That Wondrous Pattern by Kathleen Raine

Author:Kathleen Raine
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Nonfiction
Publisher: Counterpoint
Published: 2017-04-01T04:00:00+00:00

Wordsworth: A Remembered Experience

I was born in 1908 and as I come to write of my childhood find myself thinking of Edwin Muir’s line, ‘My youth to myself grown fabulous’, so different was that long-ago world from that of even country children today. Both my parents were born in 1880; my father a schoolmaster—the son of a coal-miner, of the Industrial Revolution—and my mother the daughter of a Scots country schoolmaster who had moved across the Border and taught a school in the remote moors of Kielder. I remember my grandparents’ house and its garden bright with flowers—now it is under the waters of Kielder reservoir, and the open heather moors dense plantations of conifers. My parents had met as students at the Armstrong College in Newcastle, my father having risen through the old apprenticeship of becoming a ‘pupil teacher’, then taking his B.A. degree, and his M.Litt., for which his thesis was on Wordsworth.

Thus in several ways I grew up in Wordsworth’s world; but my parents experienced that world very differently. My mother had grown up in the wilds among places and people not unlike those Wordsworth had known in adjacent Cumberland and Westmorland and has made for ever a part of the landscape of the English imagination. All my father’s school holidays were spent in Northumberland, and during the First World War I was sent to live with my mother’s family in a place I already loved; and there between the ages of eight and ten I lived the life of a Wordsworthian country child. My schoolfellows were the children of farmers and shepherds living on the farms they had most likely inherited from generations bearing their names, and who would certainly have been at some time to Newcastle but never to London—indeed Edinburgh seemed nearer, culturally speaking, in our Presbyterian world.

My father had never been in this sense a country child and seemed always alien in that world which was to me ‘the real world’, permanent and secure. His Wordsworth, I now surmise, was the Wordsworth of left-wing political idealism, for I remember his often quoting those lines about the French Revolution,

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

But to be young was very Heaven.

My father still lived in the light of that new dawn; and his belief in mankind’s innate goodness, once freed from whoever the ‘tyrants’ may have been, was unshakeable. I have in my own lifetime seen revolutions come and go—in Spain, in Russia—and seen how one day’s glorious freedom becomes the next day’s tyranny, and I find it hard to imagine that Wordsworth’s youthful political enthusiasms can carry conviction any longer. But to many like my father the political idealism of the early nineteenth century—shared by Blake and Shelley as well as by the young Wordsworth—was an inspiration from which no doubt many excellent political reforms followed. But I cannot help but feel that the ‘politics of time’ (to use a phrase of the Irish mystical poet4) is a secondary matter to

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