William and Dorothy Wordsworth by Newlyn Lucy;

Author:Newlyn, Lucy;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2013-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

11

Grasmere and Coleorton

‘Not in Utopia, subterraneous Fields,

Or some secreted Island, Heaven knows where,

But in the very world which is the world

Of all of us, the place in which, in the end,

We find our happiness, or not at all.’1

*

Whether we are reading ‘Home at Grasmere’ alongside the Grasmere Journal, or The Prelude alongside Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland, we find the great Homeric motifs of wandering and returning home intertwined with the georgic theme of dwelling in a place of work. Increasingly, the Wordsworths distanced themselves from picturesque aesthetics and romantic tourism, finding their communal identity as writers who belonged to a local landscape and its working community. As William worked intensively on The Prelude in 1804, the perspective he brought to his memories of travelling on the Continent and living in France was that of a patriotic family man, permanently settled in Westmorland. Napoleon’s rise to power had alienated him from the current regime in France. Although he recoiled from the French episode in his life, he did not, like Coleridge, disown his early republicanism; nor did he trivialize his relationship with Annette Vallon. Instead, he tried to understand the role of Continental travel (and his early enthusiasm for the French Revolution) as a formative stage in his developing consciousness. Wandering abroad in search of sublime prospects and Utopian communities, he had neglected the place where ‘in the end | We find our happiness, or not at all’.2 His task as a poet was to make amends.

Ever since receiving the Calvert legacy, William had understood his life as a form of honourable service predicated on the obligation to reciprocate a gift. His poetry was an expression of thanksgiving to the Lake District for fostering him in childhood and later providing him with a permanent home. If he wasted his talent, he would be, as he put it in January 1804, ‘like a false steward who hath much received|And renders nothing back’.3 The biblical word ‘steward’ (suggesting the parable of the talents in Matthew’s Gospel) indicates how seriously he took his gift. The Prelude traces his education in spiritual terms, as a journey of error and self-recovery which leads eventually homewards. Ravished though he had been by the Alps as a young man, Book VI of his autobiographical epic gives less prominence to the sublimity of Mont Blanc, ‘a soulless image on the eye’, than to a peaceful field in the Vale of Chamonix:

There small birds warble from the leafy trees,

The Eagle soareth in the element;

There doth the Reaper bind the yellow sheaf,

The Maiden spread the haycock in the sun…

(VI, ll. 462–5)

This harvesting scene—reminiscent of one of Bewick’s georgic vignettes—could equally well be set in the Trossachs, or indeed in Grasmere. The pair of fellow-workers, one of each sex, might be viewed as an apposite emblem for William and Dorothy’s cooperative labour. In The Prelude’s overall structure the vignette signifies gratitude for the diurnal rhythms of rural life, making recompense for the barrenness of Alpine mountains and reconciling the poet to ‘realities’.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.