The cock is crowing
The stream is flowing
The small birds twitter,
The lake doth glitter…
There's joy in the mountains;
There's life in the fountains;
Small clouds are sailing,
Blue sky prevailing
A few weeks afterwards, the poet found himself moved to write by the beauty of a sparrow's nest:
Look, five blue eggs are gleaming there!
Few visions have I seen more fair,
Nor many prospects of delight
More pleasing than that simple sight!
He experienced the same need to express joy a few summers later on hearing the sound of a nightingale:
O Nightingale! thou surely art
A Creature of a fiery heart—…
Thou sing'st as if the God of wine
Had help'd thee to a Valentine.
These were not haphazard articulations of pleasure. Behind them lay a well-developed philosophy of nature, which—infusing all of Wordsworth's work—made an original and, in the history of Western thought, hugely influential claim about our requirements for happiness and the origins of our unhappiness. The poet proposed that nature—which he took to comprise, among other elements, birds, streams, daffodils and sheep—was an indispensable corrective to the psychological damage inflicted by life in the city.
The message met with vicious initial resistance. Lord Byron, reviewing Wordsworth's Poems in Two Volumes in 1807, was bewildered that a grown man could make such claims on behalf of flowers and animals: ‘What will any reader out of the nursery say to such namby-pamby… an imitation of such minstrelsy as soothed our cries in the cradle?' The editors of the Edinburgh Review concurred, declaring Wordsworth's poetry ‘a piece of babyish absurdity' and wondering whether it might not represent a deliberate attempt by the author to turn himself into a laughingstock: ‘It is possible that the sight of a garden spade or a sparrow's nest might really have suggested to Wordsworth a train of powerful impressions … but it is certain that to most minds, such associations will always appear forced, strained and unnatural. All the world laughs at ‘Elegiac Stanzas to a Suckling-Pig', ‘A Hymn on Washing-Day', ‘Sonnets to One's Grandmother', or ‘Pindaric Odes on Gooseberry-Pie'; and yet, it seems, it is not easy to convince Mr Wordsworth of this.'
Parodies of the poet's work soon began to circulate in the literary journals.
When I see a cloud,
I think out loud,
How lovely it is,
To see the sky like this ran one.
Was it a robin that I saw?
Was it a pigeon or a daw?
ran another.
Wordsworth was stoic. ‘Trouble not yourself upon the present reception of these poems,' he advised Lady Beaumont. ‘Of what moment is that when compared with what I trust is their destiny to console the afflicted, to add sunshine to daylight by making the happy happier, to teach the young and the gracious of every age to see, to think and feel, and therefore to become more actively and securely virtuous; this is their office, which I trust they will faithfully perform long after we (that is, all that is mortal of us) are mouldered in our graves.'
He was wrong only about how long it would take. ‘Up to 1820, the name of Wordsworth was trampled under foot,' explained De Quincey ‘From 1820 to 1830 it was militant; and from 1830 to 1835 it has been triumphant' Taste underwent a slow but radical transformation. The reading public gradually ceased guffawing and learnt to be charmed and even to recite by heart hymns to butterflies and sonnets on celandines. Wordsworth's poetry attracted tourists to the places that had inspired it. New hotels were opened in Windermere, Rydal and Grasmere. By 1845, it was estimated that there were more tourists in the Lake District than there were sheep. They prized glimpses of the cadeish creature in his garden in Rydal, and on hillsides and lakeshores sought out the sites whose power he had described in verse. On the death of Southey in 1843, Wordsworth was appointed England's poet laureate. Plans were drawn up by a group of well-wishers in London to have the Lake District renamed Wordsworthshire.
By the time of the poet's death at the age of eighty, in 1850 (by which year half of the population of England and Wales was urban), serious critical opinion seemed almost universally sympathetic to his suggestion that regular travel through nature was a necessary antidote to the evils of the city.
4.
Part of Wordsworth's complaint was directed towards the smoke, congestion, poverty and ugliness of cities, but clean-air bills and slum clearance would not by themselves have eradicated his critique. For it was the effect of cities on our souls, rather than on our health, that concerned him.
The poet accused cities of fostering a family of life-destroying emotions: anxiety about our position in the social hierarchy, envy at the success of others, pride and a desire to shine in the eyes of strangers. City dwellers had no perspective, he alleged, they were in thrall to what was spoken of in the street or at the dinner table. However well provided for, they had a relentless desire for new things, which they did not genuinely lack and on which their happiness did not depend. And in this crowded, anxious sphere, it seemed harder than it did on an isolated homestead to begin sincere relationships with others. ‘One thought baffled my understanding,' wrote Wordsworth of his residence in London: ‘How men lived even next-door neighbours, as we say, yet still strangers, and knowing not each other's names.'
