defenders of the crown’ with respect, but he resisted their attempts to win him over to their cause. Coming from ‘a poor district’, one of the places in England with the fewest number of aristocrats exercising power through ‘wealth or blood’, and having then been educated in the intellectual ‘republic’ of Cambridge, where every student stood ‘upon equal ground’ as ‘brothers / In honour, as of one community’, his natural sympathies leaned towards ‘the government of equal rights / And individual worth’.[3] Many officers were deserting and going to join the émigré army that was mustering on the French border, with support from Austria and Prussia. As he walked the public roads, exploring the Loire Valley, he encountered ‘patriot’ soldiers marching off to defend the revolution against the impending invasion. Tears came to his eyes as he saw the local women saying goodbye to their loved ones.

In contrast to Orleans, there were very few foreigners in Blois. There is accordingly a strong possibility that Wordsworth was one of the two Englishmen who, a surviving record informs us, were granted permission to sit in on the meetings of the city’s pro-revolutionary group, the Friends of the Constitution. What is certain is that he also made the acquaintance of a man whose politics were very different from those of the conservative burghers of Orleans, the well-to-do Vallons and the great majority of the officer class.

Captain Michel-Armand Beaupuy was from an ancient aristocratic family in the Bordeaux region; his mother was descended from the great sixteenth-century essayist Michel de Montaigne. Brought up in the spirit of the Enlightenment philosophes, he was an ardent democrat, deeply concerned about the plight of the poor. Wordsworth put his conversations with this remarkable man at the heart of his account in books nine and ten of The Prelude of ‘Residence in France and French Revolution’. Beaupuy gave him his political education:

oft in solitude

With him did I discourse about the end

Of civil government, and its wisest forms,

Of ancient prejudice, and charter’d rights,

Allegiance, faith, and laws by time matured,

Custom and habit, novelty and change.[4]

Wordsworth turned one of their roadside encounters into the most politically charged of his spots of time, in which Beaupuy gives him a lesson on the need to eradicate poverty and inequality:

And when we chanced

One day to meet a hunger-bitten girl

Who crept along, fitting her languid self

Unto a heifer’s motion – by a cord

Tied to her arm, and picking thus from the lane

Its sustenance, while the girl with her two hands

Was busy knitting in a heartless mood

Of solitude – and at the sight my friend

In agitation said, ‘’Tis against that

Which we are fighting,’ I with him believed

Devoutly that a spirit was abroad

Which could not be withstood, that poverty,

At least like this, would in a little time

Be found no more, that we should see the earth

Unthwarted in her wish to recompense

The industrious, and the lowly child of toil,

All institutes for ever blotted out

That legalized exclusion, empty pomp

Abolished, sensual state and cruel power,

Whether by edict of the one or few –

And finally, as sum and crown of all,

Should see the people having a strong hand

In making their own laws, whence better days

To all mankind.[5]

As she slowly walks, barefoot, knitting a garment to protect against the weather, the ill-fed girl seems the very embodiment of the inequality of society.

The word ‘agitation’, which Wordsworth chooses to evoke Beaupuy’s response, meant far more than it does today: it suggests a sensitivity in the nervous system, a strength of ‘sensibility’, an activation of the spirit of philosophic sympathy. Dr Samuel Johnson’s definition of ‘agitation’ was ‘violent motion of the mind; perturbation; disturbance of the thoughts’, but Wordsworth was more influenced by the philosopher David Hartley, the man honoured in Coleridge’s naming of his first son, who proposed that sensation or feeling was the result of ‘vibration’ or ‘agitation’ in the particles of the nervous system. In this, Hartley was a pioneer of the idea that there is an integral relationship between psychic and physiological states, a key Wordsworthian tenet. Joseph Priestley, Hartley’s most influential expositor, argued that the degree of nervous ‘agitation’ determines the strength of a feeling and the force of a memory in the mind. The theory of nervous ‘agitation’ was accepted even by those who argued more generally against Hartley’s philosophy of ‘the association of ideas’. Thus Joseph Berington: ‘That many of our affections follow mechanically the nervous agitation, is not at all to be doubted. Such are, in the first place, all sensations.’[6] Wordsworth’s was indeed an age of sensation in every sense of the word.

