What though the radiance which was once so bright
Be now for ever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind
Ode, Intimations of Immortality
We went to bed, and I tried to read further, though it became hard to concentrate after I found a long blond hair caught on the headboard that belonged neither to M. nor to me and hinted at the many guests who had stayed in the Mortal Man before us, one of whom was perhaps now on another continent, unaware of having left a part of herself behind. We fell into fitful sleep to the sound of the owl outside.
3.
William Wordsworth was born in 1770 in the small town of Cocker-mouth on the northern edge of the Lake District. He spent, in his words, ‘half his boyhood in running wild among the Mountains' and aside from interludes in London and Cambridge and travels around Europe, lived his whole life in the Lake District, first in a modest two-storeyed stone dwelling, Dove Cottage in the village of Gras-mere, and then, as his fame increased, in a more substantial home in nearby Rydal.
And almost every day he went on a long walk in the mountains or along the lakeshore. He was unbothered by the rain that, as he admitted, tended to fall in the Lake District ‘with a vigour and perseverance that may remind the disappointed traveller of those deluges of rain which fall among the Abyssinian mountains for the annual supply of the Nile'. His acquaintance Thomas De Quincey would estimate that Wordsworth had walked between 175,000 and 180,000 miles over his lifetime—a statistic that was all the more remarkable, added De Quincey, considering his physique: ‘For Wordsworth was, upon the whole, not a well-made man. His legs were pointedly condemned by all the female connoisseurs in legs that I ever heard lecture upon the topic' Sadly, De Quincey continued, ‘the total effect of Wordsworth's person was always worst in a state of motion, for, according to the remark I have heard from many country people, “he walked like a cade”—a cade being some sort of insect which advances by an oblique motion.'
It was during his cadelike walks that Wordsworth derived the inspiration for many of his works, including ‘To a Butterfly', ‘To the Cuckoo', ‘To a Skylark', ‘To the Daisy' and ‘To the Small Celandine'—poems about natural phenomena that poets had hitherto looked at only casually or ritualistic ally, if at all, but that Wordsworth now declared to be the noblest subjects of his craft. On the sixteenth of March 1802—according to the journal of his sister, Dorothy, who kept a record of her sibling's movements around the Lake District—Wordsworth walked across a bridge at Brothers Water, a placid lake near Patterdale, and then sat down to write the following:
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.