Copyright

William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2019

Copyright © Adam Nicolson 2019

Cover image © In Xanadu (Island Studio)

All woodcuts photographed by Leigh Simpson

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780008126476

Ebook Edition © June 2019 ISBN: 9780008126483

Version: 2019-05-20

Dedication

For Tom Hammick

On the island of his self

Epigraph

The making of verses, the making of works, occurs in the edges of your life, of your time, in your late nights or early mornings … And my words, the words for me, seem to have more nervous energy when they are touching territory that I know, that I live with … I can lay my hand on [a place] and know it. And the words, the words come alive and get a kind of personality when they are involved with it for me. The landscape is image. It’s almost an element to work with, as much as it is an object of admiration.

Seamus Heaney, speaking to Patrick Garland on Poets on Poetry, BBC 1, October 1973

Contents

1  Cover

2  Title Page

3  Copyright

4  Dedication

5  Epigraph

6  Contents

7  1 Following

8 2 Meeting – June 1797

9 3 Searching June 1797

10  4 Settling – July 1797

11  5 Walking – July and August 1797

12  6 Informing – July and August 1797

13  7 Dreaming – September and October 1797

14  8 Voyaging – November 1797

15  9 Diverging – December 1797 and January 1798

16  10 Mooning – January and February 1798

17  11 Remembering – February 1798

18  12 Emerging – March 1798

19  13 Polarising – March 1798

20  14 Delighting – April, May and June 1798

21  15 Authoring – June 1798

22  16 Arriving – July 1798

23  17 Leaving – August and September 1798

24  Acknowledgements

25  A Note on Tom Hammick’s Pictures

26  Notes

27  Bibliography

28  Index

29  Also by Adam Nicolson

30  About the Publisher

LandmarksCoverFrontmatterStart of ContentBackmatter

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1

Following

The year, or slightly more than a year, from June 1797 until the early autumn of 1798, has a claim to being the most famous moment in the history of English poetry. In the course of it, two young men of genius, living for a while on the edge of the Quantock Hills in Somerset, began to find their way towards a new understanding of the world, of nature and of themselves.

These months have always been portrayed – by Wordsworth and Coleridge and by Wordsworth’s sister Dorothy as much as by anyone else – as a time of unbridled delight and wellbeing, of overabundant creativity, with a singularity of conviction and purpose from which extraordinary poetry emerged.

Certainly, what they wrote adds up to an astonishing catalogue: ‘This Lime Tree Bower My Prison’, ‘Kubla Khan’, The Ancient Mariner, ‘Christabel’, ‘Frost at Midnight’, ‘The Nightingale’, all Wordsworth’s strange and troubling poems in Lyrical Ballads, ‘The Idiot Boy’, ‘The Thorn’, the grandeur and beauty of ‘Tintern Abbey’, and, in his notebooks, the first suggestions of what would become passages in The Prelude.

The grip of this poetry is undeniable, but its origins are not in comfort or delight, or, at least until Wordsworth’s walk up the Wye valley in July 1798, any sense of arrival. The psychic motor of the year is something of the opposite: a time of adventure and perplexity, of Wordsworth and Coleridge both ricocheting away from the revolutionary politics of the 1790s in which both had been involved and both to different degrees disappointed. Wordsworth was unheard of, and Coleridge was still under attack in the conservative press. Both were in retreat: from cities; from politics; from gentlemanliness and propriety; from the expected; towards nature; and – in a way that makes this year foundational for modernity – towards the self, its roots, its forms of self-understanding, its fantasies, longings, dreads and ideals. For both, the Quantocks were a refuge-cum-laboratory, one in which every suggestion of an arrival was to be seen merely as a stepping stone.

The path was far from certain. One of Wordsworth’s criteria for pleasure in poetry was ‘the sense of difficulty overcome’, and that is a central theme of this year: their poetry was not a culmination or a summation, but had its life at the beginning of things, at a time of what Seamus Heaney called ‘historical crisis and personal dismay’, emergent, unsummoned, encountered in the midst of difficulty, arriving as unexpectedly as a figure on a night road, or a vision in mid-ocean, or the wisdom and understanding of a child.

It was not about powerful feelings recollected in tranquillity. Wordsworth’s famous and oracular definition would not come to him until more than two years after he had left Somerset. This was different, a poetry of approaches, journeys out and journeys in, leading to the gates of understanding but not yet over the threshold. Even now, 250 years after Wordsworth’s birth, it still carries a sense of discovery, drawing its vitality from awkwardness and discomfort, from a lack of definition and from the power that emanates from what is still only half-there.

This book explores the sources of this effusion. ‘I wish to keep my Reader in the company of flesh and blood,’ Wordsworth would write a couple of years later, and that has been my guiding principle too. The place in which these poets lived, the people they were, the people they were with, the lives they led, the conversations they had: how did all of that shape the words they wrote?

The received idea of these poets puts its focus on the immaterial, the floatingly high-minded. But here, in 1797, that is at least partly the opposite of the case. Thought for them, as the young Coleridge had written in excitement to his friend Robert Southey, was ‘corporeal’. He would later coin both ‘neuropathology’ and ‘psychosomatic’ as terms to describe aspects of this new interpresence of body and mind. The full life was not the enjoyment of a view, nor any kind of elegant gazing at a landscape, let alone sitting reading, but a kind of embodiment, plunging in, a full absorption in the encompassing world, providing the verbal life and ‘nervous energy’ that came from what Heaney would call ‘touching territory that I know’.

Here, then, was the invitation to which this book is an answer. If this was one of the great moments of poetic consciousness, it could best be understood as physical experience. By feeling it on the skin I could hope to know what had happened in the course of it. This was the subject that drew me: poetry-in-life, poetry-in-place, the body in the world as the instrument through which poetry comes into being.

The implication of that idea is that all currents must flow together. The way to approach this moment, its involutions and complexities, was to do, as far as possible, what the poets had done, to be in the Quantocks in all the moods and variations of the year at its different moments, to look for what happened and what emerged from what happened, to see how they were with each other, to feel the ebb and flow of their power relations and their affections. The timings and geography are closely known, often day by day, almost always week by week: what they were discussing, who they were meeting, how they were behaving, who their enemies and friends were, how poetry came from life-in-place.

Richard Holmes, the biographer of Shelley and Coleridge, has, unknown to him, long been my guide. When I was a young writer in the early 1980s he sent me a postcard out of the blue, encouraging me to keep going. So I have, and I think of this book as a tributary to the great Holmesian stream. Its method is his: to follow in the footsteps of the great, looking to gather the fragments they left on the path, much as Dorothy Wordsworth was seen by an old man as she was accompanying her brother on a walk in the Lake District, keeping ‘close behint him, and she picked up the bits as he let ’em fall, and tak ’em down, and put ’em on paper for him’.

So I went to live in the Quantocks. I started to imagine the poets’ lives. I bought the maps, I read what they had been reading, I immersed myself in their notebooks and the facsimiles of their rough drafts, starting to lower myself into the pool of their minds. Slowly I began to see these poets – and Dorothy Wordsworth should be included in that term – not as literary monuments but as living people, young, troubled, ambitious, dreaming of a vision of wholeness, knowing they had greatness in them but confronted again and again by the uncertain and contradictory nature of what they understood of the world, of each other and themselves.

It was a year focused on writing, on the search for forms of language that could, as Wordsworth later wrote of his own poetry, be ‘enduring and creative’, with ‘A power like one of Nature’s’. But it was not a sequence of solitudes. Coleridge’s profoundly lonely need for others guaranteed that they were not alone. It was a busy, social, talkative time. The two great poets were almost constantly surrounded by friends, acolytes, followers, patrons and relations; Wordsworth’s sister, Coleridge’s wife Sara, and the children they had with them. All provided the frame in which they lived. It is striking how often the poetry appears at the edges of that sociability, when the others have just gone, or their arrival is just expected, another of the margins at which this margin-entranced sensibility dwelt.

What emerges is something more nuanced than a straight-forward tale of miraculous productivity. Everywhere there are eddies in the stream: an interfolding of love and worry, ambition and doubt, a sense of possibility and of guilt, the patterns of human friendship oscillating between admiration and the recognition that the person you admire may not be entirely admirable, and may have the same hesitations about you.

The poets’ differences pulled and rubbed against each other. Their friendship, with its intermingling of affection and doubt, was a mutual shaping. Each became a source for the other, and each moulded himself in opposition to the other. It was intriguingly gendered. Coleridge could detect in himself elements of the female, but ‘Of all the men I ever knew,’ he wrote, ‘Wordsworth has the least femineity in his mind. He is all man. He is a man of whom it might have been said, – “It is good for him to be alone.”’

The driving and revolutionary force of this year was the recognition that poetry was not an aspect of civilisation but a challenge to it; not decorative but subversive, a pleasure beyond politeness. This was not the stuff of drawing rooms. Its purpose was to give a voice to the voiceless, whatever form that voicelessness might have taken: sometimes speaking for the sufferings of the unacknowledged poor; sometimes enshrining the quiet murmuring of a man alone; sometimes reaching for the life of the child in his ‘time of unrememberable being’, beyond the grasp of adult consciousness; sometimes roaming in the magnificent and strange disturbedness of Coleridge’s imagined worlds.

Wordsworth called poetry ‘the first and last of all knowledge’, using those words precisely: poetry comes both before and after everything that might be said. Its spirit and goal is to exfoliate consciousness, to rescue understanding from the noise and entropy of habit, to find richness and beauty in the hidden or neglected actualities. The strange, unlikely and unfashionable claim of this year stems from that recognition: poetry can remake assumptions, reconfigure the mind and change the world.

2

Meeting

June 1797

Early in June 1797, Coleridge was walking south through the lanes of Somerset and Dorset to visit Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy. I walked with him, the same lanes, the same air, absorbed in his frame of mind, my first embedding.

He was in the full flood of existence, bubbling and boiling with its possibilities and beauties, its conundrums and agonies, ensnared in ‘the quick-set hedge of embarrassment’ – money troubles always meant that ‘whichever way I turn a thorn runs into me’ – but ever alive to all that life could offer.

June in the west of England is frothing into colour and show: cow parsley and foxgloves, dark red campions mixed in with the alkanet and the nettles. The bees visiting each dangled foxglove hood in turn, as if turning in at a row of shops, pausing at each entrance, hesitating on the lip and then moving inside. The hawthorns are still clotted with blossom, the air double-creamy for yards around them. The elders are in bloom, their disk-like flower-heads held out into the roadway, dinner plates on the fingertips of an upturned hand. The first of the hay is being made in the paddocks and meadows, the swathes cut and laid across the buttercup hills. Bees in the brambles, honeysuckle in the hedges, the apple trees still just in blossom. Sprinkles of stitchwort. Every morning with a gloss on it, brushed and burnished.

The sociable time

His mind is full of starlings

A few years later Coleridge told a friend exactly how he felt when he found himself steaming along an inviting road like this, less a single man than a swarm of living things, animate nature itself, his mind as alive and mobile and endlessly self-reshaping as a concatenation of starlings oscillating and refiguring around his head. It was on the road like this, he told Tom Wedgwood, that

my spirit courses, drives, and eddies, like a Leaf in Autumn; a wild activity, of thoughts, imaginations, feelings, and impulses of motion, rises up from within me; a sort of bottom-wind, that blows to no point of the compass, comes from I know not whence, but agitates the whole of me; my whole being is filled with waves that roll and stumble, one this way, and one that way, like things that have no common master … Life seems to me then a universal spirit, that neither has, nor can have, an opposite. ‘God is everywhere,’ I have exclaimed, ‘and works everywhere, and where is there room for death?’

Coleridge, aged twenty-four, slightly fat – his friends called him ‘pursy’ – but strong, quite capable of forty miles between a summer dawn and dusk, or more than seventy miles over two days, had been on the road for three days, feeling ‘almost shillingless’ and chewing over his desperate need for cash. He had just come from seeing Joseph Cottle, his publisher in Bristol. Coleridge needed him for his money, and Cottle had offered ‘to buy an unlimited number of verses’. Cottle had ambitions as a poet himself: ‘The scatter’d cots/Sprinkling the vallies round, most gaily look./The very trees wave concord …’ It was an unequal relationship. Coleridge could flatter him when he needed to – ‘My dear Cottle’ – and just as easily dismiss him: ‘It is not impossible,’ he signed off one letter to this idealistic, helpful and generous bookseller-publisher, who did his best to promote the early careers of Coleridge, Southey and Wordsworth, ‘that in the course of two or three months I may see you.’

Now, though, Coleridge had shaken him out of his hair and the dust of Bristol from his feet, and was hungrily en route to the man he wanted to meet. He had given a sermon at the Unitarian chapel in Bridgwater, which ‘most of the better people in the town’ had attended, and the following day breakfasted with a much-adored minister in Taunton – ‘the more I see of that man, the more I love him’. The congregation in Bridgwater had admired his sermon, but was that right? Was admiration the reaction a sermon should evoke? He had ‘endeavoured to awaken a Zeal for Christianity by shewing the contemptibleness & evil of lukewarmness’, but even as those words came to him, he must have laughed. Lukewarmness was not a Coleridgean quality. He had a predilection for the extreme. Put him on a public platform and Coleridge would appear ‘like a comet or a meteor in our horizon’. He usually wrote his lectures or sermons in advance, but more often than not

against [my] better interests [I] was carried away with an ebullient Fancy, a flowing Utterance, a light and dancing Heart, & a disposition to catch fire by the very rapidity of my own motion, & to speak vehemently from mere verbal associations.

Now he was bowling down the summer lanes to meet Wordsworth. They had been corresponding for eighteen months, and Coleridge already admired him. He knew him as a poet, had met him in Bristol, and they had briefly stayed together in Somerset. He had quoted him in a poem of his own, and been quoted by Wordsworth in return. Coleridge already thought that Wordsworth was the greatest of men and ‘the best poet of the age’.

South Somerset and Dorset looked then, as they do now in midsummer, like southern comfort, with big, gentle, ten-mile views, the hills coming to well-coiffed peaks, rolled and tufted, bobbled with woods. But there was an illusion at work. These southern counties in the late 1790s were a pit of desperation, one of the poorest places in England. Anyone alive to political or human realities would be enraged by what they saw. Harvests had been bad. Long-term malnutrition kept the average height of the poor under five foot. The diet was ruinously thin: broth made of flour and onions and water for breakfast, meat maybe twice a week, otherwise the relentless repetition of bread and cheese. Bullock’s cheek was sometimes bought to flavour the broth. Potatoes were mashed with fat taken from that broth, and sometimes with salt alone.

In the evenings of early June, as the long days of the hay harvest made their demands on this underfed workforce, the labourers, watched by the diary-keeping gentry, were driven to the limits of exhaustion. William Holland, vicar of Over Stowey in Somerset, observed William Perrott, his aged parish clerk, always known as ‘Mr Amen’, struggling with the haymaking. He

looked like a hunted hare towards the end of the day, very stiff, could hardly move along, with his neck stretched out and his eyes hollowed into his head.

Mr Amen and two others had mown three and a half acres in the day, scything five tons of grass. Holland gave them ‘drink and some victuals, though the last not in the agreement’.

It was a world of brutal inequality. Your average high gentry family in the 1790s might be living off an income of £4,000 or more. There was scarcely any tax: Land Tax, Window Tax and Carriage Tax might add up to no more than £30 out of that £4,000. Local rates, to pay for the poorhouses in towns and villages, were levied, but came to only £10 extra per gentry family a year. Gifts were made to charity, to teach poor children or for the local infirmary, but the rich almost never gave away more than 1 per cent of their annual income.

Among the poor, general life expectancy was under forty. More than half of all babies born did not live beyond childhood. ‘Bad teeth, skin diseases, sores, bronchitis and rheumatism were rampant. Diagnosis was more by the eye than the touch.’ Most treatments were folk remedies in the form of leaves, roots, bark, spices and powders, and most were useless. There was no need for the poets to imagine or devise instances of human suffering. The wrongness of the social, economic and political system in England was apparent at every turn of every lane.