At the same time, ‘agitation’ was suggestive of social unrest, revolutionary sentiment. Wordsworth’s language of sensation allied him to radical new ideas in both philosophy and politics. The act of feeling on behalf of the hunger-bitten girl was the first step towards an acknowledgment of her human rights and thence to a revolution in the social relations that constrained both France and Britain. In mingling the language of democratic politics with that of strong feeling, Wordsworth was channelling the spirit of Jean-Jacques Rousseau via Michel Beaupuy, yoking the cult of sensibility embodied in La nouvelle Héloïse to the revolutionary clarion call of Rousseau’s Social Contract, with its idea that government should be based not on the inherited authority of the few but on the ‘general will’ of the people.

In the version of The Prelude completed in 1805, Wordsworth moved directly from the memory of the girl with the heifer to a story in the spirit of La nouvelle Héloïse that, he claimed, he had heard from Beaupuy ‘And others who had borne a part therein’.[7] It was a Romeo and Juliet tale of lovers called Vaudracour and Julia, facing parental resistance to their affair because the young man’s father was an aristocrat, the girl from the middle class. In the context of this social and familial gulf, the girl’s name would appear to be a nod to both Rousseau’s heroine and Shakespeare’s. But the distinctive thing about this story is that she bears Vaudracour an illegitimate child.

Wordsworth subsequently removed the story from The Prelude and published it as an independent poem. In the notes on the origins of his poems that he dictated to his friend Isabella Fenwick in his final decade, he said that it was ‘Faithfully narrated, though with the omission of many pathetic circumstances, from the mouth of a French Lady, who had been an eye and ear-witness of all that was done and said.’ He added that ‘Many long years after, I was told that Dupligne [the origin of Vaudracour] was then a monk in the Convent of La Trappe.’[8] All this was an attempt to remove any suspicion that the story might have had an autobiographical resonance. But it did. His relationship with Annette Vallon was so important to his life that he felt compelled to write about it in his poetic autobiography. He could not, however, openly admit to it in print. During the Victorian era, to have done so would have been ruinous to his reputation for probity and moral seriousness. More than half a century passed after his death before anyone outside the circle of his immediate family and friends would come to know that, during the year in the Loire when he was talking politics with Beaupuy, his relationship with Annette Vallon grew into a fully-fledged affair.

On 15 December 1792, a child, born that same day, was baptised in the cathedral church of Sainte-Croix in Orleans. Paul Vallon stood as godfather and Madame Dufour as godmother. The father was absent. Before leaving the city, he had given legal power to Monsieur Dufour to stand as his proxy. The clerk filled in the register: ‘Anne Caroline Wordswodsth [sic], daughter of Williams Wordswodsth, Anglois, and of Marie Anne Vallon.’[9] Just two weeks before the ninth anniversary of his father’s death, Wordsworth, now twenty-two, had become a father.

No love poem from William to Annette survives, but a passage that he inserted into ‘Vaudracour and Julia’ when developing it as an independent poem reflects the youthful bliss of their affair, heightened by a sense of illicit excitement but tinged with the sorrowful knowledge that Wordsworth’s poverty and his status as an itinerant foreigner meant that they could never marry:

The vacant city slept; the busy winds,

That keep no certain intervals of rest,

Moved not; meanwhile the galaxy displayed

Her fires, that like mysterious pulses beat

Aloft; – momentous but uneasy bliss!

To their full hearts the universe seemed hung

On that brief meeting’s slender filament.[10]

Wordsworth’s device of ending a line with the suspense of the word ‘hung’ creates a pause, as if the lover’s heart is missing a beat, while the notion of the entire universe resting on the single thread of a stolen nocturnal encounter brilliantly captures the sense one has when young and in love for the first time that nothing else in the world matters but this moment.

