William Wordsworth

by Hunter Davies

  The bulk of the poems he has described as destitute of merit. Am I recompensed for this by vague praises of my talent? I care little for the praise of any other professional critics, but as it may help me to pudding. Believe me, dear Cottle, your affectionate friend, W. Wordsworth.

  The big thing, the particularly original thing, about Lyrical Ballads was their conversational style and content, at least by the standards of the day. All the poems weren’t like this, but those that were, by contemporary standards, were considered either aggressively modernistic or brutally banal. Wordsworth and Coleridge, as William outlined in a foreword note, were attempting to do two things: firstly, to write poems about nature, emphasizing the romantic and the imaginative; secondly, to write about ‘matter-of-fact’ subjects. William later added a lengthier preface, expounding rather didactically, almost coxcombly his views and aims as a poet, elaborating on his theme that the convention of poetry of the time bore no relation to the real languge of men. He explained that the poems were meant to be experiments, and so the reader had to expect to be shocked by a certain awkwardness: ‘Readers of superior judgment may disapprove of the style in which many of the pieces are executed. It will perhaps appear to them that the author has sometimes descended too low and that many of his expressions are too familiar, and not of sufficient dignity.’

  It is hard today for the layman to see how the poems could in any way be called experimental, or even shocking. They appear, in the main, to be simple rustic poems, some of them little more than doggerel; but it has to be realized that eighteenth-century conventions were very rigid. Language was flowery, the form was strictly metric, there was a heavy Classical influence and the subject-matter was meant to be equally Classical and flowery. Reviewers admired perfect hexameters or iambic pentameters. Birds were ‘feathered songsters’. It is true that poets like Burns were writing about ordinary subjects, but usually as regional poets, writing in a dialect. Educated gentlemen like Wordsworth were meant to follow the literary rules. Wordsworth had indeed read and admired the accepted eighteenth-century poets, but now, so some critics thought, he was slumming and deliberately letting down the side. As in so many other matters, he had decided to revolt, throwing the accepted standards over in order to go his own way.

  It has to be understood what Wordsworth, and many young men like him, had been going through in the last decade. The French Revolution had had a profound effect on all aspects of life and thought. In his own little revolution, Wordsworth was not only reacting against the eighteenth-century style of poetry, with all its embellishments and rules, but against the eighteenth-century intellectual obsessions, such as the cult of Reason. Even people like Godwin, whose philosophical teaching he’d now rejected, put the intellect first, denying the power of the senses and emotions. Wordsworth, in his revolt, was deliberately writing about people with no intellect, no knowledge of classical logic—in fact, in many cases about people with no reason at all, being stark, raving mad.

  To find poems in Lyrical Ballads called ‘The Idiot Boy’, ‘The Mad Mother’ or ‘The Female Vagrant’ was indeed shocking to people of superior tastes. One just didn’t write about village imbeciles or deranged women. Pedlars and shepherds could conceivably be written about, but they had to be idealized and romanticized. One didn’t want some old shepherd blathering on in a conversational style about how he’d lost his flock and ended up with one dead lamb, as Wordsworth did. Poetry should be written by an educated elite, for an educated elite. It had no connection with folk ballads, passed on by peasants by word of mouth and most of which were either very rude, in every sense, or simply meant to be humorous. Wordsworth, without being humorous or saucy, was taking rustic subjects and trying to get the educated people to read about them. He never wrote in dialect. He didn’t in fact write for ordinary people, which is ironic, considering he thought he was writing about ordinary subjects. The ordinary people, whoever they are, never read his poems, and still don’t. He is the poet of the Lake District, but you don’t find Lake District shepherds reading his stuff. Wordsworth, despite his experiments, was still hoping to be read by the traditional, poetry-reading, educated public.