Coleridge, his person perhaps a little ‘slovenly’, as certain upright citizens had judged, with his stockings dirty and his hair uncombed, was walking through a country in crisis. New commercial capital coming into rural England meant that the landscape of small yeoman farms, which had been there for at least a thousand years, was being erased. What had been a class of independent farming families was now thrown back on work as servants, as piece workers in the woollen mills or as labourers on farms they had once called their own. By the late 1790s, Durweston near Blandford in Dorset, where there had been thirty or even forty smallholdings in 1775, was now concentrated into two large farms. The prevailing spirit among the dispossessed was unadulterated despair. Sir Frederic Morton Eden, the pioneering student of poverty in rural England, wrote of the Dorset poor in 1796 that the ex-yeoman families were ‘regardless of futurity’. It is a resonant phrase, which would not have been out of place in one of Wordsworth’s poems. Most of rural England was in a state of suspension, threatened by life without ambition or hope. The bonds of rural society had been broken, and this new class of the poor ‘spend their little wages as they receive them, without reserving a provision for old age’.

You need to shed any sense of Arcadian wellbeing. Britain was at war with France, press gangs were roaming the country to find men for the navy, informers were everywhere, and the Home Office files were bulging with letters from all corners, reporting on possible and known suspects. Prices were rising, and the country was full of maimed soldiers and desperate widows. Fences were often stolen for firewood. If you owned a cow and kept it in a field, you could expect it to have been milked by the hungry overnight. Hayricks by the road were regularly ‘plucked’ by the poor wanting to feed their own animals. Anyone growing peas would find them ‘swarming with the workhouse children’ in the weeks when the pods ripened. The dark, sunburned faces of the people were creased into premature old age. For meat they occasionally ate badgers, or the ‘Carrion Beef’ of a cow that had died in calving. The Reverend Holland, recording his parish visits in his journal, described how he called on a woman ‘in a most desperate way with a broken leg. She was glad to see me, and would crawl to the door.’ Otherwise, he sent his wife on the necessary visits. She

walked as far as the poor sick girl, who is indeed in a most deplorable state. I am advised not to go in to her as she is in a kind of putrid state – and indeed my wife I believe does not go in, but we send her something every day.

For all these and other outrages, for all his own anxieties, affected by toothache and neuralgia, by hideous dreams and pervasive worry, Coleridge was always able to dance and balloon into unbridled delight at the beauties of existence. Many years later, thinking of this wonderful summer, he wrote a short and Blake-like poem, a spontaneous aria celebrating the rich simplicity of friendship as ‘a shelt’ring tree’, and all the joys

that came down shower-like,

Of Beauty, Truth and Liberty,

When I was young, ere I was old!

The ideal of friendship hovers over this whole story as its subtle and fickle if ministering angel, but it is not Coleridge’s aria as much as his description of how it came to him that opens the door on to the form and habits of his mind in 1797. The poem was ‘an air’, he wrote, remembering the year of his youth in Somerset,

that whizzed δία ẻνκέφαλου [dhia enkephalou] (right across the diameter of my Brain) exactly like a Hummel Bee … close by my ear, at once sharp and burry, right over the summit of Quantock at earliest Dawn just between the Nightingale that I stopt to hear in the Copse at the foot of Quantock, and the first Sky-Lark that was a Song-Fountain, dashing up and sparkling to the Ear’s eye, in full column, or ornamented shaft of sound in the order of Gothic Extravaganza, out of sight, over the Cornfields on the Descent of the Mountain on the other side – out of sight, tho twice I beheld its mute shoot downward in the sunshine like a falling star of silver.

It is a paragraph that describes quickness but must be read slowly, the trace of Coleridge’s mind in the process of thinking: a bumblebee shooting past his ear half a lifetime before, holding the space between nightingale and skylark, whose song is now in his memory like a mountain stream in the eye of the ear (!), then becoming a high, rippling, barley-twist column of knobbled medieval beauty, but invisible, the bird itself disappearing into the wide lit spaces of the sky, but its mute, its droppings, gliding out of that ecstatic empyrean with the brilliance and glitter of a streaking meteor, a blob of mercury hurtling from the blue. Could there ever be inconsistency in a mind that thought like this? In which such potent synaesthesiac category-shifts dissolved all boundaries of time and space? In which inconsistency felt like the pulse of life?

I know this stretch of country well. I spent most of my twenties on foot, disenchanted with the world of cities. Paying for myself by writing about it in newspapers and magazines, I walked thousands of miles here in England, the same in France, and then in Europe, in Greece and Italy, not in pursuit of anything in particular except perhaps the reassurance of being able to engage with the physical world day after day, in fog and rain and snow, in the burnishing sunshine, usually alone, sleeping out in a small tent or in mountain bothies or in Greece inside the flea-ridden chapels. I was merely doing what Wordsworth and Coleridge, by some subterranean routes, flowing through the thousands of capillaries in Western culture, had taught me to do. All the years of education seemed less important than this. I once walked sixty miles in twenty hours across the Cotentin in northern France, most of the day and then all night, with a friend, an Anglo-Saxon scholar who had become a soldier, and who Coleridge-like for mile after mile didn’t draw breath. We began at Cherbourg, had dinner in Briquebec, coq au vin and a bottle of wine. Had I read Alcuin’s letters? Should he learn Farsi? What effect would living in a granite world like the Cotentin have on your mind, on your expectations of the solidity of things? Every hour or so we smoked a cigarette, leaning against one of those granite walls, sitting on the verge. The sun rose on the Normandy beaches and we swam in the golden, blue-eyed surf.

What is it about walking for days on end? Partly it is the love of self-reliance, of not needing to be dependent on anything or anyone. It is psychically naked, with the curious effect that this self-reliance seems to make your own skin more permeable. Alone on foot, not in any great heroic landscapes – these are not high mountain singular mist-visions – but in just such a place as the Somerset Levels, where the knitted ordinariness of everyday life forms the texture of the landscape through which you move – the small farms, the stalled animals, the life of the hedges – you become absorbent, inseparable from the world around you. Walking in that way is a dissolution of the self, not a magnification of it, a release from burdens, in which all you have to do is walk and be, as plainly existent as grass growing, continuous with everything that is.

The great land-artist Richard Long was my hero, and I wrote to him, wanting to talk about his absorption in the walked line, but he replied courteously by letter to say that there was nothing much we could discuss that he or I didn’t already know. And I wondered then if Romanticism, to which this habit of being was clearly the heir, alone out on the road, scarcely communicative with anyone except the self, was little but a form of loneliness, and of legitimising loneliness by being alone.

I spent one of those summers in the Levels, dropping into just the relationship with the country that Coleridge and Wordsworth had invented here two centuries before, at exactly their age, in my mid-twenties. One long afternoon remains in my memory when the water in the summer Levels, as always, was penned up in the rhynes that divide the low, damp fields, making wet fences between them.

Each rhyne shelters a particular world of butterbur or kingcup, water-mint or a flashy wedding show of flag-irises. If you sit on the bank, the high water in the field soaks up into the cloth of your trousers, so that the invitation to swim, to move over from watery peat to peaty water, is irresistible. Slowly that afternoon I lowered my body into the blood-warm cider-soup, crusty with frog-bit and duckweed, with seeds and reed shells. My feet were in the half-mud of the rhyne floor, a soft half-substance as if I were sinking into the folds of a brain. The arrowhead and bulrushes quivered in my wash and away down the rhyne – or so I always imagined – the eels released their bubbles as they shifted away from the disturbance.

This was embeddedness. The breadth of the water grows as you come near it to a generous private width, lobed into by the irises and the reeds. The air is warm and heady. Away down the rhyne a swan claps its wings. The meadows riffle in the wind. Heat and vapour wobble in the air above them. Everything hangs in suspension, and your skin turns a golden unnatural brown in the whisky water. Three hundred and fifty million years ago all life was water-life, and to float in a summer rhyne seemed then like a return to ancientness, to the deepest possible co-presence with the earth.

That idea – that the contented life was the earth-connected life, even that goodness was embeddedness – had its roots in the 1790s, perhaps drawing on what Wordsworth and Coleridge had read of Rousseau, or perhaps inheriting from him as I had inherited from them. Co-presence with the natural world, a closeness that was inaccessible in what Coleridge always described as the ‘dim’ light of the city – the persistent coal smog of eighteenth-century London – was somehow a release into a form of wellbeing which normal political, commercial, professional or even educational life would not only fail to approach but would actually disrupt and destroy. It is a powerful connection to make: love of nature as the route both to a love of truth and to a love of man.

No room in the world was closed to Coleridge. As he said to a friend, ‘I hate the word but.’ Every connection needed to be an and. Every corridor and every chamber branching off it was available to the roaming, skipping investigations of his mind, not ponderous but almost gravity-free, and in each store and warehouse to which he pushed open the door he found lying in wait for him caves of beauty and significance.

He walked as he talked, never pursuing a single line direct, but famously moving from one side of the lane or the path to another so that his companion would always have to shift to accommodate him. His mode was multiple but not anarchic. He could not put up with nonsense, and consistently searched for systematic connections across the whole width of what he had to know. That was the essence of his life: a never-ending appetite for all that was and had been, struggling with the need to bring it into a single frame of understanding.

Any talk of mere personality he detested: there was more to wisdom than the idiosyncrasies of the individual. Nor did he live in an unbroken morning of bland optimism. Excitement and despondency alternated within him. And he knew of his own failings. Forgive me, he would remark to his listeners, if sometimes you hear in what I say a verb orphaned of its subjective noun or a subjective noun widowed of its verb. He could get lost in his paragraphs like a man in a thicket. His relationship to knowledge was so hungry that knowledge itself came to live in his mind as an infinite sequence of overlapping and self-generating circles, in which no understanding of one circle could be complete without an understanding of its neighbour, an unending progression of unfolding spheres, like the universes that expand from the black holes each one contains, a multiverse strung out across space and time. It is little wonder that even his great and encompassing mind eventually faded under the strain of the challenge.

The energy, if undeniable, was fervid and troubled, drawing into itself at different times schemes for everything: a book on the modern Latin poets, an Epic Poem on the Origin of Evil, something on William Godwin, an Opera, a Liturgy, a Tragedy, editions of English eighteenth-century poets, a book on Milton, on the Greek tragedians, on the technicalities of scansion, on the laws upon wrecks, a poem in the style of Dante on Thor, on his hero the philosopher David Hartley, on the obscurities of Behmen, Helmont, Swedenborg, Philo Judaeus, Porphyry, Plotinus, Platypus, Mesmer, an address to Poverty, on the art of prolonging life – by getting up in the morning, an Ode to a Looking Glass, hymns to the Sun, the Moon and the Elements, an Ode to Southey, an Ode to a Moth, a history of night, or of privacy, or of silence, or the self.

For I am now busy on the subject, and shall in a very few weeks go to Press with a volume on the prose writings of Hall, Milton and Taylor; and shall immediately follow it up with an Essay on the writings of Dr. Johnson and Gibbon. And in these two volumes I flatter myself I shall present a fair History of English Prose … I have since my twentieth year meditated an heroic poem on the Siege of Jerusalem by Titus. This is the Pride and the Stronghold of my Hope. But I never think of it except in my best moods.

It was a fountain of being, in which the pressure was always ready to flow, no urging needed. ‘My heart seraglios a whole host of joys,’ he wrote in his notebook, a new verb for the promiscuity of knowledge and happiness.

He knew too, in a way that was profoundly different from Wordsworth, that the endless liquidity of his self-conception, the flux and reflux of his mind, the stream of the organism called Coleridge, was the lens through which he perceived the world. He thought he had ‘a smack of Hamlet myself’, as a figure who partly observed and partly created the world around him. Hamlet’s thoughts, Coleridge said in his lectures on Shakespeare, ‘and the images of his fancy, are far more vivid than his actual perceptions, and his very perceptions, instantly passing through the medium of his contemplations, acquire, as they pass, a form and a colour not naturally their own’. What was within him imposed itself on what he saw. ‘All actual objects are faint and dead to him.’

He was aware that his perceptions of the outward world were so shaped by what he already knew and remembered that when, for example, he saw the moon, he did not see a moon but instead experienced ‘the dim awakening of a forgotten or hidden truth of my inner nature’. A nightingale’s song, or the sound of a stream as it fell and slid over the rocks in its bed, or the frost creeping over the roofs of the village, or the swifts screech-screaming in the streets of Nether Stowey, or Stowey’s own flowing gutter, or a cockerel in a farmyard holding its tattered tail aloft: all of these phenomena seemed to be aspects of himself. Anything his eye saw was ‘supported by the images of memory flowing in on the impulses of immediate impression’. Nothing was uninflected by what he knew, trying to find a steady path through the jangling crowd of objects vibrating in his brain.

He could be teased. He knew he was ‘a thought-bewilder’d man’, and he knew he wasn’t like the man who had once been his best friend, the poet Robert Southey. Southey, although undoubtedly capable of great and empathetic poetry, had an austerity and a self-preservative strictness about him. Coleridge had called him ‘a man of perpendicular Virtue … enlightened and unluxurious’. But those Roman virtues were accompanied by a deep self-regard. Southey was neat, clever, handsome, conceited, ‘a coxcomb’ in Wordsworth’s eyes, well-mannered and well-ordered, a man who, Coleridge thought, had surrendered his idealism – they had planned to set up a Utopian community together in America – to a rational and rather mean self-interest. In their bruising and final argument in 1795, when Southey had decided to abandon any communitarian plans, Coleridge had told him, ‘You are lost to me, because you are lost to Virtue.’ Southey was someone, as Coleridge wrote later, who had ‘the power of saying one thing at a time’. Can you imagine, one thing at a time! The sterility of it!

Coleridge knew he was not like that but instead ‘a Surinam toad’, a creature which has the habit of embedding her eggs in pouches set in the skin of her back. Up to a hundred of them can grow there, developing into little toadlets that, when the time comes, jump out of their nests, waving their tiny hands as they emerge and drop off their mother into the roadway, scattering around her like the pips from a pomegranate as she continues on her way through life.

That is the beautiful South American amphibian walking down the road to the Wordsworths on the afternoon of 4 or 5 June 1797 – the exact date is unclear – a man who investigates everything and strews and sprinkles his own progeny around him, a king with guineas at his own coronation, a fountain of largesse, the volcano of ideas. He knew of course how he did not conform to the required ideal of manly self-containment, and that he spawned plans like a herring, but he recognised there was beauty in that. Orderliness is no more than a narrowing funnel through which to experience the world. Every step an arrival is the walker’s credo; there can be no restrictive plot or narrative that remains true. That is the source of Coleridgean wonder. What happens happens, looseness is all and absorbency beauty. The good man blesses everything unawares.

‘Southey once said to me,’ Coleridge wrote to his son Hartley in 1820,

You are nosing every nettle along the Hedge, while the Greyhound (meaning himself, I presume) wants only to get to sight of the Hare, & FLASH! – strait as a line! – he has it in his mouth! –

Coleridge thought that the kind of remark a cannibal would make to an anatomist as he watched him dissect a body, commenting on the time the doctor was taking to prepare his dinner. Must a man wait a whole day before he is allowed to eat? But it was the journey Coleridge valued as much as the arrival.

The fact is – I do not care two-pence for the Hare; but I value most highly the excellencies of scent, patience, discrimination, free Activity; and find a Hare in every Nettle I make myself acquainted with.

That June afternoon, Coleridge, with a mind full of every hare in every nettle he had passed on the way, arrived at Racedown, the house in Dorset where the Wordsworths were living. Coleridge famously did not come down the path that led from the turnpike, but across the field, diagonally, over a gate in the corner, and bounding through the corn to the garden where Wordsworth brother and sister were working.

He comes like a comet to their door

It is rather a busy road now, with cars coming fast around blind corners, but Coleridge’s gate is still there, if almost never used nowadays, sagging on its hinges and half-buried in the strands of a hawthorn hedge. Through its straggling opening, one can look down at the house the Wordsworths were living in. There is no access for modern pilgrims, but this is what I imagine: Coleridge bursting down the slope where the corncrakes had been croaking, as they had been all summer, across the green corn that the farmer Joseph Gill had yet to cut or get the men to cut for him. Each blue-green spear standing in that field blazingly alive. The poet’s long leaping footsteps, looping up and over and into the corn, his legs swathed in it and breaking through it, with his bag on his hip swinging up and out at each extended pace, leaving a dragged wake of stems behind him, breaking what had been the perfection of that field, so that afterwards, that evening, looking up at the way by which he had arrived, his mark was there on the country like the tail of a comet or the track of a meteor or the blunderings of a dog in the corn.

