The Making of Poetry. Adam Nicolson
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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
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