  Naturally enough, most educated people were put off by Wordsworth’s rustic topics, which are certainly very easy to ridicule, and only slowly did they get round to realizing that it was his reactions to such topics or such people that was new and interesting. That was where his message lay. He was leading readers to see a wisdom and a morality in ordinary people and in ordinary, natural things that had been dismissed and ignored, not just in poetry but in life, by the so-called superior people. Often, when the message as well as the medium is very simple, then the result can appear totally simplistic, not to say pointless. It is always easier to hide behind complications, to cover yourself in style. Doing or saying the simple thing leaves you open to groans and heavy sighs, or, as happened with Wordsworth in many quarters, to laughter and ridicule.

  The most ridiculed passage has usually been from the poem ‘The Thorn’, where Wordsworth did take his matter-of-fact style to extremes, writing more like a surveyor than a poet:

  And to the left, three yards beyond

  You see a little muddy pond

  Of water—never dry,

  I’ve measured it from side to side

  ’Tis three feet long, and two feet wide.

  ‘The Idiot Boy’ was also much abused, for its subject-matter and style:

  ’Tis eight o’clock—a clear March night,

  The moon is up,—the sky is blue,

  The owlet, in the moonlight air,

  Shouts from nobody knows where;

  He lengthens out his lonely shout,

  Halloo! halloo! a long halloo!

  One of the simplest poems in Lyrical Ballads is called ‘We are seven’, in which the poet meets a little girl and asks her how many brothers and sisters she has. It turns out there are five living, and two buried in the churchyard, but she still insists ‘we are seven’. That’s about all there is to it. No wonder people scoffed at the banality of the subject—and the style is no better.

  I met a little cottage girl:

  She was eight years old, she said;

  Her hair was thick with many a curl

  That clustered round her head.

  It could be a nursery rhyme, or a poem written by a child of eight, but there’s a certain haunting beauty in its simplicity and starkness—at least, I think there is, having read it a few times, at first preparing to scoff.

  William wrote this poem at Alfoxden, walking up and down in a little wood outside the house, remembering a conversation he’d had a few years earlier with a little girl while walking up the Wye valley. Coleridge and Dorothy were waiting inside for him, with the tea all set, but William, who’d composed the last lines first, couldn’t think of an opening stanza.

  ‘When it was all finished,’ William later recalled, ‘I came in and recited it to Mr Coleridge and my Sister and said “A prefatory stanza must be added and I should sit down to our little tea meal with greater pleasure if my task were finished.” I mentioned in substance what I wished to be expressed and Coleridge immediately threw off the stanza.…’

  Not all the poems were as simple as that—notably ‘Expostulation and Reply’ and ‘The Tables Turned’. They were the ones written at Alfoxden, based on conversations which had taken place between William and young William Hazlitt, then only nineteen years old. He had heard Coleridge lecture at Shrewsbury the previous year—he had walked ten miles through mud to get there—and got himself invited to Coleridge’s cottage. ‘I got into a metaphysical argument with Wordsworth,’ wrote Hazlitt, ‘while Coleridge was explaining the different notes of the nightingale to his sister, in which we neither of us succeeded in making ourselves perfectly clear and intelligible.’

  Hazlitt had a highly developed critical brain, even at nineteen, and he later held some strong opinions on Wordsworth, but he remembered ever afterwards that first meeting with the poet and how Do
rothy had allowed him free access to the manuscripts of Lyrical Ballads. ‘I dipped into a few of these with great satisfaction. I was not critically or sceptically inclined. I saw touches of truth and nature … and the sense of a new style of poetry came over me. It had to me something of the new effect that arises from the turning up of fresh soil, or the first welcome breath of Spring.’

  Coleridge also read out to him some of Wordsworth’s ballads, in a sonorous and musical voice, and told Hazlitt, as he told all his friends, about the greatness of Mr Wordsworth. ‘He strides so far before you that he dwindles in the distance.’

  The best known and the best received of William’s poems in the first volume of Lyrical Ballads was ‘Lines composed a few Miles above Tintern Abbey’. This was written by William after the rest of the book was at the printers, which was why it became the last poem in the collection. Having finished the book, so he thought, he went on a four- or five-day walking trip up the Wye valley with Dorothy. On the road back from Tintern, he was suddenly inspired to write the poem and composed it in three days, rushing it straight to the printers without making any alterations—a rare occurrence for him. His feelings of spontaneous joyfulness shine through: ‘No poem of mine was composed under circumstances more pleasant for me to remember than this.’