The house itself was the opposite of everything Coleridge brought to it. It was a gentleman’s residence, a cliff of brick and grey stucco, sash windows, symmetry, multi-flue chimneys, outhouses, red stretchers with black headers laid in diaper-diamonds across its surface. ‘An excellent house’, Wordsworth called it to a friend; ‘a very good house, and in a pleasant situation’, his sister said. This was no poet’s cottage, and Coleridge casually referred to it in a letter to Cottle as ‘the mansion of our friend Wordsworth’. A tight parapeted formality confronted the visitor. There were two parlours, one with a fine Axminster carpet, one with an oil cloth on the floor, a kitchen and scullery, a pantry, a servants’ hall and a butler’s pantry. Above, four excellent bedchambers looked out over the willows and alders of the valley below the house, each chamber with a closet. There were four further bedchambers on the floor above.

Furnishings were not lacking: mahogany chairs and table, a tea chest and a reading stand, two bookcases filled with the classics and works of history and theology. There was a leather sofa, a pier glass in a gilded frame, a pianoforte, two blue and white Delft flower stands, a well-furnished hearth and a dinner service in Queen’s Ware. Linen sheets were provided, and Betty Daly, at one and a half guineas a year, plus two shillings a week when the gentlemen were in residence, could come in to air and clean the house and do the laundry. Peggy Marsh worked as her maid. Wineglasses, tumblers and decanters could be provided, but these were all to be returned to Joseph Gill, the manager of house, farm and adjoining brickyard, when not required. A picture of Leda, naked with swan, in a gilt frame, belonging to the owners of the house, the Pinneys of Bristol, slave-owning plantation landlords and sugar-traders, was not required by the Wordsworths, and had been packed up and sent away.

It seems in retrospect the most unlikely situation for a man on the lip of revolution, but beneath the surface there is a more complex set of social and emotional conditions in play.

Wordsworth, aged twenty-seven, and his sister Dorothy, a year and a half younger, are borrowing, not renting, the house. They cannot afford the rent, and it has been lent to them by two young radical Bristol friends, the Pinneys, who have not told their far-from-radical father that they have lent out his house for nothing. The Wordsworths are camping here, happy to find a temporary perch in their peripatetic and impoverished life. They are living – or meant to be living – on the proceeds of a legacy which a young friend of Wordsworth had left to him when he died two years earlier. Wordsworth has in turn lent the money out to two other London friends who are meant to be paying him interest – at a handsome 10 per cent a year – but who regularly fail to come up with the payments or are late in doing so. For pin money Dorothy is now making shirts for her brother Richard, a London lawyer, cutting and sewing the linen from a huge bolt delivered to the house, for which she is also hemming sheets.

The Wordsworths in their gentleman’s house have to borrow money from Joseph Gill, the farmer (himself a cousin of the Pinneys, but drunk and disintegrated after a life in the Caribbean), and are given coal during the winter by other neighbours. There is meant to be a gardener, but he is ‘saucy’ and won’t do what either Wordsworth or Gill asks him, so Wordsworth does some of the gardening himself, uprooting hedges, planting potatoes and picking beans. He is, rather to his sister’s surprise, ‘dextrous with a spade’. She hires a boy to mow the lawns. Like the rural poor around them, they eat only vegetables and broth, and drink tea.

‘I have lately been living upon air and the essence of carrots cabbages turnips and other esculent vegetables, not excluding parsley the product of my garden,’ Wordsworth writes to a friend. They buy the worst of the meat at sixpence a pound from a butcher who comes with his cart from Crewkerne, and must depend for their clothes on the cast-offs from Richard in London. At times the whole household falls ill with coughs and colds. They walk everywhere, and the house has a ‘perambulator’, a measuring wheel which can clock off the distances along the road, although, as Wordsworth notes carefully in the inventory, its handle was already broken on their arrival. When the young Pinneys come from time to time, a moneyed interlude intervenes, during which Wordsworth goes shooting and hare-coursing with them and there is wine and meat and gravy, but when the Pinneys go back to Bristol, the austerity returns. Wordsworth must ask Gill to borrow household equipment, one tumbler or four sheets of paper at a time, and Gill carefully records each request in his diary.

Behind this there is a deeper personal history, hinged precisely to the gap between poverty and gentility. The Wordsworths’ father had been law agent to Sir James Lowther, a great landowner in Westmorland. John Wordsworth was a power in the land himself, a coroner worth some £10,000 when he died, living with silver coffee pots and handsome watches, a life lubricated with good port and madeira. He had brought up his children in the most handsome of houses in Cockermouth, with a beautiful garden at the back along whose boundary the River Derwent ran, and the sound of whose water came in through the windows of the bedrooms. But both Wordsworth parents had died when the children were young, the mother of pneumonia in March 1778, when William was seven, their father of a dropsy after spending a night out, lost on the winter fells, five years later. With his father’s death, their world collapsed. Sir James Lowther, soon to be the Earl of Lonsdale, owed John Wordsworth £4,625, but for years the Lonsdale estate refused to pay over the money. The key to the house the Wordsworths had lived in was surrendered to the Lonsdale agent, and the children were dispersed among their relatives, where they were treated as poor relations, humiliated and patronised by the servants and made to feel ashamed of who they were. ‘How we are squandered abroad!’ Dorothy had written of these years.

In 1787 Wordsworth was sent to Cambridge, and encouraged by those relations to think of a career in the Church. But at Cambridge, while ferociously aware of his own great gifts, he had refused to engage with the route required by a conventional career, and had been ‘an idler among academic bowers’. The great emotional and intellectual experience of his time as an undergraduate was not at Cambridge itself, but on a heroic three-thousand-mile walk in the summer and autumn of 1790 through France in the first glow of its revolutionary fever, to Switzerland and the epic landscapes of the Alps. France then was ‘standing on the top of golden hours/And human nature seeming born again’.

After he had left university, with no good degree, he went to London, directionless and unfocused, unable to commit to any life in the Church, the law, university, politics or commerce. He felt ‘rotted’:

my life became

A floating island, an amphibious thing

Unsound, of spungy texture.

But the scent of liberty was coming across the Channel. A decade earlier, the Americans had cast themselves free. Now an ancient European monarchy was heading for a rational, liberated future. Richard Price, a suddenly famous dissenting minister-turned-lecturer, was drawing vast crowds to his London talks. ‘A general amendment’, he told his excited audience, was beginning in human affairs:

the dominion of kings [is] changed for the dominion of laws, and the dominion of priests giving way to the dominion of reason and conscience. Be encouraged, all ye friends of freedom, and writers in its defence!

Once again, Wordsworth was drawn to France, not only to escape the urgings of his relatives, who had in mind a rural curacy, but to taste and know the sources of the future. This time he went to the Loire valley, where, even as the massacres were committed in Paris and the French Republic was being declared, he met two people who had a shaping influence on his life and thought. The first was an officer in the army, Armand-Michel Bacharetie de Beaupuy, known simply as Michel Beaupuy, an aristocrat from the Périgord, now in his mid-thirties, and a republican idealist, who in Wordsworth’s loving remembering of him in The Prelude sounds like a vision of the perfect man. They talked politics and the virtues of change, weighing the best of ancient republican systems against the extremes of revolutionary violence, sifting what seemed good from the horrors and strains of the moment.

Injuries

Made him more gracious, and his nature then

Did breathe its sweetness out most sensibly,

As aromatic flowers on Alpine turf,

When foot hath crushed them.

By birth he ranked

With the most noble, but unto the poor

Among mankind he was in service bound,

As by some tie invisible, oaths professed

To a religious order. Man he loved

As man, and, to the mean and the obscure,

And all the homely in their homely works,

Transferred a courtesy which had no air

Of condescension; but did rather seem

A passion and a gallantry, like that

Which he, a soldier, in his idler day

Had paid to woman: somewhat vain he was,

Or seemed so – yet it was not vanity,

But fondness, and a kind of radiant joy

That covered him about when he was intent

On works of love or freedom.

Beaupuy looked like an oasis in a bitter world, a source of hope and goodness in a violent time, a demonstration that human nature was capable of fineness and grace. With him, walking along the road in Touraine, Wordsworth had a sudden, formative encounter, one of those spots of time that make us what we are, remembered for the rest of his life:

And when we chanced

One day to meet a hunger-bitten girl,

Who crept along fitting her languid self

Unto a heifer’s motion – by a cord

Tied to her arm, and picking thus from the lane

Its sustenance, while the girl with her two hands

Was busy knitting in a heartless mood

Of solitude – and at the sight my friend

In agitation said, ‘’Tis against that

That we are fighting,’ I with him believed

Devoutly that a spirit was abroad

Which could not be withstood, that poverty,

At least like this, would in a little time

Be found no more, that we should see the earth

Unthwarted in her wish to recompense

The industrious, and the lowly child of toil,

All institutes for ever blotted out

That legalized exclusion, empty pomp

Abolished, sensual state and cruel power

Whether by edict of the one or few –

And finally, as sum and crown of all,

Should see the people having a strong hand

In making their own laws; whence better days

To all mankind.

It is difficult to judge how much The Prelude attributes later thoughts and ideas to earlier events – Wordsworth was imperious in his relationship to time – but that moment with Beaupuy, who in 1796 would be killed by a cannonball in battle against the Austrians, and the simplicity and passion of the remembered words, ‘’Tis against that/That we are fighting,’ seem now to stand as one of the sources of Wordsworth’s later life. Beaupuy’s name is among those cut into the stones of the Arc de Triomphe, but these lines, in which he is described in the beautiful, supple, easy blank verse of The Prelude, are a true memorial.

At the same time, Wordsworth fell in love with a young French woman. Annette Vallon was four years older than him. Their story, which was only ever known within the family circle in Wordsworth’s lifetime, is exceptionally opaque. She was the daughter of a surgeon in Blois. Nearly nothing is known about her, except that during the years of the Revolutionary wars, in which her Catholic and Royalist family suffered at the hands of the Republic, she and her sisters behaved with extraordinary and resourceful courage, running messages for the Royalists, concealing enemies of the state, smuggling them to safety, evading the secret police, in turn, of the Terror, the Directoire and Napoleon, risking all. Wordsworth had fallen in love with a woman of mettle and fire. She had first encountered him late in 1791, at the house in Orléans of André-Augustin Dufour, a magistrate’s clerk, and may have begun by teaching him French, but soon they moved together to Blois. In the spring of 1792 she became pregnant with their child.

Wordsworth scarcely communicated with anyone at home, only asking his brother Richard for some money, but saying nothing of Annette. In December 1792 their daughter, Anne-Caroline Vallon, was born and baptised in Orléans, the French clerk carefully recording the impossible name ‘Anne Caroline Wordswodsth, daughter of Williams Wordswodsth, Anglois, and of Marie Anne Vallon’. Wordsworth had made arrangements for Dufour to represent him at the baptism, by which time he himself had gone, leaving Annette unmarried and unsupported. Astonishingly, he did not return immediately to England, but spent six weeks in Paris witnessing the drama of revolution.

It is, at the least, chaotic behaviour. Although their politics were directly opposed, Annette certainly expected him to marry her. She called herself Annette Williams, and her distraught letters long for his return, for him to be present in her life and the life of their daughter. Only obliquely did Wordsworth ever write of her, as an interlude in The Prelude, in which there is no suggestion that the love affair he describes was anything more than a story told to him by Beaupuy. But it is filled with memories of the ‘delirious hour’, the ‘happy time of youthful lovers’ he had known with her, the promise of that Loire valley beginning:

his present mind

was under fascination; he beheld

A vision, and he lov’d the thing he saw.

Arabian fiction never fill’d the world

With half the wonders that were wrought for him.

Earth liv’d in one great presence of the spring …

all paradise

Could by the simple opening of a door

Let itself in upon him, pathways, walks

Swarm’d with enchantment, till his spirit sank

Beneath the burthen, overbless’d for life.

It may be that, at the height of the reign of Terror late in 1793, with Britain at war with France, Wordsworth quickly and secretly returned to see her – there are suggestions of that in The Prelude – but he was soon gone, and her piteous letters resumed:

Come, my friend, my husband, receive the tender kisses of your wife, of your daughter. She is so pretty, this poor little one, so pretty that the tenderness I feel for her would drive me mad if I didn’t always hold her in my arms. She looks like you more and more each day. I believe that I hold you in my arms. Her little heart beats against mine and I feel as if it is your heart beating against me. ‘Caroline, in a month, in a fortnight, in a week, you will see the most cherished of men, the tenderest of men’ … Always love your little daughter and your Annette, who kisses you a thousand times on the mouth, on the eyes … I will write to you on Sunday. Goodbye, I love you for life. Speak to me of the war, what you think of it, because it worries me so much.

Wordsworth never received that particular letter, as it was impounded by the Committee of Surveillance, and was only discovered in the 1920s, with one other, hidden in the files of a sub-police station in the Loire valley. But others of the same kind, all now destroyed, crossed the Channel, filled with appeals to a desperate conscience.

On his return to London, Wordsworth sank into the deepest depression of his life, besieged by guilt and ‘dead to deeper hope’, his soul dropping to its ‘last and lowest ebb’. He had lost all faith in human endeavour. His abandonment of Annette and Caroline was fused in his mind with the fate of the Revolution in France and the turn to repression in England, with his own lack of any future and the absence of much hope for the ideals Beaupuy had embraced and the happiness Annette may have represented.

Wordsworth wandered lost through these years. After 1793 France was at war with England, and Wordsworth, in love with liberty and in love with his own country, found himself torn in two. He moved from place to place – Wales, Yorkshire, the Isle of Wight, Salisbury Plain, London, Westmorland, Cambridge – without employment, without prospects, without money, without love, almost without friends, living sometimes in London, mixing in the circles around the rationalist republican William Godwin, involved with radical politics, writing at least one long attack on the Church and the establishment, sometimes in the north of England, occasionally reunited with his adoring sister Dorothy, just as often apart from her.

His depression was accompanied by radical, republican rage. Compassion, he wrote, was to be done away with. Liberty was to ‘borrow the very arms of despotism’, and ‘in order to reign in peace must establish herself by violence’. The contempt with which the Wordsworth family had been treated by the Earl of Lonsdale fuelled his hatred:

We are taught from infancy that we were born in a state of inferiority to our oppressors, that they were sent into the world to scourge and we to be scourged.

The British government was bent on suppressing the French contagion. In May 1794 Habeas Corpus was suspended and dozens of radicals were arrested. The following year seditious gatherings and pamphlets were banned. Free speech was gagged. Many writers, printers, publishers, booksellers and lecturers who had embraced the radical ideas of their generation were placed in the pillory, imprisoned for six months or more, harassed, interrogated, ruined or transported to Australia, from where few would ever return. Others were tried for treason or condemned to death in their absence. In these conditions, Wordsworth’s tirades were too extreme for any printer to risk their publication, and he remained almost unknown.

Wordsworth in Darkness

Through connections of the Godwin circle he met the Pinneys, whose house at Racedown was offered to Wordsworth brother and sister as a place of refuge away from the stress and strain of the city, from the stress and strain of his own mind.

In September 1795, Dorothy and William retreated to Dorset, taking with them little Basil Montagu, the son of a young lawyer also called Basil Montagu, whose wife had died in childbirth and who was struggling to bring up his son in his chambers in Lincoln’s Inn. The Wordsworths had the hope that other children might join them to make a little school at Racedown, whose fees they could add to the income from the investment of the legacy.

Darkness gathered around Wordsworth, although neither he nor his sister could admit as much in their letters. A disenchantment with political radicalism and its rationalist revolution had left him with a sense of having nowhere to go. He was afflicted with debilitating headaches. His nightmares of the Terror, as he would later tell Coleridge in The Prelude, had come with him:

I scarcely had one night of quiet sleep,

Such ghastly visions had I of despair

And tyranny, and implements of death,

And long orations which in dreams I pleaded

Before unjust Tribunals, with a voice

Labouring, a brain confounded, and a sense

Of treachery and desertion in the place

The holiest that I knew of, my own soul.