Wordsworth had left the Loire Valley at the end of October. Annette was heavily pregnant and there was no prospect of him getting work locally. Over the summer, word had come from Paris that the revolution was becoming more extreme. The three-year experiment of a constitutional monarchy came to an end with the deposition of the king in August. The Parisian sans-culottes stormed the Palace of the Tuileries and killed about 800 of the royal Swiss guards and domestic staff. Then in early September, after Verdun fell to the counter-revolutionary Prussian invaders, royalists and common prisoners were massacred after peremptory show trials. On 20 September, the revolutionary army effected a reverse, defeating the Prussians at Valmy. The next day a National Convention was opened in Paris and the day after that France was formally declared a republic. The prospect of war with Britain was becoming more likely by the day, with unknown consequences for a young Englishman far from home. The only sensible option was for him to return to England, commence a career and send such funds as he could for the support of his child.

Wordsworth had grown used to goodbyes by this time, what with his parents’ deaths, his long separation from Dorothy and the death of his beloved schoolmaster. Yet this would not have diminished the pain of parting from his lover and their unborn child. The impropriety of the liaison was such that he could not write about it directly, but he projected his feelings into the narrative of the separation of Vaudracour from Julia:

Once again

The persevering wedge of tyranny

Achieved their separation: and once more

Were they united, – to be yet again

Disparted, pitiable lot! But here

A portion of the tale may well be left

In silence, though my memory could add

Much how the Youth, in scanty space of time,

Was traversed from without; much, too, of thoughts

That occupied his days in solitude

Under privation and restraint; and what,

Through dark and shapeless fear of things to come,

And what, through strong compunction for the past,

He suffered – breaking down in heart and mind![11]

In the story, it is parental ‘tyranny’ that parts the lovers; in Wordsworth’s experience it was the prospect of national and international political tyranny. Poetically, the word ‘disparted’ is a fine example of his mastery of the negative prefix; biographically, it is a hint that the passage is informed by his own disappointment, indeed despair, over his parting from Annette and the knowledge that he might never see his first child. There is a revealing reticence as part of the story is left ‘in silence’, then a tell-tale introduction of the first-person voice (‘my memory could add / Much’). The ‘fear of things to come’, ‘strong compunction for the past’, the suffering and the breakdown of ‘heart and mind’ are his own.

He also found a way of processing his sorrow at not witnessing his daughter’s early years by having Vaudracour bear his infant child away and nurse it as a single father:

His eyes he scarcely took,

Throughout that journey, from the vehicle

(Slow-moving ark of all his hopes!) that veiled

The tender infant: and, at every inn,

And under every hospitable tree

At which the bearers halted or reposed,

Laid him with timid care upon his knees,

And looked, as mothers ne’er were known to look,

Upon the nursling which his arms embraced.[12]

This is a fantasy that imagines the impossible circumstance of him taking the baby with him when he left France. But then the poem ends in bereavement: ‘the precious child … by some mistake / Or indiscretion of the Father, died’. In penance, Vaudracour becomes a hermit and an elective mute. Not even ‘the voice of Freedom’ resounding through France can rouse him back into society. The most psychologically revealing line of the poem occurs just after the child dies: ‘Theirs be the blame who caused the woe, not mine!’[13] Given that he is allegedly narrating the story at second hand, there was no need for Wordsworth to introduce any mention of blame being attached to himself. Clearly, he did blame himself for the reality that from the point of view of his daughter, as she grew into consciousness of family and circumstance, her father might as well have been dead.

Between parting from the pregnant Annette and writing these lines, Wordsworth witnessed Coleridge’s paternal care of his son Hartley. And he read his friend’s ‘Frost at Midnight’, one of the most beautiful poems ever written about a father’s love for his baby: ‘at my side / My cradled infant slumbers peacefully … My babe so beautiful! It thrills my heart / With tender gladness thus to look at thee’.[14] Deprived of such moments, Wordsworth compensated by nurturing his imaginary children: his poems.

