As you can see from the last few posts, being cooped up inside for nearly 6 months has guided my reading in one specific direction. Being deprived of the great outdoors I am vicariously living through literature. Jonathan Bate's Radical Wordsworth was not just about satiating my need for nature. It also had a lot to do with human connection. Come September, I will celebrate 25 years of friendship with two special people with whom I had the pleasure to visit Grasmere and other places in the Lake District that were fundamental to Wordsworth's poetry.
In Tintern Abbey, the prophet of nature wrote
Though absent long
These forms of beauty have not been to me,
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye;
But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet
Grasmere and the lakes of Lake District have offered similar sweet sensations to my weary mind especially during this pandemic. Back in 1997 my friends and I were 23, carefree, just getting started in our careers and had the opportunity to work and travel in the UK albeit each in a different city. Since then a lot has happened in our lives, both ups and downs and we've pursued our own interests. However, it has remained a steady friendship, a constancy in our lives without the need for instant gratification and frequent validation. We don't care where the other person works, what their title is, what their career progression has been. We are not connected on Facebook, LinkedIn and we don't even talk frequently. As I get older I cherish the friendship even more now than I did in 1995. There are so many reasons that I am grateful to them for, but in the context of this post I am especially grateful that they humored my whims and wishes about the places I wanted to see in the UK and offered me their companionship.
Bate says he wrote this book for "anybody who raises an eyebrow when the poet's name is mentioned and the only word that comes to mind is daffodils." That was surely the case for us when we visited Grasmere back then. Since then I went on to read more of his verses from Lyrical Ballads for my M.A. in English and I am positive the other two have not read much Romantic poetry. Reading Bate's biography was going to be an opportunity for me to once more savor the landscape and the friendship and while it certainly achieved that, it offered me so much more.
Wordsworth often lamented about the fact of growing up. Growing up meant that the unity between the body, the self and the environment gets broken and the only way to recapture that "primal spirit" was through poetry and memory. As I was house cleaning during the pandemic, I chanced upon my daughter's journal from first grade and she had written "I want powers to like everything I already like when I grow up. So that I can pass my thoughts to my children." Here was a 6 year old who seems to know that as adults we forget the simple things we loved as kids and she never wanted to lose that ability!
Wordsworth's poems gave me insights into my daughter's sensibility. If I am Jane Austen's Elinor, my daughter is certainly Marianne and spontaneity and deep feeling are just first nature to her when they are not even remotely third nature to me. Yet, to my credit (even if i say so myself) I have not let my "sense" completely crush my daughter's "sensibility." She loves the outdoors and when I see her seek some "alone time" at the beach or in the woods with her "favorite tree" I am pleased to recognize
In nature and the language of the sense
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being
One of her lamentations is how in high school the emphasis is already on college and she feels she is on a treadmill that she never asked to get on. On top of that the racism, sexism, environmental disaster of contemporary times is crushing children with feelings of guilt even though it is not their fault. Dealing with all this baggage in isolation is worse. Childhood seems to have vanished in the past year. This sense of loss of childhood is one felt acutely by Wordsworth and he writes with hope that "The Child is Father of the Man"
My heart leaps up when I behold
A Rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a Man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
While childhood is hard to recapture, the things that restore childhood can be found in nature and the ability to be excited by a rainbow can remain with one all their life. This is my hope for her and the generations coming after us. They will have wild landscapes available to inspire and restore them.
Bate's biography also introduces us to a few characters who I had never heard of but who were instrumental in his poetical and political development. I specifically wanted to mention two. Helen Maria Williams an abolitionist, an anti-imperialist and a poet of great talent who wrote sensitive nature poetry was one who inspired Wordsworth. The other was an eccentric man called John Stewart known popularly as "walking Stewart" - an 18th century Forrest Gump. He never rode in carriages because "they were both elitist and cruel to horses" and he had "walked halfway around the world from Madras, through Persian, Arabia, Abyssinia, much of North Africa and every country in Europe as far as Russia." Walking Stewart introduced Spinoza's ideas of pantheism and the belief that God can be found in nature to Wordsworth.
The second half of Wordsworth's life was dreary as he deviated from his principles of his youth. His poetry became monotonous and not very inventive and he lived for a really long time unlike other Romantic poets who lived hard and died young and in glory. Bate purposefully presents only a "lightning sketch" of the second half of the poet's life. Despite the gradual decline, he argues that Wordsworth is still relevant "because he reminds us ... to cherish a child's way of looking at the world. Because he wrote with unprecedented sympathy for the poor, the excluded, the broken... Because his elegian poetry can speak to us when we are bereaved...he foresaw that among the consequences of modernity would be not only the alienation of human beings from each other, but also potentially irretrievable damage to the delicate balance between our species and our environment."
These past few weeks of reading Wordsworth has taken me back to my past and also given me glimpses into the future. I remember the day we walked around Ullswater in the summer of 1997. There were no dancing daffodils to greet us, but we had "laughing company". Someday I wish to go back to Grasmere with my husband and daughter and see these landscapes once again
For oft when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the Daffodils.