The sense of treachery and desertion was all-colonising: a betrayal of his own ideals, of the hope that had once glowed in France, of his youth, of his child, of her mother, of himself. It was an amalgam of fear and guilt. Wordsworth felt disconnected from the goings on of life and the world. He asked for newspapers to be sent to him, no matter if they were five days old by the time they arrived. He thought of himself as ‘a man in the moon’ who had no inkling of what was happening on earth. Coleridge would later describe Wordsworth’s ‘unseeking manners’, that drift towards isolation, the refusal to engage with anyone or anything beyond himself. A kind of sardonic humour seeped out of him. ‘Our present life is utterly barren of such events as merit even the short-lived chronicle of an accidental letter,’ Wordsworth wrote to his Cambridge friend William Mathews, now a bookseller in London.

We plant cabbages, and if retirement, in its full perfection, be as powerful in working transformation on one of Ovid’s Gods, you may perhaps suspect that into cabbages we shall be transformed.

He had heard that remarks of that sort were circulating in London. ‘As to writing, it is out of the question.’

Cynicism and bitterness, a dark estimation of himself and others: these were the outlines of a Wordsworth lost. ‘We are now at Racedown and both as happy as people can be who live in perfect solitude,’ he wrote to Mathews.

We do not see a soul. Now and then we meet a miserable peasant in the road or an accidental traveller. The country people here are wretchedly poor; ignorant and overwhelmed with every vice that usually attends ignorance in that class, viz – lying and picking and stealing &c &c

He had sunk inward, in a kind of paralysis, held in uncertainty and perplexity, not bounding down the flank of a wheatfield but stalled at the gate, balked and blocked. It was, he later wrote, ‘a weary labyrinth’. He turned to bitter satire, imitating Juvenal, in which with ‘knife in hand’ his aim was to ‘probe/The living body of society/Even to the heart’.

He made visits to London and Bristol, and on one of them, probably through the Pinneys, he met Coleridge and began to show him and send him the poetry he was writing. Coleridge’s letters to him from that time have disappeared, but through the course of 1796 it seems as if, perhaps under Coleridge’s habit of encouragement, Wordsworth began to emerge from the darkness, and to feel his powers returning as both a man and a poet.

Pieces survive in his notebooks from that year, never shown to anyone, in a form of almost undecorated poetry, never published, surviving only as fragments of rough manuscript on the back of sheets containing other lines. One describes an incident on the road outside Racedown, a transient scene reminiscent of the encounter with the poor girl with the heifer in the Loire valley five years before. A baker from Clapton, just outside Crewkerne, used to deliver to houses in the area, and regularly came past Racedown. The speaker begins by addressing a young woman he has met in the road:

I have seen the Baker’s horse

As he had been accustomed at your door

Stop with the loaded wain, when o’er his head

Smack went the whip, and you were left, as if

You were not born to live, or there had been

No bread in all the land. Five little ones,

They at the rumbling of the distant wheels

Had all come forth, and, ere the grove of birch

Concealed the wain, into their wretched hut

They all return’d. While in the road I stood

Pursuing with involuntary look

The Wain now seen no longer, to my side

came, pitcher in her hand

Filled from the spring; she saw what way my eyes

Were turn’d, and in a low and fearful voice

She said – that wagon does not care for us –

That wagon does not care for us. This is unfinished: he addresses the woman, but then describes to her the scene she would just have witnessed herself. She begins by standing next to her hut, but then arrives from the spring with her pitcher. Nor can he name her – Wordsworth left a blank at the beginning of the line. But in its under-qualities, its directness and the simplicity of its language, its rhymeless pentameters without an abstract noun or any large Miltonic reference to the important or the exotic, one part of what would happen this year is already underway. This is the first signpost towards Wordsworth’s future as a poet. The truth of her statement – that wagon does not care for us – emerges from under the carapace of the brutalised-civilised. It seems as if poetry, allied to the language of the real, can do what politics and revolution can never manage: make vivid and present the reality of suffering, of human experience, for which no exaggerated language or theatrics are required.

No graph of a life pursues a single line, and the man Coleridge had come to see and be with, to admire and encourage, is a hazy compound of mentalities and influences. With his hair cut short in the republican manner, and a heavy stubble on his cheek, there was an intense, haunted and self-possessed air to him. The artist Benjamin Robert Haydon later said that there was something ‘lecherous, animal & devouring’ in Wordsworth’s laugh, and there is no doubt of the almost predatory power that hung about him. He would always control anyone who came into his orbit. And his erotic life was real and vivid. When, later, after ten years of marriage, he was away from his wife for a few days, he wrote to her: ‘I tremble with sensations that almost overpower me,’ his mind filled with images and memories of ‘thy limbs as they are stretched upon the soft earth’ and ‘thy own involuntary sighs and ejaculations’.

The writing of poetry could take hold of him in what he called ‘the fit’, the need to get it down before it left his mind. His sister Dorothy watched him one morning at breakfast:

he, with his Basin of Broth before him untouched & a little plate of Bread & butter.

He had not slept well, but the idea of a poem had come to him.

He ate not a morsel, nor put on his stockings but sate with his shirt neck unbuttoned, & his waistcoat open while he did it. The thought first came upon him as we were talking about the pleasure we both always feel at the sight of a Butterfly. I told him that I used to chase them a little, but I was afraid of brushing the dust off their wings, & did not catch them – He told me how they used to kill all the white ones when he went to school because they were Frenchmen …

Uniforms in the armies of Bourbon France had been white, decorated with golden fleur-de-lis, and any right-thinking English boy in the 1770s would have pursued them with a vengeance. Wordsworth was remembering that from the other side of a revolution that had replaced the white with the tri-colour, but in this tiny scene, away from public view or the need to present himself as he might have wanted to be known, something of the undressed Wordsworth appears: quietly and gently witty, preoccupied, getting up late, needing to catch the moment of writing a poem before it fled, his memories and the present moment interacting as two dimensions of one life, calmly there in the room but, in the writing of that poem, entirely removed, alone.

One further element reflects on Wordsworth in the late 1790s. In the archive at Dove Cottage in Westmorland is the extraordinary and rare survival of some of his clothes. His waistcoats and breeches from the last years of the eighteenth century open a shutter on to this gentleman-poet, governor-radical, man of the people who was also a man, in his own mind, set far above them. Much of the poetry he would write this year was intended, as he said, ‘to shew that men who did not wear fine cloaths can feel deeply’, and one might imagine that a poet who wrote those words might also wear the fustian and the grosgrain of the working man.

He did not. In Grasmere you can find his cream waistcoat with linen back and silk front, with a kind of spreading collar and decorated with embroidered flowers, its pockets edged with red braid, its twelve fabric-covered metal buttons each decorated with a flower. Beside it is a matching suit of waistcoat and breeches also in cream silk, this waistcoat with a stand-up collar, two small pockets with scallop-edged flaps, and eleven small buttons covered in fabric. The breeches are knee-length, gathered into a band at the knee and secured by four fabric-covered buttons and a strap fastening. A third waistcoat is in ivory silk, decorated in careful pale-blue, red and white embroidery, scattering his chest and stomach with perfect, crystalline lilies of the valley.

Are these really the clothes of the man who would write The Prelude? Was Wordsworth a dandy? In Germany late in 1798, according to his sister, he went out ‘walking by moonlight in his fur gown and a black fur cap in which he looks like any grand Signior’. The gown was green, ‘lined throughout with Fox’s skin’. At other moments he would appear in ‘a blue spencer’, a short double-breasted overcoat without tails, and a new pair of pantaloons. Perhaps one can see in this elegance and this air of distinction, this distance from mud and toil, a picture of the man who was living in Racedown and considering his position as an un-acknowledged legislator of the world, preparing to convey to that world his vision of completeness and authority. ‘The Poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth …’, he would write a year or two later. There is no retreat in those magnificent words to a cosy provincial irrelevance. The ambition is explicitly imperial. Here is a man who wanted to establish a form of poetry whose ligatures would bind up the whole of existence.

His sister Dorothy, part-hidden, is at the centre of this year. There is a surviving silhouette of her: small and bright, sharp, attentive, slight-bodied. Her hair is bound up, her whole being taut. A high lace collar, curly hair on her brow. Delicate, poised, a small bosom, half-open lips, drawn in this silhouette with all the expectations of femininity, her presence almost toylike, but nothing skittish or girlish: careful, exact, intelligent, enquiring.

Coleridge described her in a letter written a few weeks after he had arrived at Racedown:

Wordsworth & his exquisite Sister are with me – She is a woman indeed! – in mind, I mean, & heart – for her person is such, that if you expected to see a pretty woman, you would think her ordinary – if you expected to find an ordinary woman, you would think her pretty! – But her manners are simple, ardent, impressive –

Above all they noticed each other’s eyes. Hers were ‘watchful in minutest observation of nature – and her taste a perfect electrometer – it bends, protrudes, and draws in, at subtlest beauties & most recondite faults’. His were large and grey, lit and sparkling when animated, sometimes half-absent, as if he had sunk a quarter of an inch below the surface of the skin, but otherwise rolling bright towards you, as if the sight within them were not a receptive faculty but active, coming and reaching out to grasp his hearers. The lower part of his face could look somehow unbuttoned. His mouth was always hanging half open – he couldn’t breathe through his nose. ‘I have the brow of an angel, and the mouth of a beast,’ he used to say, the repeated binary vision of himself, great and weak, good and bad, never ceasing to oscillate between its poles.

She saw a poet in him. ‘He is a wonderful man,’ she wrote to her great friend Mary Hutchinson, who had been staying with them at Racedown and had left only a day or two earlier.

His conversation teems with soul, mind, and spirit. Then he is so benevolent, so good tempered and cheerful, and, like William, interests himself so much about every little trifle. At first I thought him very plain, that is, for about three minutes: he is pale and thin, has a wide mouth, thick lips, and not very good teeth, longish loose-growing half-curling rough black hair. But if you hear him speak for five minutes you think no more of them. His eye is large and full, and not dark but grey; such an eye as would receive from a heavy soul the dullest expression; but it speaks every emotion of his animated mind: it has more of ‘the poet’s eye in a fine frenzy rolling’ than I ever witnessed. He has fine dark eyebrows, and an overhanging forehead.

In return she sparkled with her own sharp-edged, discontinuous brilliance, a flashing light in her eyes, her mind not a grand instrument of connection like Coleridge’s, nor vastly present to itself like Wordsworth’s, but full of bright remembered visions, exactly recalled, seen in detail: the sky-blue hedge sparrows’ eggs in a childhood nest, the bilberries in the bowl of a black porringer. She had the gift of what Keats would later call ‘that trembling delicate and snail-horn perception of Beauty’, precise and sensitive, alert to variation. The sensitivity meant, as Coleridge noticed, that her horns would draw in at the slightest touch, and she would easily weep at things seen or remembered. She often felt her heart was full. Her separation from her brothers in childhood meant that she had been ‘put out of the way of many recollections in common’, and that separation only served to heighten the value of closeness for her. She and Wordsworth now shared their everyday life, but they also shared the experience of a mutual absence when young, and then the denial by the Lonsdale estate of their inheritance, the compulsory impoverishment in which they were both now living.

So much had been denied to them, and so much had been broken, that it was her duty to tend to her brother. She was both stronger and weaker than him. He may have been, as he wrote, the mountain and she its flowers, yet he was broken and she was the mender of him. She loved him but she could admonish him, just as later she could tell Coleridge not to publish an unkind review, as it was beneath him and its value as criticism was not greater than its cruelty.

Dorothy on the path of poetry

She saw her own and her brother’s situation clearly enough: ‘We have been endeared to each other by early misfortune,’ she told a friend. Their love may or may not have sublimated the sexual – there is no evidence at all of anything approaching incest – but the form it took was admiration, protection and education, enabling him to leave behind the extremes of his broken self within her shelter and become the greater and more vulnerable poet she believed him to be. He had been addicted to a kind of exclusive masculinity, and only within her care, the shield of her above and around him, could he find the courage to melt and grow.

In The Prelude he said as much to her:

I too exclusively esteemed that love,

And sought that beauty, which as Milton sings,

Hath terror in it. Thou didst soften down

This over-sternness; but for thee, sweet friend,

My soul, too reckless of mild grace, had been

Far longer what by Nature it was framed –

Longer retained its countenance severe –

A rock with torrents roaring, with the clouds

Familiar, and a favourite of the stars;

But thou didst plant its crevices with flowers,

Hang it with shrubs that twinkle in the breeze,

And teach the little birds to build their nests

And warble in its chambers.

Their intimacy was real. ‘Neither absence nor Distance nor Time can ever break the Chain that binds me to my Brothers,’ she wrote. They would wrap up together inside a single coat to stay warm. Her breath, he said, ‘was a kind of gentler spring/That went before my steps’.

Dorothy, or Dolly as she had been called by her parents, loved robins, and there was something robin-like about her: the needle brilliance of their song, their alert restlessness, the tiny, flicker-instant acuity of body and being. She was not sweet in her person, more ardent than that, with a gypsy wildness in her, so that her eyes burned and flashed for almost anyone who met her, like the gold leaf in the electrometer that Coleridge saw.

It was this quality, her ability to respond to the instant, with an immediate attachment to what was in front of her eyes, that allowed her to teach the men around her how to see the world. Joseph Gill’s diary shows that he bought her a notebook when they were at Racedown, but it has disappeared, and there is no written record of what she had been seeing there, as there is for part of the following year in Somerset. But when in March 1798 she wrote in her journal that ‘A quiet shower of snow was in the air,’ that is a moment, as Pamela Woof has written, that tells you who she was. The snow in Dorothy’s perception is ‘simultaneously both hovering and falling; the silent snow stays and does not stay in the air. Dorothy conveys at once the temporary and the timelessness.’ Those moments of transient beauty were part of her daily experience. She saw ‘the moonshine like herrings in the water’, and the moonlight lying on the hills like snow. Categories blurred: the change of season became an active, animated process: ‘The Fern of the mountain now spreads yellow veins among the trees’; the stars were ‘almost like butterflies or skylarks in motion & lightness’. She heard the ‘unseen birds singing in the mist’ and saw the ‘turf fading into mountain road’. She loved to look for nests in the privet and the roses; everything was part of a naked meeting with an exactly encountered and constantly shifting world.

There was nothing saccharine about this. She loved ‘the strength with which nature has endowed me’, and was indifferent to the demands and limits of femininity, loving solitary walks alone in the moonlight when in her early twenties, not submitting to the kind of ignorance thought suitable for many girls of her class and upbringing, socially engaged, giving money to beggars. She was busy, practical, organising a household around the poet who lived alongside her, broiling the gizzard of a hen with some mutton for his supper, baking bread and pies, sewing and laundering, writing letters, copying out his verses.

Over this entire relationship, of such intimacy and such mutual interpenetration – and with such undisputed dominance of male over female – hangs the question of Annette Vallon and her daughter Caroline. Racedown was a mirror-image of the situation Wordsworth had left behind in France. He and his sister were now living together in Dorset as he and the mother of his child were not in Blois. He was looking after and tending to a young child, Basil Montagu, as he was not his own daughter in France.

Guilt stalks these arrangements, and Dorothy’s unqualified admiration of and service for her brother look like the necessary balm for a man besieged by it. Racedown was a parodic rerunning of the married life William had not begun in France. He had saved both Dorothy and Basil from the isolation and difficulty to which they might otherwise have been condemned, but to save them he had left Annette and Caroline to the same fate.

Did Wordsworth abandon one woman and child to attend to another woman and child? And for his own convenience? Or was it that only with Dorothy, and not with Annette, could he see his way to being the poet he knew he wanted to be? Writing in The Prelude of his years of despair at Racedown – and never admitting in that poem or anywhere else to the existence of Annette or her child – he very nearly said that. Dorothy was his saviour because she saw a poet in him and was prepared to fight for that poet. She was

the belovèd woman in whose sight

Those days were passed – now speaking in a voice

Of sudden admonition like a brook

That did but cross a lonely road; and now

Seen, heard and felt, and caught at every turn,

Companion never lost through many a league –

Maintained for me a saving intercourse

With my true self (for, though impaired, and changed

Much, as it seemed, I was no further changed

Than as a clouded, not waning moon);

She, in the midst of all, preserved me still

A Poet, made me seek beneath that name,

My office upon earth.

