The Making of Poetry: Coleridge, the Wordsworths and Their Year of Marvels

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.