*

On a beautiful autumn day, he left the vineyards, orchards and meadows of the Loire for the ‘fierce metropolis’ of Paris.[15] Once again, he ranged through the city, judging the mood of the people, weighing the hope brought by the proclamation of the republic against the fear that followed from the slaughter of the palace guards and the September Massacres. He spoke to fellow English radicals who had witnessed these events. One of them, James Watt, wrote home to his father, the inventor of the steam engine:

I am filled with involuntary horror at the scenes which pass before me and wish they could have been avoided, but at the same time I allow the absolute necessity of them. In some instances the vengeance of the people has been savage and inhuman. They have dragged the dead naked body of the Princess de Lamballe through the streets and treated it with all sorts of indignities. Her head stuck upon a Pike was carried through Paris and shown to the King and Queen, who are in hourly expectation of the same fate.[16]

In The Prelude, Wordsworth elides the two bloody events of August and September as he remembers walking across the vast Place du Carrousel in front of the Tuileries Palace, where the bodies of the Swiss Guard and other victims had been piled up and burned:

I crossed – a blank and empty area then –

The Square of the Carousel, few weeks back

Heaped up with dead and dying, upon these

And other sights looking as doth a man

Upon a volume whose contents he knows

Are memorable but from him locked up,

Being written in a tongue he cannot read,

So that he questions the mute leaves with pain,

And half upbraids their silence.[17]

He was beginning to question his own complicity with the revolution, to upbraid himself. His own loyalties were by now divided: he had shared in Beaupuy’s revolutionary fervour, but at the same time he was in love with Annette, whose family were staunch royalists. What would happen to them if Robespierre and the other hardliners tightened their grip not just on Paris, but on the provinces? Was it a harbinger of things to come that, before he had left Orleans, more than fifty political prisoners had been transferred from that city to Versailles, where they were slaughtered in the street by the very same sans-culottes who were responsible for the massacres? That night, he lay awake in his lodgings, feeling ‘most deeply’ in what a world he now found himself:

My room was high and lonely, near the roof

Of a large mansion or hotel, a spot

That would have pleased me in more quiet times –

Nor was it wholly without pleasure then.

With unextinguished taper I kept watch,

Reading at intervals. The fear gone by

Pressed on me almost like a fear to come.

I thought of those September Massacres,

Divided from me by a little month,

And felt and touched them, a substantial dread.[18]

‘A fear to come’, so close to the ‘dark and shapeless fear of things to come’ in the ‘Vaudracour and Julia’ sequence, is a sign that his fears are not only for himself but also for Annette and his child.

Unable to sleep, he is haunted by a voice of remembrance and admonishment, conjured out of some combination of recent experience and ‘tragic fictions’. The language has a distinctly Shakespearean feel, signalled by an allusion to the voice that cries ‘sleep no more’ to Macbeth, murderer of an anointed king:

‘The horse is taught his manage and the wind

‘Of heaven wheels round and treads in his own steps,

‘Year follows year, the tide returns again,

‘Day follows day, all things have second birth;

‘The earthquake is not satisfied at once.’

And in such way I wrought upon myself

Until I seem’d to hear a voice that cried

To the whole City, ‘Sleep no more.’[19]

Wordsworth can only be comparing himself to Macbeth because he feels in some sense responsible for the blood that has just stained the Place du Carrousel, even for the execution of the French royal family that was soon to follow. Had he not welcomed the revolution? Having heralded the dawn, he was implicated in the consequences that were unfolding in the cold light of day. Blood will have blood, as Macbeth says. Wordsworth generalizes the thought into the old sense of the word revolution: ‘Course of any thing which returns to the point at which it began to move … Rotation; circular motion’.[20] Actions have consequences; once violence begins, a cycle of retribution will follow. Does that mean, Wordsworth wonders, that the pure ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity will never be realized throughout society and that the task of the writer may be to think about individual choice and liberty instead?

He was, of course, writing this passage a decade after the event, circling back in retrospect. And he would revise his account on several occasions in later years, moderating the language of books nine and ten of The Prelude in order to distance himself more and more from his youthful self, as the politics of his middle age and later years revolved to conservatism. We will never know whether he really heard an inner voice of admonition during that restless night. In the act of writing, it is his mature self in flight from the young idealist he once was.