It is the most beautiful metaphor of love, of a woman as a mountain brook coming and going along the same valley as the road the poet is taking, bringing her irrigating, generous presence to the drought of his journey and his despair. In later revisions he added the beautiful suggestion that in the darkness of the waning moon, ‘She whispered still that brightness would return’. The moon would wax again. Love is in that line, love given and heard. There is a suggestion, as often in what he would write about her, of suppressed desire, in the physical intimacy of ‘Seen, heard and felt, and caught at every turn’, in the giving liquidity of her presence, in the brook’s gentle washing of him and perhaps even in the atmosphere around ‘intercourse’, which by the late 1790s had already begun to carry the implications of ‘sexual connection’. There is no suggestion of equality between them. She is the servant, he the walking hero; she quietly attends, he struggles with his greatness. He relies on her and dominates her; he uses her and she conforms to the idea that she is there to be used. One version of her usefulness is the strictness with which she can admonish him. Both master and servant are happy for one to be reproved by the other, and to understand that admonition as a form of love.

Here then, on this summer evening in early June 1797, assembled together in the small parlour of Racedown, with the oil cloth on the floor, and an air of warmth and mutual affection and value in the room – all his life Coleridge would remember the welcome they gave him this evening – the sun dropping outside, these three people, each in their varied, multi-layered conditions of longing and despair, genius and trouble, sit down together to talk, to discuss what they have written and seen, what they might write, what they have been and what they might yet be. It is the seeding moment of this year.

Coleridge came to love and revere them both, as one sensibility in two people. Much later, he wrote to Dorothy about their brother, who had come along with him and Wordsworth on a walking tour through the north of England:

Your Br. John is one of you; a man who hath solitary usings of his own Intellect, deep in feeling, with a subtle Tact, a swift instinct of Truth & Beauty.

One of you: as if ‘Wordsworth’ is not the name of a person but a way of being, not entirely communicative to others, with a prompt tactility but unseen depths, both a flickering quickness and an immanence in all of them, as if their dwelling was some way far below the surface, profoundly attractive and curiously removed.

Sit in the valley of the little River Sydeford below the house, in the shadow of its willows and alders, with the evening hatch of olives speckling the yard of air above the water, the cattle grazing in the last sunlight on the sloping fields, their long-bodied shadows patched across the pasture, and an owl announcing itself in the wood across the valley, and it is not difficult to see the three of them there beyond the darkened panes of the parlour windows.

The owl is muted, like a trumpet with a cushion in its mouth. The robins are still singing in the hollies, one on each side of the river, bright as water. Next to them the owl is throaty-chesty. If a cough could sing, it would sound like this.

There is a sheet on the table, for want of a tablecloth. Coleridge is asleep upstairs. Wordsworth at the table looks across to Dorothy, where she is transcribing from his notebooks. Rough pages lie torn out between them, and she is copying in her neater more regular hand from his tragedy The Borderers.

He is looking at her, but there is a vacancy in his eye and he is looking across her, through her, his own pen poised over a notebook, as she is busy copying.

What is this word? she asks. Sublimity?

No, no. Sterility.

They sit there with a kind of contentment between them, no tension, a jointness, ease.

What does this say Will? I am the devil?

No, he half laughs with his outgoing breath. No, ‘I am the dark.’

The dark? She laughs at him.

It runs on to the next line: ‘I am the dark/Embracer of the superlunary world.’

As he speaks, the life-flame in him is barely visible. Only now and then, as some breeze blows over him, her breeze, a movement and change becomes apparent, a reanimation of the suspended life, a breath across coals. Wherever his vacant eye looks, he can see through to the bones and the soft inner parts. But that is because he is also transparent to himself, and in himself finds the boneyard of the past, a littered emptiness, the ashy remains of what he thought he might have been. Behind it, distant, is some other, larger and half-forgotten mountain world, his time in the Alps or in north Wales, his childhood in the Lakes. In certain lights he looks as gaunt as a new-dropped lamb.

3

Searching

June 1797

Coleridge stayed at Racedown for the next three weeks, and the talk began. For months Wordsworth’s poetry had been fragmentary, fierce and strange, moving between the worlds of doubt and guilt, finding significance on the borders of madness. He read his poems to Coleridge. A set of sketches and revisions of one of them has survived on the reverse side of the same large folio sheet as his lines on the baker’s cart, with further thoughts and rethoughts of it on a neighbouring sheet, both now in the Wordsworth archive at Dove Cottage.

Looking at these repetitive, hesitant drafts of something Wordsworth would come to call ‘Incipient Madness’ is like observing a man feeling for poetry with his fingertips in the dark.

There were at least twelve uncertain and twitchy stages. From the first moment are three words:

You see the

It is a tiny eruptive nodule of poetic substance focused on a ruined building, a small cottage or shed.

He pulls back a foot or two and starts again:

Though open to the sky yet stained with smoke

You see the swallows nest has dropp’d away

A wretched covert ’tis for man or beast

And when the poor mans horse that shelters there

Turns from the beating wind and open sky

The iron links with which his feet are clogg’d

Mix their dull clanking with the heavy sound

Of falling rain a melancholy

That has come easily, without correction, on this otherwise heavily corrected sheet, so materially realised that it seems likely to have been something seen by Wordsworth on his walks in Dorset. This poetry is already autobiographical, and its atmosphere describes the man Wordsworth was in his darkest hours. ‘You’ is ‘you’ the reader or the passer-by; it is also Wordsworth himself, and the ‘you’ also seems identified with the horse and his hobbling chains, both man and animal a prisoner, dulled by the conditions life has imposed, sheltering in a wreck of a building for which all hope is gone and which even the swallows have deserted. Coleridge accused Wordsworth of being a ‘spectator ab extra’ – an observer from outside whatever conditions or predicament he was describing – but here the ‘covert’, the hiding place, is wretched for man or beast, no matter which, and all these creatures – Wordsworth, the horse, the poor man, the swallow, you – are inhabiting the same desolate landscape.

But the setting is not entirely true. There is a whiff of cliché in the air. The magazines of the 1790s were full of tragic scenes of rural poverty, and the word ‘melancholy’ seems to bring the movement to a halt. So Wordsworth stops and tries again:

And when the poor mans horse that hither comes

For shelter turns ab

That too, for whatever reason, is a dead end. And he takes another run:

And open sky the passenger may hear

The iron links with which his feet are were clogged

Mix their dull clanking with the heavy sound

Of falling rain, a melancholy thing

To any man who has a heart to feel. –

Those final words at last ring with an air of Wordsworth’s own truth. That is his subject: the grandeur in the beatings of the heart.

But whatever this poem is, it won’t come clean. He introduces his own recent visit to the cottage:

But two nights gone

I chanced to I passed this cottage and within I heard

The poor man’s lonely horse who that hither comes

For shelter, turning from the beating rain

And open sky, and as he turned, I heard

At one level the horse was a ‘who’, but Wordsworth revises that to the more conventionally impersonal ‘that’. The various elements and players need to be organised: himself, the horse, the place, the stormy night, the connections between them. The revisions now turn scratchy and directionless:

I heard him turning from the beating wind –

And open sky and as he turn’d I heard

But he cannot decide what the horse is doing there: ‘to weather the night storm’ or ‘to weather out the tempests’? ‘Within these walls’, ‘within these roofless walls’, or ‘these fractur’d walls’? Then, at draft twelve of these few recalcitrant lines, another set of ingredients appears which suddenly mobilises this dark fragment of experience:

But two nights gone, I cross’d this dreary moor

In the still clear moonlight, when reached the hut

I looked within but all was still and dark

Only within the ruin, I beheld

At a small distance on the dusky ground

A broken pain which glitter’d to the moon

And seemed akin to life. – Another time

The winds of autumn drove me oer the heath

Heath in a dark night by the storm compelled

the hardships of that season

I crossed the dreary moor

Those lines are still in thrall to an earlier way of doing poetry – ‘dusky’ is dead jargon; ‘glitter’d to’ is patently false language – but that broken pain/pane of glass on the dark floor of the ruined shed, a lifeless thing that seems to be full of life, grips and obsesses him:

I found my sickly heart had tied itself

Even to this speck of glass – It could produce

a feeling as of absence

on the moment when my sight

Should feed on it again. For many a long month

I felt Confirm’d this strange incontinence; my eye

Did every evening measure the moon’s height

And forth I went before her yellow beams

Could overtop the elm-trees oer the heath

I sought the r and I found

That speck more precious to my soul

Than was the moon in heaven

Here now at last are the elements for a strange and lonely poem of experience on the edges of despair, an act of empathy. It is driven by an obsessive and disordered frame of mind, dissociated from the normalities of human love and community, in a world where, in its final form, a looming morbidity infects and pollutes all living things. It is a poem written by the desperate man Coleridge had come to cure.

Incipient Madness

I crossed the dreary I crossed the dreary moor

In the clear moonlight when I reached the hut

I enter’d in, but all was still and dark

Only within the ruin I beheld

At a small distance, on the dusky ground

A broken pane which glitter’d to in the moon

And seemed akin to life. There is a mood

A settled temper of the heart, when grief,

Becomes an instinct, fastening on the all things

That promise food, doth like a sucking babe

Create it where it is not. From this hour time

I found my sickly heart had tied itself

Even to this speck of glass – It could produce

a feeling as of absence

on the moment when my sight

Should feed on it again. For many a long month

I felt Confirm’d this strange incontinence; my eye

Did every evening measure the moon’s height

And forth I went soon as her yellow beams

Could overtop the elm-trees. Oer the heath

I went, I reached the cottage, and I found

Still undisturbed and glittering in its place

That speck of glass more precious to my soul

Than was the moon in heaven. Another time

The winds of Autumn drove me o’er the heath

One gloomy evening: By the storm compell’d

The poor man’s horse that feeds along the lanes

Had hither come within among these fractur’d walls

To weather out the night; and as I pass’d

While restlessly he turn’d from the fierce wind

And from the open sky, I heard, within,

The iron links with which his feet were clogg’d

Mix their dull clanking with the heavy sound noise

Of falling rain. I started from the spot

And heard the sound still following in the wind

These lines, firmly in a gothic tradition, nevertheless stand as a challenge to everything the eighteenth-century inheritance of elegant rural landscapes might have suggested or proposed. The heart of what Wordsworth sees is not the well-framed picture but the broken pane of glass, and the haunted sound of chains blown towards him on the vast and homeless winds of heaven. There is no connection yet to any larger significance – any movement beyond the gothic – that connection would have to wait until Coleridge had changed his relationship to the world.

There was one more poem, his most recent, that Wordsworth was keen to have Coleridge hear, and it marked an emergence from this darkness. He read him this first version of ‘The Ruined Cottage’, not giving it to him to read but making sure he heard it from his own lips. It is a descendant of the dark poetry which had poured out of him over the previous six or nine months, but this is different. In ‘The Ruined Cottage’, suffering and the disordered world are seen in tranquillity. The gothic furniture has been dispensed with, much of it hived off into ‘Incipient Madness’. Instead, a calm and beneficent air emerges from a sad and simple story of suffering and failure, nothing over-heightened, no melodramatic lighting, but a rich simplicity in language and setting by which the place itself of the ruined cottage and its surroundings comes to portray the people whose lives it describes. His previous rhetorical habits have dropped away. Abstractions and pat responses are banished in favour of the tender, corporeal realities in the life of a poor woman and her family.

In Wordsworth’s poem, the poet comes across a ruin and meets an old man, a pedlar, who had known the place many years before, when happiness had glowed from its windows. ‘I see around me here,’ the Pedlar says,

Things which you cannot see. We die, my Friend,

Nor we alone, but that which each man loved

And prized in his peculiar nook of earth

Dies with him, or is changed, and very soon

Even of the good is no memorial left.

In the garden is a neglected spring, and the poet goes to drink there:

A spider’s web hung to the water’s edge

And on the wet and slimy foot-stone lay

The useless fragment of a wooden bowl.

It moved my very heart.

A young woman, Margaret, had lived in the remote cottage, and always welcomed passers-by. Her husband Robert had worked in the garden, often late,

till the day-light

Was gone, and every leaf and flower were lost

In the dark hedges.

One or two other poets – Southey, Cowper – had managed to write of simplicity and suffering in this low, gentle, absorbent, un-self-proclaiming way, in which the reality underlying the poetry matters more than the surface of the poetry itself, but ‘The Ruined Cottage’ is something new in Wordsworth’s life. Its facts, like those leaves and flowers sinking back into the darkness of the evening hedge, have become the modest elements of an unquiet landscape. The whole poem exists in a border state, ‘without the application of gross and violent stimulus’, as he would describe the qualities of valuable poetry the following year, but attentive to the sorrows of the story it tells.

It is tempting to think, given the permeability of the boundary in Wordsworth’s mind between the remembered and the imagined, between some other reality and his own experience, that there is autobiography underlying this tale of distress. Margaret is one of the many women in Wordsworth’s poetry who are left with their children to fend for themselves, and suffer as a result. He said himself that in ‘several passages describing the employment & demeanour of Margaret during her affliction, I was indebted to observations made in Dorsetshire’, but there was a more powerful stimulus than the poor he met on the paths and roads of Dorset: the knowledge and memory of the woman and child he had abandoned in France.

This sort of figure had haunted Wordsworth’s imagination before he had met – or left – Annette Vallon, and they appear, usually in much more exaggerated form, in the poetry of many of his contemporaries. But here, in the simple, first version of ‘The Ruined Cottage’, there is a kind of conceptual democracy at work, by which Margaret’s modest truth is allowed to be as valid as any other. There is no need to exaggerate, because exaggeration is a form of obscurity. And so the poem looks carefully at the quiet facts around her. The bad years had come – war and summers when ‘the fields were left with half a harvest’, a sickness everywhere and no work:

shoals of artizans

Were from their daily labour turned away

To hang for bread on parish charity,

They and their wives and children, happier far

Could they have lived as do the little birds

That peck along the hedges or the kite

That makes her dwelling in the mountain rocks.

Robert was driven to the army as the only source of employment, and before he went, left for Margaret and their children a bag holding ten guineas, eight months’ pay for a labourer, given as a bounty to all who volunteered. She waited five years for him to return, a kind of vacuity in her:

in that broken arbour she would sit

The idle length of half a sabbath day;

There, where you see the toadstool’s lazy head;

And when a dog passed by she still would quit

The shade and look abroad.

Dorothy copied out for Coleridge the lines describing Margaret’s paused and eviscerated life, in which, sitting in the ruin of her cottage,

Her tattered clothes were ruffled by the wind

Even at the side of her own fire

and he sent them in amazement in a letter to a Bristol friend, evidence that Wordsworth had broken through to a new level of poetic speech, in which the story was embodied in language that claimed no status greater than what it described. Wordsworth’s language had itself become the medium for empathy and democracy, and for that Coleridge recognised greatness in him.

4

Settling

July 1797

Coleridge brought the Wordsworths over to Stowey from Racedown at the very beginning of July, at first for what they all thought was to be a short visit. He borrowed a one-horse chaise and drove them – ‘always … very cautious’ – all day along the execrable Dorset and Somerset roads.

Even at first sight, arriving on a July evening, Nether Stowey is a place for entrancement. From the castle motte above the village, England is there in all its beauty. The low nose of the Quantocks pushes out dark blue and gold in the shadows towards the sea at Kilve. The sun is setting, at nine o’clock, well to the north of west over the Bristol Channel. The sheep grazing around the Norman mound are haloed by that last light. It falls on the power station at Hinckley, on the two purple, shadowed islands in the channel, Steep Holm and Flat Holm, with the line of Wales behind them, beyond the sky-blue band of sea.

Is this what people have always seen? Or am I seeing it because Coleridge has taught me to see it? It feels golden, honeyed, a sweetness poured over the country and into it, into the fescues and little vetches and vetchlings at my feet, all of which are glowing now as if they were part of the mended world.