  There were twenty-three poems in the book, nineteen by Wordsworth and only four by Coleridge, including the first one, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’. This was obviously not a matter-of-fact, colloquial poem, but it represents the supernatural side of Lyrical Ballads. As a narrative poem, it is now considered one of the finest in the English language, though by 1799, even Wordsworth turned against it, disliking the archaic language, putting the blame on it for their poor reviews and suggesting to Cottle that it could be taken out, if there was ever another edition.

  Coleridge even agreed with this, willing as ever to subjugate his muse to Wordsworth’s. By the time the book came out they realized they were different sorts of poet anyway, though still the most passionate of friends. Their attempt at complete collaboration had been brief—Wordsworth thought of the albatross for ‘The Ancient Mariner’, but little else. Wordsworth was never as keen as Coleridge was on the supernatural or the legendary, preferring to start on the ground, with hard, observed incidents or topics, mundane sights, ordinary people, and then build his poem up from there, rising into the mind and the spirit, rather than starting off from some fanciful, surrealistic, hallucinatory images.

  Coleridge was probably the first to realize that what in fact Wordsworth was trying to do was give poetry higher aims than it currently had. Through the images of poetry, Wordsworth was doing nothing less than teaching men about his relationship with his fellows and with the universe. Even when Coleridge could see when it didn’t work, he still recognized the giant in Wordsworth, struggling to get out.

  As we have seen, Lyrical Ballads was mainly Wordsworth’s production. Coleridge hadn’t produced much new material: of his three other poems (apart from ‘The Ancient Mariner’), one had already been published in the Morning Post and the other two were taken from his play. However, the book was published anonymously with neither poet’s name appearing anywhere. ‘Wordsworth’s name is nothing,’ said Coleridge, when Cottle suggested their names should appear, ‘and mine stinks.’ The first reactions, as they learned when they returned from Germany, seemed to prove Coleridge’s point.

  William came straight back from Germany and headed for the north of England. Coleridge stayed on for a few more months, despite the death of his baby son Berkeley. He worried about William hiding himself away in the North, if indeed that was what he finally intended to do. ‘I think it is highly probable that where I live, there he will live, unless he should find in the North any person or persons who can feel and understand him, and reciprocate and react on him. My many weaknesses are of some advantage to me; they unite me more with the great mass of my fellow-beings but dear Wordsworth appears to me to have hurtfully segregated and isolated his being.’

  William thought differently. He and Dorothy went first of all to Sockburn on Tees, the home of their old friends the Hutchinsons, where they based themselves for several months. ‘We have spent our time pleasantly enough in Germany,’ wrote William. ‘But we are right glad to find ourselves in England for we have learnt to know its value.’

  Coleridge eventually dragged himself away from Germany and joined William in the north of England, going with him on a tremendous walking tour, right round the Lakes, in the autumn of 1799. Cottle, their erstwhile publisher, who had now gone back to bookselling, joined them for a while, and so did John Wordsworth, William’s sailor brother, who was between voyages. But mostly they were on their own. They climbed Helvellyn and toured the outlying valleys—ones, such as Ennerdale, that even the hardiest travel writers of the day never ventured into. William proudly showed his native land to Coleridge, who’d never been there before, and Coleridge was suitable enthralled.

  It was on this trip that William revisited Grasmere Vale, and he chanced upon a little cottage that was available to rent. He decided it would be perfect for himself and Dorothy, just the two of them together again. It was up to Coleridge this time to decide if he wanted to live with them there. William’s roving days were over.

  TINTERN ABBEY

  Some lines from the final poem in Lyrical Ballads, 1798.