During the month that he spent back in Paris, he furthered his acquaintance with the Girondin faction. It is possible that the very house in which he spent that sleepless night belonged to the man to whom Charlotte Smith had introduced him. An edition of Wordsworth’s poems published in Paris in 1828 includes an anonymously written introduction, which claimed that he ‘was acquainted with many of the leaders of the revolutionary party, and lodged in the same house with Brissot’.[21] Brissot lived in a tall four-storey town house in the Rue Grétry, a few blocks from the Palais Royal, to which Wordsworth remembered walking on the morning after his dark night of the soul, so both the structure and the location of the house make the identification plausible. The older Wordsworth denied that he actually lodged with Brissot: in his seventieth year he annotated a manuscript memoir by a writer called Barron Field, in which the claim from the 1828 Paris edition was repeated: ‘There is much mistake here which I should like to correct in person.’ He also crossed out the phrase about Brissot and wrote ‘a mistake’ above it in the manuscript.[22] This may, however, be an obfuscation on the part of the old Tory, eager to underplay the extent of his involvement with the revolution.

Whether or not the house was Brissot’s, there is no doubt that at this time Wordsworth supported the Girondins against the extremist Jacobins. The Palais Royal, just to the north of the Louvre, was the home of the king’s cousin, the Duke of Orleans, who had come out in favour of the revolution and even changed his name to the Duc d’Egalité. He had opened the palace grounds to the public and now it was a place where people thronged to hear the latest news. When Wordsworth walked round the corner from his lodgings into the ‘Palace Walk of Orleans’ on the morning after his sleepless night, he heard hawkers crying ‘Denunciation of the crimes / Of Maximilian Robespierre’. They were selling copies of a pamphlet in which the moderate Jean-Baptiste Louvet, a close associate of Brissot, accused Robespierre of seeking dictatorial power. The Prelude gives an account of the circumstances: Brissot had attacked Robespierre in the Convention and Robespierre had responded by challenging anyone accusing him of tyrannical ambition to confront him face to face. ‘Whereat’, writes Wordsworth, evoking a moment of vivid theatricality:

When a dead pause ensued and no one stirred,

In silence of all present, from his seat

Louvet walked singly through the avenue

And took his station in the Tribune, saying

‘I, Robespierre, accuse thee!’[23]

A pause, a silence, and then a moment of strong emotion: this is the Wordsworthian moment of suspension, as in ‘There was a Boy’, transposed to the seat of high politics.

Just how close Wordsworth was to the Girondin cause is apparent from the official memoir published by his nephew Christopher Wordsworth shortly after his death. The family of the recently deceased Victorian Laureate was eager to dismiss the young poet’s radical phase as a juvenile aberration, but the memoir nevertheless acknowledged that ‘If he had remained longer in the French capital, he would, in all probability, have fallen victim among the Brissotins, with whom he was intimately connected, and who were cut off by their rivals, the Jacobins, at the close of the following May.’[24]

In that same district of Paris, on the north bank of the Seine, close to the Palais Royal, there was a narrow street called the Passage des Petits-Pères. This is another possible location for Wordsworth’s lodging. It housed both the Hôtel des Etats-Unis and the Hôtel d’Angleterre, also known as White’s Hotel. These two lodgings provided the hub for the pro-revolutionary Americans and British who had descended upon Paris. On 18 November 1792, halfway through Wordsworth’s sojourn, about a hundred men and women met for a banquet at White’s, during which they formed themselves into ‘The Society of the Friends of the Rights of Man’, celebrating the creation of the republic and the values of liberty, equality and fraternity. Thomas Paine himself, author of The Rights of Man and one of the chief architects of both the American and French revolutions, was there. So were Helen Maria Williams; renegade Irish lord, Edward Fitzgerald; radical Welsh philosopher, David Williams; publisher of revolutionary pamphlets, John Hurford Stone; and freethinker John Oswald, who believed that rights should be extended not merely to all men, women and slaves, but even to animals and to nature itself. Fifty of them signed a petition addressed to the National Convention that advocated ‘a close union between the French republic and the English, Scotch, and Irish nations, a union which cannot fail to ensure entire Europe the enjoyment of the rights of man and establish on the firmest bases universal peace’.[25] Wordsworth may well have been among those who were present but did not sign.