Myself afflicted by a few of these ills, I had, one evening several months before my journey to the Lake District, emerged from a gathering held in the centre of London, that ‘turbulent world/of men and things' (The Prelude). Walking away from the venue, envious and worried about my position, I found myself deriving unexpected
relief from the sight of a vast object overhead, which, in spite of the darkness, I attempted to photograph with a pocket camera—and which served to bring home to me, as rarely before, the redemptive power of natural forces with which so much of Wordsworth's poetry is concerned.
The cloud had floated over that part of the city only a few minutes before and, given the strong westerly wind, was not destined to remain above it long. The lights of surrounding offices lent to its edges an almost decadent fluorescent orange glow, making it look like a grave old man bedecked with party decorations, and yet its granite-grey centre testified to its origins in the slow interplay of air and sea. Soon it would be over the fields of Essex, then the marshes and oil refineries, before heading out over the mutinous North Sea waves.
Keeping my eyes fixed on the apparition while walking towards the bus stop, I felt my anxieties abate, and I turned over in my mind some lines the cadeish poet once composed in honour of a Welsh valley:
… [Nature] can so inform
The mind that is within us, so impress
With quietness and beauty, and so feed
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all
The dreary intercourse of daily life,
Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb
Our chearful faith that all which we behold
Is full of blessings.
Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey
5.
In the summer of 1798, Wordsworth and his sister went on a walking holiday along the Wye Valley in Wales, where William had a moment of revelation about the power of nature that was to resonate through his poetry for the rest of his life. It was his second visit to the valley; he had walked along it five years before. In the intervening period he had endured a succession of unhappy experiences: he had spent time in London, a city he feared; altered his political views by reading Godwin; transformed his sense of a poet's mission through his friendship with Coleridge and travelled across a revolutionary France wrecked by Robespierre's Great Terror.
Back in Wye, Wordsworth found an elevated spot where he sat down under a sycamore tree, look
ed out across the valley and its river, cliffs, hedgerows and forests and was inspired to write perhaps his greatest poem. At least, ‘no poem of mine was composed under circumstances more pleasant for me to remember than this', he would later explain of ‘Lines Written a Few Miles above Tin-tern Abbey', which he subtitled ‘On revisiting the banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798', an ode to the restorative powers of nature.
Though absent long,
These forms of beauty have not been to me,
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet …
With tranquil restoration.
Philip James de Loutherbourg, The River Wye at Tintern Abbey, 1805
The dichotomy of town and country forms the backbone of the poem, with the latter repeatedly being invoked as a counter to the pernicious influence of the former:
how oft,
In darkness, and amid the many shapes
Of joyless day-light; when the fretful stir
Unprofitable, and the fever of the world,
Have hung upon the beatings of my heart,
How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee
O sylvan Wye! Thou wanderer through the woods,
How often has my spirit turned to thee!
This expression of gratitude was to recur in The Prelude, where the poet once more acknowledged his debt to nature for enabling him to dwell in the cities without succumbing to the base emotions that, he held, they habitually fostered:
If, mingling with the world, I am content
With my own modest pleasures, and have lived …
removed
From little enmities and low desires,
The gift is yours …
Ye winds and sounding cataracts! 'tis yours,
Ye mountains! thine, O Nature!
6.
Why? Why would proximity to a cataract, a mountain or any other form of nature render one any less likely to experience ‘enmities and low desires' than proximity to crowded streets?
The Lake District offered suggestions. M. and I rose early on our first morning and went down to the Mortal Man's breakfast room, which was painted pink and overlooked a luxuriant valley. It was raining heavily but the landlord assured us, before serving us porridge and informing us that eggs would cost extra, that this was but a passing shower. A tape recorder was playing Peruvian pipe music, interspersed with highlights of Handel's Messiah. Having eaten, we packed a rucksack and drove to the town of Ambleside, where we bought a few items to take with us on a walk: a compass, a waterproof map holder, water, chocolate and some sandwiches.
Little Ambleside had the bustle of a metropolis. Lorries were noisily unloading their goods outside shops, there were placards everywhere advertising restaurants and hotels, and though it was still early, the tea shops were full. On racks outside newsagents' stalls, the papers reported on the latest development in a political scandal in London.
A few miles northwest of the town, in the Great Langdale Valley, the atmosphere was transformed. For the first time since arriving in the Lake District, we were in deep countryside, where nature was more in evidence than humans. On either side of the path stood a number of oak trees. Each one grew far from the shadow of its neighbour, in fields so appetising to sheep as to have been eaten down to a perfect lawn. The oaks were of noble bearing: they did not trail their branches on the ground as willows are wont to do, nor did their leaves have the dishevelled appearance common to certain poplars, which can look from close up as though they have been awoken in the middle of the night and not had time to fix their hair. Instead they gathered their lower branches tightly under themselves, while their upper branches grew in small, orderly steps. The result was a rich green foliage in an almost perfect circle, like an archetypal tree drawn by a child.
