The Prelude
Wordsworth remembered
The Lake District is a spectacularly beautiful part of the British Isles, especially in my opinion, in autumn.The colours are fabulous, and I enjoyed them enormously this week, despite the record amount of water everywhere, including extensive flooding of the roads. So I’m not surprised that the area inspired the poet William Wordsworth to write some of the best known lines in the English language. And it was a real thrill to visit his home, Dove Cottage, now a memorial to him, with an excellent museum and stunning special exhibition.
William was relatively unknown when, in 1799, he arrived aged 29 and set up house with his beloved sister Dorothy in the modest cottage in Grasmere. She remained with him when he went on to marry his wife Mary, (a childhood friend) and their five children came along. Two of the five sadly died in infancy and this profoundly affected the poet. So deep was the effect of the unremitting grief for his youngest, Catherine, that he was taken aback when he felt a moment of happiness. He turned to share the joy with his ‘heart’s best treasure’ only to remember she was ‘buried in the silent tomb’. That experience inspired Surprised by Joy, published three years after her death.
The two women, Dorothy and Mary, played a pivotal role in his life and work. Dorothy was a thinker, writer and diarist in her own right, and she especially contributed ideas and beautiful language as well as practical support for her more famous brother.
By his own admission William’s writing was ‘mangled and almost illegible’, so both women paintakingly copied his work legibly all by hand with a quill pen in poor light to make it fit to submit. There’s dedication for you! The house today is kept lit by candles and shaded lanterns, as it would have been, and it’s a struggle, even with the benefit of our modern spectacles, to see the tiny print of newspapers or books and diaries in which they recorded their thoughts.
Wordsworth was also a deep and sensitive thinker and, though he was writing three centuries ago, many of his ideas resonate with us today. He calls us to reconnect with nature; to show empathy for others; to nurture our creative imaginations; to live and do good. Throughout his life he wrote a reflective poem about his own experiences and cogitations, a monumental work, The Prelude, which ran to 7,898 lines! It was published three months after his death at the age of 80, by which time his copy-editors (Mary and Dorothy) had inscribed 20,000 lines spread over 5 decades! And it was William who was paranoid about his own eyesight!!
Nowadays this man is revered as one of the greats in English literature – who hasn’t heard of his host of golden daffodils?! – but there was a point in 1807 when reviews of his poems were so savage – ‘nauseating’, ‘dull’, ‘downright raving’, ‘such trash as this’ – that he couldn’t face publishing another volume of poems for 7 years!
Fortunately he overcame the criticism and his name lives on, though his detractors have vanished without trace! Let that be a lesson to all of us who venture to put our thoughts above the parapet.
On that best portion of a good man’s life
His little, nameless, unremembered acts
Of kindness and of love