Down the streets of the little town below the castle, the swifts are sweet-screaming, whistles blown through atom-wide mouths, with the martins above them, and midges alight in the sun-shafts between the buildings. Beyond the tile and slate of the roofs and the church tower are the blocks of woodland, the golden windows of the cornfields, the hedgerow oaks now nearly black, gone monumental in the dusk, the dabbed dark ink marks of summer trees.

Honeyed world

Stowey swifts sweet-screaming

Everything is still, but a dog barks and the young rooks chatter and caw between them. The swifts are making sudden power turns in among the buildings, weaving their paths down South Lane, back over the houses in Castle Street, over the road to Spaxton and then into the narrow canyon between the cottages in Lime Street before climbing up over the roofs, again and again. A stream from the hills runs down the streets in a wide stone gutter, almost soundless now in its reduced summer flow. Even on a beautiful sunlit evening, the little town closes by the time the sun sets. There are drinkers in the pubs, and the sound of televisions comes through open windows. If anywhere can seem well, this place does.

In reality, Nether Stowey in the 1790s was no dream world. It was still connected to its medieval past. Every winter, pairs of heavy oxen ploughed the red Quantocks soil. Old Somerset men talked in a way William Holland, the Oxford-educated vicar of Over Stowey, couldn’t understand, shouting at their animals ‘Jubb along, jubb along’ – meaning, Holland guessed, that the vast oxen should somehow be skipping and jumping down their furrows. Every Tuesday, farm women brought their eggs and butter for sale to the market cross in the centre of Stowey. The poor climbed the hills to the commons, called the Stowey Customs, to cut the gorse or ‘furze’ for their bread ovens, bracken for animal bedding, picking up fallen wood for their own fires. The fields of the parish still bore their ancient names: Cockley Land, Strawberry Hill, Fuzz Ground, Great Warren, Castle Ground.

This rooted, intractable and impoverished life was dense with pockets of isolation. Fevers broke out in individual villages, and all hoped that the contagion would not spread across the fields. On occasions a whole village forgot its connection to the rest of the world, and when Holland arrived to conduct a service the people asked him to remind them what time or date it was. In some parts of the parish the poor still celebrated Christmas on Twelfth Night, as the whole of England had a century or two before.

In the winter, with lanes deep in mud, the vicar rode around like a modern man in an ancient world, his servant Morris following on foot. ‘I had an umbrella and was obliged frequently to shake off the snow and Morris every now and then shook the skirts of my coats.’ Arriving at one of the outlying hamlets in the parish, wearing his clerical black and gaiters, he had the church bell tolled, and the congregation walked slowly in from the fields, a scene from the Brueghels. With sermons, weddings, baptisms, funerals, he regulated the life of his flock. Forty days after the birth of a child, according to the teachings of Leviticus, Holland liked to ‘church’ the mother at a special ceremony in which a veil was worn, reaccommodating women who were considered defiled by the process of giving birth.

Returning from a summer walk, Holland called on an ‘old sick dropsical woman’. She was living in a kind of horror-slum which he called ‘the Indian village’ – a few hovels gathered on the edge of the Quantock woods. Her house

was a shocking place. No chimney for the smoke – I could scarcely stand it, and was almost suffocated to death. The poor woman was brought downstairs, and her daughter and grand-daughters around her, and she gasping for breath. They told us that one part of the house was sold to Davies, who was to make a chimney for them.

The tiny hut had been subdivided on the condition that the man called Davies would take the smoke out of the rooms in which the family was trying to live. But Holland knew him. ‘Davies is one of the greatest rascals that haunts the hills.’ He happened that morning to be outside, in the field making hay. Holland went up to him, and asked why he had not done what he had promised. Davies lied calmly to his vicar.

The man was civil to me, and assured me that he was by the agreement to do no such thing. At this the old woman’s daughter rushed out of doors, and there was such a terrible set to that I and my family walked off; but the sound of their voices, shrill and deep, followed us most part of the way to Over Stowey. A sad set – the wretched inhabitants of three or four huts, like a nest in the bosom of Quantock, and living there without law or religion or the fear of God or man; for they never come to church, and what to do with them I scarce can tell.

These are the people of Wordsworth’s poetry seen from the point of view of the hierarchy presiding over them. Holland may have felt resourceless in meeting them, but his answers were the stock ones: fear the law, submit to the disciplines of the Church of England, restore the picture because the picture is the frame of goodness. These were precisely the attitudes that the young men of the next generation were set on changing.

The Coleridges were embedded in this beautiful and troubled world. The three of them – Coleridge himself, his wife Sara and their son little Hartley – were living with a much-loved maid called Nanny in a small cottage up at the top end of Lime Street. They had a well and a garden at the back, in which Coleridge thought he could ‘raise vegetables & corn enough for myself & Wife, and feed a couple of shouted & grunting Cousins from the refuse’. There were indeed two pigs, plus ducks and geese, and some apple trees whose trunks were ‘crooked earth-ward’ and whose boughs ‘hang above us in an arborous roof’.

The house had three small dark rooms on each floor, in which the fires smoked and draughts found their way through windows and doors. The thatch was half-rotten. Anything left there would get damp. On wash days, the ‘little Hovel is almost afloat – poor Sara tired off her legs’. On the street side, a cobbled pavement stood up out of the mud that caked the street itself. A small millstream ran down the side of the pavement, ‘the dear gutter of Stowey’ which Coleridge said he preferred to any purling Italian brook, but the road itself was dusty in summer and in winter ‘an impassable Hog-stye … a Slough of Despond’. The half-foetid smell of tan-pits at the back came wafting over everything. At night, the people living in the parish workhouse just down from the cottage fought and argued, so that as Coleridge joked to Sara, Lime Street more often than not was ‘vocal with the Poorhouse Nightingales’.

Coleridge had been married to Sara for nearly two years. She was the sister of Robert Southey’s wife Edith, and all of them had been planning to set out on a dream expedition to America, where, with eight others, they were going to establish a Utopian community called Pantisocracy, meaning ‘the rule of all’, to be set up on the cheap land along the banks of the Susquehanna River in Ohio. It was to be ‘a Social Colony, in which there was to be a community of property and where all that was selfish was to be proscribed’. There were to be no formal laws, but ‘by excluding all the little deteriorating passions – injustice, wrath, anger, clamour and evil-speaking, – an example would be set to the world of Human Perfectibility’.

Stephen Fricker, Sarah’s father – only when she married Coleridge and at his insistence did she drop the ‘h’ from her name – had been a wine and coal merchant and publican in Bristol, with a good house in the country and another in Bath. Her mother, who came from a rather more upmarket family, with moneyed connections, had overseen the family’s life, and they had lived among the fashionable, in ‘a smartish way’. Sarah and her sisters were well educated, learning mathematics and grammar, history and French as befitted young women of bon ton. Sarah all her life used to drop her h’s in a distinguished, relaxed, upper-class way, and insert little French phrases into her conversation, discussing events entre nous and en passant, emphasising, au fait and au fond, how important it was to remain au courant. The seal she used to close up her letters, however despondent their contents might have become, year after year impressed the phrase ‘Toujours gai’ into the wax.

Stephen Fricker had spent beyond his means, and had failed at every scheme he had tried. In 1786, when Sarah was sixteen, he was declared bankrupt. A few months later he died, broken, aged forty-eight. The Fricker family was destitute. Their mother opened a dame school in Bristol and the teenage girls were set to work as needlewomen. There was zest and spark in them. They retained their ‘polished, calculated light style’, and for all their poverty had moved happily in the modern, radical, open-minded Bristol circles to which Robert Southey had introduced Coleridge.

When Sarah first met him, at dinner one day, unexpectedly, he had been on a walking tour in Wales and had returned ‘brown as a berry’. Her first evaluation was undeceived: ‘Plain but eloquent and clever. His clothes were worn out; his hair wanted cutting. He was a dreadful figure.’ Southey, who was ‘very neat, gay and smart’, agreed: ‘He is a diamond set in lead.’

The diamond could talk, the heady prospects of ‘the Scheme of Pantisocracy’ were in the air, Sarah herself was a woman of courage and self-possession, both forthright and capable of discretion and delicacy, and within a fortnight of meeting they had agreed to marry. Things did not run smooth. Coleridge seems to have committed himself to her at first only philosophically and as a duty. He and Southey both thought she would make an excellent Pantisocratic bride, just as her sister Edith would for Southey and a third Fricker sister, Mary, already had for a third Bristol poet-Pantisocrat, Robert Lovell. The young idealists had plumped for brides en bloc. On top of that, Coleridge was still agonisingly and undecidedly in love with another girl, Mary Evans, and when he went back to London and Cambridge for a while, he failed – to Southey’s and Lovell’s consternation and disgust – to give a thought to Sarah or to write her a single line, despite writing to others in the same household.

Coleridge’s chaos alienated Lovell and the other Frickers, who advised against the marriage and swirled superior offers in front of Sarah’s eyes. Two rich young men proposed when Coleridge was away, but she would have neither. When Coleridge returned to Bristol early in 1795, something had changed, and he could begin to be amazed by this beautiful, competent, strong-minded woman, who was quite clearly and courageously in love with him, despite what all around her were saying to the contrary. By the summer of that year he had fallen in love with her in return.

For £5 a year, before their marriage, they rented a cottage in Clevedon, on the shores of the Bristol Channel, where the tallest of the roses in the garden looked in at the window of the first-floor bedroom, and there, away from the world, in August 1795, in anticipation of their happiness, Coleridge had written his first great poem.

As much as Wordsworth’s twin entrancements with Annette Vallon and Michel Beaupuy, and his lines on the baker’s cart, this poem, called ‘Effusion 35’ in 1795, later ‘The Eolian Harp’, stands at the headwaters of the Quantocks year. Coleridge and Sara – no ‘h’ was an attempt to classicise her – are together on a warm and quiet August evening, within earshot of the sea. They sit beside their cottage, ‘o’ergrown/With white-flower’d Jasmin, and the broad-leav’d Myrtle’, and while Venus appears in the evening sky they watch the light fading from the clouds. Quietness envelops them, and the revolutionary world is a universe away.

How exquisite the scents

Snatch’d from yon bean-field! and the world so hush’d!

The stilly murmur of the distant Sea

Tells us of Silence.

Detailed, located, precise, simple, receptive. In the window of the cottage they have placed an Aeolian harp, a ten-stringed musical instrument, a yard long and about five inches square, part of the domestic equipment for all aesthetic middle-class families in the late eighteenth century, by which the wind passing over the strings plays strange and ethereal music, seeming at times like audible moonlight, quiveringly present and absent as the breeze shifts across it and the vibrations in one string summon the harmonics in the others.

For Coleridge, writing as if talking gently and conversationally, almost whispering, abandoning the public and stentorian address of so much eighteenth-century verse, including his own, this floating coming and going of the wind-music becomes, first, a gently erotic replaying of the feeling between the two of them:

And that simplest Lute,

Plac’d length-ways in the clasping casement, hark!

How by the desultory breeze caress’d,

Like some coy Maid half yielding to her Lover,

It pours such sweet upbraidings, as must needs

Tempt to repeat the wrong!

Then, as the gusts strengthen over it, the music seems to create a world of delicious fantasy, a soft and suggestive prefiguring of the dreams of Kubla Khan:

And now, its strings

Boldlier swept, the long sequacious notes

Over delicious surges sink and rise,

Such a soft floating witchery of sound

As twilight Elfins make, when they at eve

Voyage on gentle gales from Faery-Land,

Where Melodies round honey-dropping flowers,

Footless and wild, like birds of Paradise,

Nor pause nor perch, hov’ring on untam’d wing!

Coleridge’s mind knew no divisions. He may have been imagining these sounds as audible hummingbirds, but he was thinking, too. ‘I feel strongly and I think strongly,’ he wrote to a friend the following year, ‘but I seldom feel without thinking or think without feeling. Hence, though my poetry has in general a hue of tenderness or passion over it, yet it seldom exhibits unmixed and simple tenderness or passion. My philosophical opinions are blended with or deduced from my feelings.’

And what if all of animated nature be but organic Harps

And so the drifting half-sounds of the wind-harp, as if summoned from nowhere by nothing, become in his mind not merely the charged atmosphere between him and his wife-to-be, or a dream of sugared otherness, but the manifestation of everything that essentially is, in a universe full of significance. The Aeolian harp, it occurs to him, may be the mute world speaking, a legible or audible version of what could, if you were properly aware, be heard everywhere and all the time as the music of existence.

And what if all of animated nature

Be but organic Harps diversely framed,

That tremble into thought, as o’er them sweeps

Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,

At once the Soul of each, and God of all?

That trembling into thought, that vast ‘plastic’ breeze – the adjective means what it does in Greek, the moulding wind of a divine and universal spirit – blows through the Quantocks year. It is the shaping wind, standing opposed to the winds that often threaten in Wordsworth’s poetry, where they are the unsettling agents of otherness, bordering on the meaningless and the broken.

The idea of the world as a harp to be played on by the winds of intelligibility and significance is rarely absent from Coleridge’s mind, although this poem eventually withdraws from such a suggestion. Sara could not agree with him that the harp in the window might be speaking with the voice of God, and she reproved him for his heresy. But the suggestion remained – in the poem, in Coleridge’s mind, and soon, under Coleridge’s influence, colonising the mind of the Wordsworths – of a beautiful connectedness in all living things, by which all were part of one life, a coherence to which human society should be tuned and in which poetry, if it was to be valuable, needed to find its language.

At the end of 1796 the Coleridges moved to Nether Stowey, and into the frankly unsatisfactory house in Lime Street. An old woman called Mrs Rich came in to help Sara with the housework. She lived next door with a poor Stowey man called Daddy Rich. They had a son for whom they had scrimped and saved to set up in a currying business, cleaning the flesh from hides before they were tanned. The son knew no gratitude, had abandoned the business to go into the Marines and left his parents grieving for his absence. As Coleridge wrote to Southey, Daddy and Mrs Rich spent their lives

wishing & praying only to see him once more/and about a fortnight ago he returned, discharged as an ideot. – The day after I came back to Stowey, I heard a cry of Murder, & rushed into the House, where I found the poor Wretch, whose physiognomy is truly hellish, beating his Father most unmercifully with a great stick –/I seized him & pinioned him to the wall, till the peace-officer came –/– He vows vengeance on me; but what is really shocking he never sees little Hartley but he grins with hideous distortions of rage, & hints that he’ll do him a mischief. –And the poor old People, who just get enough to feed themselves, are now absolutely pinched/& never fall to sleep without fear & trembling, lest the Son should rise in a fit of insanity, & murder them.

In the Lime Street poorhouse, men in a fit would be given gin – a whole bottle if need be – to calm them. A man living there had twice made his sister-in-law pregnant. His brother, her husband, had been transported to Australia. The man told William Holland, the vicar, that he wished to know whether it was ‘more sinful in the eye of God’ to live with her as his mistress or his wife. Holland had no answer. Conventional morality could not accommodate a living husband imprisoned on the far side of the world. The troubles of the 1790s had found their way into every nook and cranny, and this combination of war, despair, hunger, a global perspective and the fracturing of lives lay as the background to much of what the poets would write in their year together.

The Coleridges had dreamed of a perfect rural retreat in which the consolations of nature, a bit of ground to cultivate and vegetables to grow, would provide the life in which Hartley could blossom and his parents could be happy. They had been promised for a moment a beautiful little smallholding in the valley at Adscombe, the far side of Over Stowey and just under the Quantocks, but that had fallen through, and Lime Street was all that was on offer. It was scarcely the place for bliss, but as one of their visitors wrote to his sister, ‘Here you can be happy without superfluities. Coleridge has a fine little boy about nine or ten months old. This child is a noble, healthy-looking fellow, has strong eyebrows and beautiful eyes. It is a treat, a luxury, to see Coleridge hanging over his infant and talking to it, and fancying what he will be in future days.’

Without doubt, gaiety rollicked around the house, for all their poverty and discomfort, toothache and neuralgia, and for all Coleridge’s habit of walking up and down, ‘composing poetry, instead of coming to bed at proper hours’. Among their friends this was a time of real delight, of games and laughter, of cups of flip and jugs of cider. Anna and John Cruikshank, the son of the Earl of Egmont’s steward and an admirer of Coleridge, had a child the same age as Hartley and often had them to supper at Ivy Cottage in Castle Street. Sara was friends with Mrs Roskilly, whose husband, the curate, ‘a most amiable liberal-minded man’, ran the boarding school. James Cole the watchmaker and his wife, John Brice the vicar of Aisholt, a beautiful green hamlet on the edge of the hills, and his daughters, and a whole family of Chesters, John and his sisters, all welcomed them in.