Another acquaintance he made in Paris at this time was John Stewart, an eccentric figure known as ‘Walking Stewart’. His nickname came from the fact that he had walked halfway round the world, from Madras, through Persia, Arabia, Abyssinia, much of North Africa, and every country in Europe as far as Russia. He refused to take carriages because they were both elitist and cruel to horses. He came to believe that there was an impending ‘universal empire of revolutionary police terror’ that would ‘bestialize the human species and desolate the earth’. The police state would ban his books, so he urged readers to translate them into Latin (a precaution against the supposed decay of the English language) and bury them seven feet underground. Their locations would be passed down orally until the dawn of the age of the Stewartian man made their disinterment possible. Despite these bizarre beliefs, Thomas De Quincey, who wrote a wonderful essay about him, said that his political views ‘seemed to Mr Wordsworth and myself every way worthy of a philosopher’.[26]

Stewart’s philosophy, expounded in books with titles such as The Apocalypse of Nature and The Revelation of Nature, was a theory of materialism, influenced by Spinoza and Holbach, combined with a distinctive belief in a single universal consciousness, an idea partly inspired by his travels in the East. Spinoza’s pantheism, the belief that there is no transcendent or personal deity, that God is to be found in nature, in things, was abhorrent to the church. It would fascinate Coleridge. As for Baron d’Holbach, his pseudonymously published anti-religious polemic The System of Nature, with its argument that there is ‘no necessity to have recourse to supernatural powers to account for the formation of things’, underpinned the state-decreed atheism of the French Revolution.[27] The universe, Holbach argued, was nothing more than matter in motion.

Wordsworth learned of Spinoza from Coleridge, but probably never read him; he did not own a copy of Holbach’s System of Nature until 1805. His acquaintance with Walking Stewart in Paris meant that he didn’t need a first-hand knowledge of these influential radical thinkers. In The Apocalypse of Nature, Stewart praised Holbach for completing ‘the destruction of error’ and purging the human mind of prejudice. He made a series of claims that were profoundly formative of Wordsworth’s mind. Stewart began with matter and motion. ‘MOTION is the force or soul of matter, and cause of all action’: hence Wordsworth’s conception, expressed in ‘Tintern Abbey’, of a motion that impels all thinking things and all objects of all thought. ‘MAN. This machine is formed of particles of matter, organized so as to resemble a corded instrument of music of five strings which correspond with the five senses’: this idea chimed with Coleridge’s notion, which would soon also influence Wordsworth, of the human mind as an aeolian harp – a stringed instrument played by the wind – trembling into thought. For Stewart, as for Wordsworth, the self and nature are inextricably linked: ‘Self, as a part of all Nature, is immortal and universal … self pervades all Nature in its revolutions and operations, and self is as much concerned in the present or future health and happiness of all Nature, as the hand is concerned in that of the body.’[28] The further one reads into The Apocalypse of Nature, the more deeply one understands that the animated nature of Wordsworth’s poems, the insight into ‘the life of things’ that a few years later he would be articulating in ‘Tintern Abbey’, is deeply bound to the philosophies of pantheism and materialism that were at the ideological heart of the French Revolution.

Wordsworth asserted in The Prelude that in the early 1790s his love of nature gave way to a love of humankind. This was inspired by Beaupuy and the other radicals whom he met in France, and whose courage he saluted: ‘For great were the auxiliars which then stood / Upon our side, we who were strong in love’, he wrote in book ten. At the same time, he never renounced his primary love of nature. At the core of his system of belief there remained what Walking Stewart at the climax of his Apocalypse of Nature called ‘The RELIGION of NATURE’, its first tenet being ‘Nature is the great integer of being, or matter and motion, without beginning as without end.’[29] Nature would always offer Wordsworth a sense of wholeness and what he called in the same passage of The Prelude a ‘pleasant exercise of hope and joy’. Through that spring and summer in the Loire, inspired by river and valley, radicalized by Beaupuy, and in love with Annette, he breathed a vision of hope and joy for both nature and society. He believed for the while that ‘Not favored spots alone, but the whole earth, / The beauty wore of promise’. He was able to say

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

But to be young was very heaven.[30]

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