Radical Wordsworth

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.