These were the more democratically-minded of Stowey’s inhabitants, the free thinkers, those for whom events in France and on the Continent had not been mere catastrophe. The conservative elements of the town continued to dislike and suspect the Coleridges. One Stowey woman thought Coleridge ‘an absent-minded, opinionated man, talking everybody down, fatiguing to listen to’, while William Holland, the diary-keeping rector of Over Stowey, despised anyone who associated with them.

The worlds of the Georgian vicar and the Romantic poets collide on the very first page of the earliest surviving volume of Holland’s diary, from October 1799. He and his wife Mary have gone shopping for a gown at Frank Poole’s ‘every-thing shop’ in St Mary’s Street, where, as usual, the unctuous Mr Poole ‘smiled and bowed graciously’. Then:

Saw that Democratic hoyden Mrs. Coleridge, who looked so like a frisky girl or something worse that I was not surprised that a Democratic libertine should choose her for a wife. The husband gone to London suddenly – no one here can tell why.

Here, from nowhere, a glimpse of the hostile world in which the poets were living. Hoyden – rude, rough, dirty, saucy, immodest, whorish, sexual, self-sufficient, not submitting to the requirements of social deference or feminine modesty. Frisky – only ever used elsewhere by Holland of horses that had not been adequately exercised. Something worse – salacious talk of the Fricker girls’ sexual mores in Bristol and in London, where, in another euphemism, they had been described as ‘haberdashers’, had reached Stowey. Democratic – suspect, Francophile, eroding all that Holland valued most. Libertine – the fusion of the worst sexual and political freedoms. No one here can tell why – the hostile, supervisory talk in the street. The reality was that the Coleridge marriage was in crisis and ‘the husband’ had gone north to see the Wordsworths.

Sally Pally

What in the end emerges from this cascade of disapproval? The alluring freedom, directness and attractiveness of Sara Coleridge in 1799, a liberty woman in a closed and controlling world. Coleridge when he loved her called her ‘Sally Pally’, and it is Sally Pally Coleridge one should think of walking the streets of Nether Stowey, indifferent to the sneers of its inhabitants. When Southey, in the midst of a ferocious row with her husband, pouring ‘heart-chilling sentiments’ into the room, had claimed that he liked Coleridge more than ever, Sara ‘affronted [him] into angry Silence by exclaiming What a Story!’ It is one of the ironies of this year, so carefully and agonisingly dedicated to the finding and telling of truths, that one of its principal truth-tellers was excluded from its inner circle.

Coleridge loved the Quantocks, but the centre of Nether Stowey for him, and the reason he was there, was neither a landscape nor a building but a man. Tom Poole was a tanner, in his mid-thirties, the son of a tanner and entirely self-educated, bright-eyed, ‘not of a yielding disposition’, and with a rough and abrupt manner that he never attempted to refine or conceal.

In the early 1790s he had read The Rights of Man by Tom Paine and had been radicalised by the news from France. A network of Pooles – lawyers, landowners, men of the cloth, ‘the very top of the yeomanry’, the Reverend Holland called them – was spread across Stowey, Bridgwater and the neighbouring villages. Except for Tom’s brother Richard, most of them disapproved of him. His cousin Charlotte bristled with resentment: ‘Tom Poole,’ she told her journal, ‘has imbibed some of the wild notions of liberty and equality that at present prevail so much.’ He had set up a book society in Stowey, and when Richard Symes, a Bridgwater lawyer, found a young man with a copy of The Rights of Man given to him by Poole, he tore it from his hand and stamped it to shreds on the pavement of Castle Street. Effigies of Tom Paine had been burned in Bridgwater and Taunton, and after Poole prevented the same being done in Stowey, stories ran around the rumour-networks of his town that he was now distributing seditious pamphlets. There is no doubting his radicalism. It went much further than a simple concern for the poor of Somerset. When war broke out against France he was unequivocal:

Many thousands of human beings will be sacrificed in the ensuing contest; and for what? To support three or four individuals, called arbitrary kings, in the situation which they or their ancestors have usurped. I consider every Briton who loses his life in the war as much murdered as the King of France, and every one who approves the war, as signing the death warrant of each soldier or sailor that falls.

He tormented Stowey with his democratic sentiments. He talked politics when out shooting woodcock. He thought England ‘a declining country, too guiltily leagued with despots’. He told whoever would listen that if he ever had a son he would call him John Hampden, after the great seventeenth-century revolutionary, and was always ready to have some good radical talk in his parlour, providing a comfortable and well-stocked book room in his own house for Coleridge and others to read and write in, helping with his mother – another committed radical – to make the new radical hotbed of the cottage in Lime Street as comfortable as he could. To his cousin Charlotte, he was a propagandist. She thought he always wanted ‘to load the higher class of people indiscriminately with opprobrium, and magnifies the virtues, miseries, and oppressed state of the poor in proportion’.

Not surprisingly, Poole started to come to the attention of the government’s spy networks. His letters were secretly opened and their contents reported to Whitehall. A Bridgwater friend told him that he was

considered by Government as the most dangerous person in the county of Somerset, and, as it was well known that this part of the country was disaffected, the whole mischief was, by Government, attributed to me.

Poole laughed at the idea, but his tone was bitter. ‘Now an absolute controul exists,’ he wrote. The souls of Englishmen were ‘as much enslaved as the body in the cell of a Bastile’. That is not far short of revolutionary talk, and William Holland knew him as the enemy:

Met the patron of democrats, Mr Thomas Poole, who smiled and chatted a little. He was on his gray mare, Satan himself cannot be more false and hypocritical … very grand and important, took out his French gold watch and affected much the travelled man, coxcomby and with all the appearance of greatness and liberality he is the most shabby dodging man to deal with I ever met … a selfish vain artful man.

There was undoubtedly a touch of self-importance about Poole. ‘For these opinions I would willingly go to the Tower,’ he once said at a meeting in Nether Stowey. ‘The Tower indeed!’ came from the corner of the room. ‘I should think Ilchester Gaol would do for you.’ And not unlike Joseph Cottle, the Bristol bookseller, Poole was entranced when the brilliant young radical poets turned up in Somerset. He had met Coleridge and Southey in 1794 when they were on a walking tour, scandalising the good people of Stowey by the violence of their principles, claiming that Robespierre was a ministering angel of mercy, sent to slay thousands so that he could save millions. Southey had laid his head on the table in one Poole house and declared that he would rather hear of the death of his own father than the death of Robespierre, a gesture which would have been less effective if his audience had known that Southey’s father was already dead.

The Somerset tanner, concerned for the wellbeing of his people, on the good side of the increasingly polarised political divide, full of admiration and reverence for the genius of the young, also appealed to the poets. They saw in him, with a certain gentlemanly condescension, a version of the ideal man who would later appear in Wordsworth’s lyrics, above all as the good shepherd Michael, ‘stout of heart, and strong of limb’.

It was an idealisation of Poole in which Poole himself was prepared to play his part, arranging for six or seven of his friends to subscribe £40 a year for seven years to save Coleridge from hackwork and encourage him to write the great works that were surely in him.

Poole was the equivalent, as a man, of what the Quantocks could offer as a place. He was an amalgam of the safe and the free, reliable, practical, enfolding but enlarging, no intellectual rival, but radically minded and providing a bower of friendship, a kind of organic rootedness in which liberty and poetry could blossom. ‘Where am I to find rest!’ Coleridge had written to him before coming to live in Stowey, when for a few days it looked as if Poole would be unable to find him a house nearby. The answer Coleridge arrived at was: only when I am with you. ‘I adhere to Stowey,’ he wrote imploringly. Without it, and without him, Coleridge thought he would be ‘afloat on the wide sea unpiloted & unprovisioned’. Poole was the home and harbour Coleridge needed and longed for.

The year in the Quantocks was not a question of a few gentle strolls in a charming corner of England, but setting up a colony of radical hope, ‘a small company of chosen individuals’, in Coleridge’s phrase, embracing more than politics could ever embrace, thinking that with the writing of a poetry that was true to the beatings of the heart, with working in the garden, days spent out on the high tops and evenings in the lush richness of the midsummer combes, some kind of change could be wrought in the soul of England.

This was the cluster of ideas-in-a-place to which Coleridge brought Wordsworth and Dorothy in early July 1797. Their arrival was only one part of his more general gathering of friends and allies. It was not to be a lonely year. He had Poole there already. Soon to come was Charles Lamb, his great and brilliant boyhood friend from his school days at Christ’s Hospital in London. Also walking down from London was a man he knew only by correspondence, John Thelwall, famous across England for his radical lectures, his still more famous treason trial of 1794, at which he had been acquitted, and his continuing harassment and persecution by the spy system of the Home Office and its attendant bullies. There was a chance that Robert Southey, Sara Coleridge’s brother-in-law, would also come, with her sister Edith. Coleridge had broken with Southey, but it was to him that he was continuing to write his most intellectualised of letters. The Wedgwood brothers, the Pinneys, his Bristol publisher John Cottle, his unstable pupil and protégé Charles Lloyd – all were to be swept into the Coleridgean embrace. Nether Stowey in his mind was to be a nest of nightingales, singing for the future.

Just how the Wordsworths, the Coleridges, Lamb, Hartley, Nanny and Mrs Rich were crowded into the tiny house, with the prospect of all these others in the offing, is difficult to imagine. At least there was the outside, the vegetable patch and orchard with the leaning tree, the gate and lane at the back leading to Tom Poole’s house and garden. There Poole had built a rustic summer house made of slabs of oak bark, with a jasmine trained over them, all under the shade of a lime tree – nothing more richly or thickly honey-scented in early summer – and with four big elms ballooning above them. Beyond that were the hills and the combes. The Quantocks beckoned them that July. It scarcely rained, just over an inch in the whole month, with one dry day succeeding another. The thermometer stood above seventy degrees Fahrenheit on more than twenty of those July afternoons, occasionally climbing into the eighties, and with hot nights to follow.

It was a recipe for English summer freedom. Sometimes the walks were solitary, Wordsworth and Dorothy exploring the world Coleridge had brought them to, Coleridge going out on his own, but often all of them went, six or seven of them heading out into the hills. There was nothing inherently odd about this kind of walking. As William Holland repeatedly described, everybody walked, and not only the poor who had no choice. Errand boys did indeed ‘walk from place to place on messages’, and one man walked all the way from London to Over Stowey to get a marriage licence, but gentry neighbours also walked to visit each other, or to have tea, to give people news or to deliver the newspaper whose subscription they shared, up the hill to look at the ships in the Bristol Channel with the spying glass, for picnics, with children to look for birds’ nests, in the dusk or the early morning, or ‘after supper by a fine moonlight’. Husbands and wives, children and young women all went walking on the lanes and paths of the parish.

Walking could be preferable ‘to the jogging of the cart’, or a pleasure in itself: ‘After dinner the young nymphs took a walk … I walked home by the light of the good moon.’ A ‘trudge’ in the snow, or at night with a lantern, or in the rain with an umbrella, were all part of everyday life. In bad weather the women wore pattens, high-soled wooden overshoes to keep the ordinary shoes dry and above the mud, and men heavy boots.

And so, soon after their arrival, the Wordsworths sauntered off on their own. Coleridge had judged them right. Dorothy suddenly expanded into all-enveloping enthusiasm for a country that felt like a mild version of their childhood mountains, even with woods that seemed to match those that had belonged to the Earl of Lonsdale, who had cheated them of their inheritance for so long:

… There is everything here; sea, woods wild as fancy ever painted, brooks clear and pebbly as in Cumberland, villages so romantic; and William and I, in a wander by ourselves, found out a sequestered waterfall in a dell formed by steep hills covered with full-grown timber trees. The woods are as fine as those at Lowther, and the country more romantic; it has the character of the less grand parts of the neighbourhood of the Lakes …

They had rambled as far as a large seventeenth- and eighteenth-century house, Alfoxden, hipped roof, wide cornice, far-gazing windows, in a large park, with seventy head of deer grazing and browsing around it. The sequestered waterfall was in the dell or combe or glen that formed the eastern boundary of the park, with the village of Holford on the far side. It turned out that the house was for rent – its owner, a St Albyn, was a minor, away as an undergraduate at Balliol College, Oxford, and the Wordsworths could have it for £23 a year, taxes included. Tom Poole made the arrangements, and the lease was signed.

‘The house is a large mansion, with furniture enough for a dozen families like ours,’ Dorothy told her childhood friend Mary Hutchinson.

There is a very excellent garden, well stocked with vegetables and fruit. The garden is at the end of the house, and our favourite parlour, as at Racedown, looks that way. In front is a little court, with grass plot, gravel walk, and shrubs; the moss roses were in full beauty a month ago. The front of the house is to the south, but it is screened from the sun by a high hill which rises immediately from it. This hill is beautiful, scattered irregularly and abundantly with trees, and topped with fern, which spreads a considerable way down it. The deer dwell here, and sheep, so that we have a living prospect. From the end of the house we have a view of the sea, over a woody meadow-country; and exactly opposite the window where I now sit is an immense wood, whose round top from this point has exactly the appearance of a mighty dome. In some parts of this wood there is an under grove of hollies which are now very beautiful. In a glen at the bottom of the wood is the waterfall of which I spoke, a quarter of a mile from the house. We are three miles from Stowey, and not two miles from the sea. Wherever we turn we have woods, smooth downs, and valleys with small brooks running down them through green meadows, hardly ever intersected with hedgerows, but scattered over with trees. The hills that cradle these valleys are either covered with fern and bilberries, or oak woods, which are cut for charcoal … Walks extend for miles over the hill tops, the great beauty of which is their wild simplicity: they are perfectly smooth, without rocks. The Tor of Glastonbury is before our eyes during more than half of our walk to Stowey; and in the park wherever we go … it makes a part of our prospect …

Somehow the Wordsworths had brought their gentlemanliness with them, and had stumbled on a handsome pedimented house, filled with old hangings and ‘covered with the round-faced family portraits of the age of George I and II’, not unlike and actually larger than Racedown, with hints of Lonsdale grandeur. The way in which Dorothy described it to her friend feels nearly like an heiress coming into her own. Her language is virtually without the stock Romantic or even pre-Romantic phrases that would have displayed the fashionable attitudes to place. The only hint in these letters that she is not a straightforward member of the landowning classes is her love of the ‘wild simplicity’ of the hill tops. Otherwise it is a land surveyor’s account, allied to a calm and proprietorial description of an elegant landscape seen as the declaration of a well-ordered life and a contented household. The much-admired, sparkle-eyed observer of the slivers and specks of the natural world, the empathiser with the poor and troubled, the poet of the unnoticed and the everyday, seems to have slipped away here under the manners and modes of the gentleman and the squire.

Perhaps one can see in this the Dorothy who was the source of strength and connection in their lives, who sustained her broken brother, the irrigating woman-brook, ‘seen, heard, felt, and caught at every turn’. Audible in that account is ‘the voice of sudden admonition’ with which she recalled Wordsworth to his ‘office upon earth’, his destiny as a poet. Its authority is unmistakable. None of this was coming from Wordsworth himself, and in the months that followed, that ownership of settled beauty was the very opposite of what Wordsworth himself would find here.

Alfoxden – called by Coleridge ‘All the Foxes Den’ and by most people, dully, Alfoxton – remains a beautiful and haunting place. The house is now decrepit, and the park broken and ragged. It is scarcely visited. Unlike Coleridge’s spruced-up cottage in Nether Stowey, no National Trust care is applied to the flaking and rotting surfaces of these buildings. Little wrens play on the cornices and pied wagtails pick through the gravel where the moss roses used to flower. The roof in places is breaking through, and the paint on the doors looks as if it has been peppered with gunshot. The walled garden is abandoned, and the trees lie collapsed and broken where they have fallen, vast twisted and spiralled chestnuts lying riven on the hillside, as if a war had been fought through them.

