Radical Wordsworth

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]