The Making of Poetry. Adam Nicolson
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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 William 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