Broken Park

That very condition, on a thick summer evening, with the leaves darkening in the dusk, the bats flicking and scouting overhead, and the deer rustling their anxious, hidden bodies somewhere up in the bracken, has over the centuries absorbed, ironically enough, a Wordsworthian atmosphere. Now Alfoxden seems more than ever like his place, with an ancient grandeur, poised and beautifully placed between hill and sea, with its own apron of hedge and field spread out in front of it towards the grey waters of the Bristol Channel to the north. Everywhere the atmosphere is of decay and breakage, as if forgotten, a fraying cloth, a place shut up and shuttered, ragwort on the lawns and marsh thistles in ranks in front of the house like ushers at its death. On the upper edges of the park the rim of beech trees stands waiting for the old beast to lie down.

Allow night to fall here, and memory and hauntedness come easing out of the ground, a dusk in which Alfoxden’s half-ruin summons the sense of marginal understanding, of something growing in significance because only half-seen, which is one of Wordsworth’s lasting gifts to the world. It is easy to imagine that he was like this himself in these years, a man glimpsed but never quite grasped, always a suggestion of a resolution in him, making half-gestures, a raised eyebrow, an almost-smile, so that his whole being appeared more latent than present.

His repeated habit in poetry, and perhaps in speech, was to use the double negative. Pleasures were not unwelcome, sounds not unheard, understandings not ungrasped. Even when he feels, for instance, the ‘mild creative breeze’ lifting within him, the very centre of his being as a poet, he calls it ‘a power/that does not come unrecognised’.

Everything hangs there as a suggestion. The wind of poetry is no more than a breath of stirring air, and Wordsworth only half-knows it for what it is. That half-state, a not-unreality, is the condition of his inner life, his duskiness, and now, through neglect, is the very state that Alfoxden has come to. There are no mathematics here; the two negatives do not cancel each other out, or at least in their mutual cancelling leave the ghost of a third term, something which might have been or might yet be. The mild creative breeze is itself an aspect of the tentative, a half-feeling, a stirring of the inner atmosphere that might or might not be the making of poetry. There is no certainty that it is; nor any that it is not. That very hanging in a qualified neutrality, which smells of something and suggests something but isn’t quite the thing itself, is the revelatory thing. It is the simmering of a presence, not the memory of a presence but the promise of a presence which bears the same relationship to the future as a memory does to the past.

Over the smooth, curved carriage drive leading back to the village, buzzards turn in the wind off the sea. A dog barks in Holford Glen, and in response the buzzards catcall over the dying ashwoods. Looking down from the footbridge, the rocks and all the ferns beside them are invisible under the roof of summer leaves. As Alfoxden drops into its felt-lined dark, I stay up and walk along the easy way through the edge of the park. Miles off to the north, the surge of a westerly swell breaks and draws on the stones at East Quantoxhead.

There is the slightest undulation in the surface of the carriageway, an easy coming and going beneath the trunks of the ancient chestnuts. There is no need for light here. This was the way loved by Wordsworth for its continuousness, a zero space whose fluency of form allowed the steady, uninterrupted and murmured composition of his verses as he walked, a place in which his music could hold sway, the body-rhythm of a man who, in one half of his own self-conception, belonged in the park of a fine house, suited to a naturally Miltonic and magisterial frame of mind. Wordsworth had a powerful sense of his own promise, and, in 1797, of his failure to fulfil it. Alfoxden now is a picture of Wordsworth then. What could be more fitted to this great man in trouble than a house in ruins and a park in greater ruins, along whose lightless paths he must make his way to find the greatness he knows is in him?

5

Walking

July and August 1797

Coleridge would not have taken long to urge his friends on their first walk out and up into the hills. This was to be the frame of their time here, an emblematic topography which came to play a central part in shaping the poetry they wrote in the course of the year. The whole pattern of life and work swings around the alternations of out and in, up and back, engaged and removed, obscure and revealed that the Quantocks provide.

That drama and setting was a function of geology. The Quantocks are at least twice as old as the comfortable and rather soft Jurassic and Cretaceous rocks around Racedown in north Dorset. The ridge of the Quantocks, or the Quantock as it is called in Somerset, not plural but a single long hard object, stands out above the wet moors of the Levels to the east of them. That single line is a block on the horizon to the west as you approach from the lowlands, a black bulk in the light of the evening, its ridge-line rising and falling, with the trees of its woods standing out against the last of the light. Most of it is no more than 1,200 feet high, and the whole ridge is only about twelve miles long and four or five miles wide, but it looks and feels more than that, a distinct world, an upland province away from the willow and dairy country below it.

These hills are made almost entirely of Devonian rocks, more than 350 million years old, often dark red or in places copper blue from the mineral dust of the ancient deserts, which have been twisted and uplifted in more than one mountain-building episode since. The result is a hardness and strength that mean they now stand proud of the cowy vales that surround them. This hill is built out of dense, dark and intractable slates and grits, with metals and minerals embedded in them, precisely the rocks the Wordsworths would have known as children in Westmorland.

Far more than Dorset, the Quantocks create the kind of highly figured topography to which the aesthetic needs of these people at this moment could respond. The geological structure of England is such that, almost without exception, the further south and east you go, the newer the rocks and the softer the landscapes. In many of the places Wordsworth had been living, in Cambridge and around London, you will find low-lying meadows and rivers brown with silt. Hardness and antiquity, higher hills and hard running water, high outcrops and the stony beds of streams, are all to be found only to the west and north. This was the shift Coleridge had urged on the Wordsworths late in June 1797, and from then, the year acquired its formative geological structure: friends coming to stay nearly always came from the soft east; whenever any of them wanted or needed to engage with the world of business or work, politics or the theatre, they would also travel east, to Bristol or on to London. But whenever they needed stimulus or adventure, beyond what the Quantocks themselves could provide, they walked west, to hardness, over the high tops and on into the wild woods and rocky valleys of Exmoor and Devon. Again and again in the poetry of this year, the implications of this hard but riven landform make themselves apparent: a clear and distinct difference between empty hill and occupied valley, high tops and buried combes, with the brilliant streams acting as the veins and arteries of the whole body of country.

The lane at the southern end of Stowey, just along from Tom Poole’s house, soon leaves behind the clustered domesticity of the village. The road itself in summer is dry and stony, rimmed with the grey-pink dust of the Quantocks, while a stream, which even in July does not fail, runs down the ditches, the first of the bubbling watercourses that give the Quantocks, for all their southern Englishness, a sense of mountain life. They were what Dorothy loved when she first came here: the ever-present sound of water over stones. And so here, physically and immediately, is the first pair of qualities which make this a stimulating place: orderliness and vitality, a mutually enriching and fertile meeting of the natural and the cultural, Welsh poppies growing in the gravel next to a cottage door.

Jungle Lane

In the height of summer there is a thickness and a richness here too, no northern austerity. Leaves shadow the world. Bindweed is in the hedges and the brambles are in flower. Lady’s bedstraw and mallows grow in the shady damp places under the hedges. The roses overtop the garden walls, up and over them, dropping in long tendrils into the lane. Wood-pigeons hoot and strum in the garden trees, and the meadowsweet bubbles beside the road.

The boundary between the cultivated lowland and the hill is quite sharp, no suburban blurring. A stream runs along the floor of the lane itself. Hazels and field maples arch it over into a green tunnel ‘so overshadow’d, it might seem one bower’, and the sun pushes in there in narrow rods, so that the watery floor is spattered and mapped in leopardskin light.

This is the first slight lift of the hills away from Nether Stowey, but the sensation is not of climbing on to the hill but into it, following the wet shaded path as if into a vein. Even on a hot summer day the damp hangs and clings in there. Big lolling hart’s-tongue ferns, feathery polypody ferns and others more like giant shuttlecocks, with the luxuriant undergrowth of dog’s mercury around them, make a jungled Amazonian lushness beside the stream. A broad-bladed frondy apron of fern spreads over the water. This is an English rainforest, coomby with buttercups and little cranesbills, water dropwort and fat, snaking ivies on the trunks of the trees, the whole place womblike, interior. Beyond the hedges, the sunlit meadows beside the lane are spangled with daisies as if they belonged to another and more obvious world.

Whichever way you climb, whether through the damp combes made by the streams or on the old charcoal burners’ tracks that net the hills on all sides, you soon come to the next element: the Quantock oakwoods, one of the great, scarcely regarded beauties of England. They coat the flanks and thighs of each hill, coppiced every sixteen years or so in the 1780s and 90s, so that each new oak, as it grew, curled towards the light, competing with its neighbour. The result is a wriggling snakepit of a wood, in which the trees weave and twist upwards, blotched with lichen, the dancing stems springing from mossy and ferny groins, sometimes four or five to each stool. Their canopy, thirty or forty feet above the bilberries or whortleberries, creates a mosque-like room in which the green carpet of the berries glimmers for thousands of acres beneath them, lined out in avenues of sun-spotted green, an arcaded temple and shrine to growth and light.

In the early morning, when the leaves are grey with dew, the air in these oakwoods is as cool as a glass of cider. Cloud floats in the tops of the woods like another element, another sphere between you and the blue of the sky. Occasionally a big old pollard oak hangs its branches over the path. This is not wild country, not impressive in the way of grand or famous landscapes – far more intimate than that, and thick with the sensation that Wordsworth came to embrace in the course of this year. In some unused manuscript lines from 1798 he described how, after he had been walking for a long time in a remote and lonely place, away from people,

If, looking round, I have perchance perceived

Some vestiges of human hands, some stir

Of human passion, they to me are sweet

As light at day break or the sudden sound

Of music to a blind man’s ear who sits

Alone & silent in the summer shade.

They are as a creation in my heart …

Those words record the education of a mind, the sudden seeing of what had not been seen before. Man and nature fuse in those places. Human presence is no pollution in these woods, but the means by which a communal, multi-generational beauty has evolved, the co-production of man and the world of which he is a part. This is also part of the great gospel of interfusion of all in all and each in each to which this year is dedicated. When the wind is right, the bells of Holford church reach deep into the air between the trees.

Beyond the woods the world changes again, and the path emerges on to the tops, just above the treeline, or at least into one of the wind-sheltered nooks still surrounded by the wood but open at its upper edge. All above you, hill country: an occasional thorn, abused by storms or grazing mouths, and hung in the sunlight with gossamer threads, standing among the heather and gorse, the scrambled feathers of a young pigeon, a peregrine kill, a pair of buzzards mew-crying over the trees, tormentil in the acid turf.

Ahead, the lit outlines of the open-headed hills, a sun-drenched roof for the world. Over to the north, the Bristol Channel, with its two little islands, and the hazed Welsh mountains beyond them, to the east the milky distance of the low moors of the Somerset Levels, and on the far side the steady line of the Mendips.

It is a place, in that sunshine, to lie down and look: the woods on the lower slopes of these hills, the scatter of big farms and fields beyond them, multicoloured, green and tan, the shadowed hollows and dips in the farmland, the grey-blue plume of a distant bonfire smoking in the sun. Pies and doughnuts of woods dropped across the chequered fields.

Wordsworth loved to remember precisely how ‘in many a walk’, as he wrote later in his notebook, when they had reached this top and

reclined

At midday upon beds of forest moss

Have we to Nature and her impulses

Of our whole being made free gift, – and when

Our trance had left us, oft have we by aid

Of the impressions which it left behind

Looked inward on ourselves, and learn’d, perhaps,

Something of what we are.

The mind and the world were – ‘perhaps’ – part of one substance. To look outward was to look inward. The perceiving self was only the finest of strata buried in that doubly enveloping universe. The inner world was as vast as the outer. All the old impressions were ringing in his heart. Here was a place where the very movement of coming up and out allowed a movement down and in, the geography of the self becoming an inverse mirror of the material and external world.

It was true for Coleridge too. He described in his notebook how, when he forgot a name, only by not thinking of it could he remember it:

Consciousness is given up and all is quiet – when the nerves are asleep, or off their guard – and then the name pops up, makes its way and there it is! Not assisted by any association, but the very contrary – the suspension and sedation of all associations.

Sedation was one of the roots of understanding. Too much noise interfered with the mind’s engagement in the world. Only when you reduced the vibrations coming into your mind, and into your self, could things begin to seem as they were.

Many years later, on a return visit to the Quantocks, but filled with regret for the passing of time, Coleridge lay in reverie in just one such nook on the margins of wood and heath, easing himself back on to the perfect elastic mattress of the heather, but dreaming of love lost and love never to be had.

How warm this woodland wild Recess!

Love surely hath been breathing here;

And this sweet bed of heath, my dear!

Swells up, then sinks with faint caress,

As if to have you yet more near.

Eight springs have flown, since last I lay

On sea-ward Quantock’s heathy hills,

Where quiet sounds from hidden rills

Float here and there, like things astray

And high o’er head the sky-lark shrills.

This is where the wavering wind-songs of the Aeolian harp could soothe and seduce the mind. When the wind was right, a long, continuous and minimal music eased out of it. The sound belonged on empty heights like these – not the buffeting white noise of wind in the ear or in a chimney but something more hidden, tapered, as if the harp were releasing an element that was buried in it, or in the air. Deeper tones come from the heavier strings, along with witchery notes from the others, as if this were dream music or, as Coleridge says, the sound of the world singing.

Again and again, the year was filled with walks that followed this movement, the two poets up ahead, always a few dozen yards ahead, Dorothy following at their heels, always slightly behind. It is the deep psychic structure of the year, repeatedly drawing from these landforms, up from the settlements of the valley, through the combes and the oakwoods, on to the sunlit widths of the wide-ranging tops and then down again, back into the rowan and oakwood, as if into a bath of shade.

Nothing in the walk together would ever have been silent. Talk was the medium in which Coleridge swam. ‘He runs up and down the scale of language,’ Virginia Woolf wrote of him in her notebook,

stretching and suppling prose until it becomes pliable enough and plastic enough to take the most subtle creases of the human mind and heart. But while he disports himself like a great sea monster in his element of words, spouting, snorting, he uses them most often to express the crepitations of his apprehensive susceptibility.

You only have to read Coleridge’s own notebooks to feel that these hill-paths are still crackling with the crepitations of his apprehensive susceptibility. There is one place on the way down, in the little sub-hamlet of Over Stowey, or Upper Stowey as Coleridge called it, where an old well near the church had entranced him. Years later, from a time when he was abroad in Malta and in distress, he remembered gazing into its waters:

The images of the weeds which hung down from its sides, appeared as plants growing up, straight and upright, among the water weeds that really grew from the bottom/& so vivid was the Image, that for some moments & not until after I had disturbed the waters, did I perceive that their roots were not neighbours, & they side-by-side companions. So – even then I said – so are the happy man’s Thoughts and Things –

There, preserved in his memory, is a tiny fragment of Coleridge’s ebullient, ever-referential talk, perhaps to Wordsworth as they were coming down one day off the high tops.

It is his governing vision of the intimate co-existence of everything the mind shapes – the Thoughts – with everything that comes to him through his senses, the Things that seem so solidly present around us. The two are side-by-side companions. Thoughts and things are friends, and this for Coleridge is not a description of any sort of delusion but of happiness.

Intriguingly, Wordsworth had a parallel but different experience, which appears in The Prelude. He too is looking down into weedy water, not at a well but hanging over the side of a slow-moving boat, floating on stillness. The Wordsworth figure,

solacing himself

With such discoveries as his eye can make

Beneath him in the bottom of the deeps,

Sees many beauteous sights – weeds, fishes, flowers,

Grots, pebbles, roots of trees – and fancies more,

Yet often is perplexed and cannot part

The shadow from the substance, rocks and sky,

Mountains and clouds, reflected in the depth

Of the clear flood, from things which there abide

In their true dwelling;

Upper and lower surfaces are interlaced here too, but there is a difference between them. For Coleridge, this twinned condition of the seen and the imagined was an aspect of how things were, the intertwining of sense impressions and the constructions of the mind. For Wordsworth, it was part of how he was, a description of himself, an entangled muddle of what he had been and what he was now. The figure in the boat is Wordsworth’s own self hanging

Incumbent o’er the surface of past time,

his own invigilator, the priest of his own being, wrapped up in the ever-entrancing story of his own evolving self.

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