  For I have learned

  To look on nature, not as in the hour

  Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes

  The still, sad music of humanity,

  Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power

  To chasten and subdue. And I have felt

  A presence that disturbs me with the joy

  Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

  Of something far more deeply interfused,

  Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

  And the round ocean and the living air,

  And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:

  A motion and a spirit, that impels

  All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

  And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still

  A lover of the meadows and the woods,

  And mountains; and of all that we behold

  From this green earth; of all the mighty world

  Of eye, and ear,—both what they half create,

  And what perceive; well pleased to recognise

  In nature and the language of the sense

  The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,

  The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul

  Of all my moral being.

  8

  Dove Cottage

  1800–1802

  IT was ten years since Wordsworth’s home had been in the Lakes, ten years of wandering round England and Europe; but, at the time, his return was not as inevitable as it might now appear. The world at large thought of him later as purely a Lake District poet. Yet there was an element of chance in his decision to move to Grasmere when he did. If he hadn’t lost the lease of the Alfoxden house, thanks to his radical friends and radical habits, he would have stayed there much longer. He was happy enough in the West Country, living with Dorothy at last, writing away excitedly with Coleridge. Even when they lost that house, their thoughts had turned to Germany, not to the Lakes.

  William was homeless, in the sense of no longer having a family home or any family ties in the Lakes, and free to go anywhere. The original plan had been for a two-year stay in Germany. Coleridge, at least, thought they would eventually all end up back in the West Country. It was William’s dreadful homesickness in Germany, which turned his mind back to his youth, that seems to have decided him to return to the north of England. He’d never felt like that in France, but then he had other things to occupy himself with in Orleans and Blois. But if any other suggestions or possibilities had turned up after Germany, who knows where he might have gone.

  He returned to the Lakes on the very stroke of a new c
entury and spent the rest of his life there, but for several years, as can be seen from his letters, he did not believe he had returned to the Lakes for good and ever. He had now definitely decided that his purpose in life was to write poetry (unlike Coleridge, who was still involved with differing projects), but he didn’t necessarily consider that the only place he could write his poetry would be the Lakes. It was events which kept him there, till he realized, deep down, that this was where he belonged.

  He had been led into the West Country and into the German adventure by other people’s whims. The Lakes had been his personal choice. Now, in his thirtieth year, though he might not have been aware of it, he was beginning, just ever so slightly, to settle down.…

  William did not approve of some of the things he saw on his return. On his tour of rediscovery with Coleridge in the autumn of 1799, he was appalled by the new developments and the growth of tourism in the previous ten years. Almost two hundred years later, when people go back to the Lakes after a short absence and see more cars and more people, they are still being appalled, maintaining things have been ruined. In Wordsworth’s case, he could make such statements with even greater truth, since he had seen the Lakes in their virgin state.

  ‘Went on the ferry—a cold passage—and were much disgusted with the New Erections and objects about Windermere,’ William wrote to Dorothy. ‘Thence to Hawkshead—great change amongst the People since we were last there.’

  Although Coleridge had never seen the Lakes before, he agreed with his companion’s opinion that the vandals had arrived. Coleridge always kept a notebook on his journeys, and though most of the entries are little more than rough jottings, his comments are often lively and amusing. ‘The Damned Scoundrel on the right hand with his house and barn built to represent a Chapel. His name is Partridge from London. This Fowl is a stocking weaver by trade.…’ On Derwentwater, they heard about a wealthy eccentric called Colonel Pocklington who’d built himself a mock ruin on an island in the middle of the lake, following the contemporary fashion for Gothic follies. Coleridge noted: ‘Pocklington has taken off the steeple of the mock church. Ey! Ey! Turned my church to a Presbyterian Meeting. Pocklington shaved off the Branches of an oak, whitewashed and shaped it into an Obelisk. Art Beats Nature.…’ When they got to the prehistoric Castlerigg Stone Circles near Keswick, they found that some hooligans had beaten them to it. The stones had been painted with whitewash, so that they looked like ‘an assembly of white-vested Wizards’. As Coleridge commented, ‘The Keswickians have been playing Tricks with the stone.’