The rain, which continued to fall confidently despite the promises of the landlord, gave us a sense of the mass of the oaks. From under their damp canopy, rain could be heard falling on forty thousand leaves, creating a harmonious pitter-patter that varied in pitch according to whether the water dripped onto a large or a small leaf, a high or a low one, one loaded with accumulated water or not. The trees themselves were an image of ordered complexity: the roots patiently drew nutrients from the soil, and the capillaries of the trunks sent water twenty-five metres upwards, each branch taking enough but not too much for the needs of its own leaves, each leaf in turn contributing to the maintenance of the whole. The trees were an image of patience, for they would sit out this rainy morning and the many that would follow it without complaint, adjusting themselves to the slow shift of the seasons, showing no ill temper in a storm, no desire to wander from their spot for an impetuous journey across to another valley—content to keep their many slender fingers deep in the clammy soil, metres from their central stems and far from those tallest leaves that held the rainwater in their palms.
Wordsworth enjoyed sitting beneath oaks, listening to the rain or watching sunbeams fracture across their leaves. What he saw as the patience and dignity of the trees seemed to him characteristic of nature's works, which were to be valued for holding up,
before the mind intoxicate
With present objects, and the busy dance
Of things that pass away, a temperate show
Of objects that endure.
Nature would, he proposed, dispose us to seek out in life and in one another ‘whate'er there is desirable and good'. An ‘image of right reason', nature would temper the crooked impulses of urban life.
If we are to accept (even in part) Wordsworth's argument, we may need to concede a prior principle holding that our identities are to a greater or lesser extent malleable, changing according to whom—and sometimes what—we are with. The company of certain people may excite our generosity and sensitivity, while that of others awakens our competitiveness and envy. Thus A's obsession with status and hierarchy may—almost imperceptibly—lead B to worry about his own significance, even as A's jokes quietly rouse his hitherto submerged sense of the ridiculous. But move B to another environment, and his concerns will subtly shift in response to a new interlocutor.
What, then, may be expected to happen to a person's identity in the company of a cataract or a mountain, an oak tree or a celandine, objects that after all have no conscious concerns and so, it would seem, can neither encourage nor censor particular behaviours? And yet an inanimate object may, to come to the linchpin of Wordsworth's claim for the beneficial effects of nature, still work an influence on those around it. Natural scenes have the power to suggest certain values to us—oaks dignity, pines resolution, lakes calm—and therefore may, in unobtrusive ways, act as inspirations to virtue.
In a letter written to a young student in the summer of 1802, addressing the task of poetry, Wordsworth came close to specifying the values that he felt nature embodied: A great Poet… ought to a certain degree to rectify men's feelings… to render their feelings more sane, pure and permanent, in short, more consonant to Nature.'
In every natural landscape, Wordsworth found instances of such sanity, purity and permanence. Flowers, for example, were models of humility and meekness:
Sweet silent Creature!
That breath'st with me in sun and air,
Do thou, as thou art wont, repair
My heart with gladness, and a share
Of thy meek nature!
Animals, for their part, were paragons of stoicism. Wordsworth at one point became quite attached to a bluetit that even in the worst weather sang in the orchard above Dove Cottage. During their first, freezing winter there, the poet and his sister were inspired by a pair of swans that were also new to the area, and that endured the cold with greater patience than the Wordsworths.
An hour up the Langdale Valley, the rain having abated, M. and I hear a faint tseep, rapidly repeated, alternating with a louder tissip. Three meadow p
ipits are flying out of a patch of rough grass. A black-eared wheatear is looking pensive on a conifer branch, warming its pale sandy-buff feathers in the late-summer sun. Stirred by something, it takes off and circles the valley, releasing a rapid and high-pitched schwer, schwee, schwee-oo. The sound has no effect on a caterpillar that was walking strenuously across a rock, nor on the many sheep dotted across the valley floor.
One of the sheep ambles towards the path and looks curiously at his visitors. Humans and sheep stare at each other in wonder. After a moment, the sheep sinks into a reclining pose and takes a lazy mouthful of grass, which he chews on one side of his mouth, as if it were gum. What makes me me and him him? Another sheep approaches and lies down next to his companion, wool to wool, and for a second they exchange what appears to be a knowing, mildly amused glance.
A few meters ahead, from inside a deep-green bush that runs down to a stream comes a noise like the sound of a lethargic old man clearing his throat after a heavy lunch. It is followed by an incongruously frantic rustle, as though someone was rifling through a bed of leaves in an irritated search for a valuable possession. But on noticing that it has company, the creature falls silent—the tense silence of a child holding his or her breath at the back of a clothes cupboard during a game of hide-and-seek. Back in Ambleside, people are buying newspapers and eating scones, while out here, buried in a bush, is a thing, probably with fur and perhaps a tail, interested in eating berries or flies, scurrying in the foliage and grunting—and yet still, for all its oddities, a contemporary, a fellow sleeping and breathing creature alive on this singular planet in a universe otherwise made up chiefly of rocks and vapours and silence.
The Art of Travel Page 9
