1.
We left London by an afternoon train. I had arranged to meet M below the departure board at Euston Station. Watching crowds step off the escalators and on to the concourse, I thought it miraculous that, in the midst of so many people, I should ever be able to find her-as well as testimony to the strange particularities of desire that it should have been precisely her I needed to find.
We travelled up the spine of England and, as night fell, there were intimations of countryside, though gradually all we could see was our own faces in windows that had turned into long black mirrors. Somewhere above Stoke-on-Trent, I visited the buffet car, sensing once again, on my way through a succession of carriages that swayed as if I were drunk, the excitement caused by the prospect of eating something cooked in a moving train. The timer on the microwave gave off a chunky mechanical sound, like a detonator in an old war film, then rang a dainty bell to signal that it had finished with my hot dog-just as the train went over a level crossing, behind which I could make out the shadow of a group of cows.
We arrived at Oxenholme Station, subtitled 'The Lake District', shortly before nine. Only a few others alighted with us and we walked silently along the platform, our breaths visible in the night chill. Back inside the train, passengers were dozing or reading. The Lake District would, for them, be one stop among many, somewhere to look up from their book for a moment and take in the concrete pots arranged symmetrically along the platform, check the station clock and perhaps let out an uninhibited yawn-before the Glasgow train pulled off again into the darkness and they returned to a new paragraph.
The station was deserted, though it could not always have been thus, for, remarkably, many of the signs were translated into Japanese. We had called from London to rent a car and found it at the end of a parking bay under a street-lamp. The rental company had evidently run out of the small models we had asked for and had delivered instead a large burgundy family saloon, which had a heady new-car smell to it and an immaculate grey carpet, across which the marks of a vacuum cleaner were still visible.
2.
The immediate motives for our journey were personal; but they might also be said to have belonged to a broader historical movement dating back to the second half of the eighteenth century, in which city dwellers began for the first time to travel in great numbers through the countryside in an attempt to restore health to their bodies and, more importantly, harmony to their souls. In 1700, 17 per cent of the population of England and Wales lived in a town; in 1850, it was 50 per cent, by 1900, 75.
We headed north towards the village of Troutbeck, a few miles above Lake Windermere. We had reserved a room at an inn called the Mortal Man. Two narrow beds with stained blankets had been pushed together. The landlord showed us the bathroom, warned us of the high phone charges which he suspected (from our clothes and our hesitant manner at the reception desk) that we would be unable to afford and, as he took his leave, promised us three days of perfect weather and welcomed us to the Lake District.
We tried the television and found news from London, but after a moment switched off and opened the window. There was an owl hooting outside-and we thought of its strange existence, out there in the otherwise silent night.
I had come in part because of a poet. That evening in the room, I read another section of Wordsworth's Prelude. The cover of the paperback was illustrated with a portrait by Benjamin Haydon, which showed Wordsworth severe and aged. M declared him an old toad, and went to have a bath, though later, while standing by the window applying face cream, she recited several lines from a poem whose title she had forgotten, which she said had moved her perhaps more than anything she had ever read:
What though the radiance which was once so bright
Be now for ever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower；
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind
Ode: Intimations of Immortality, X
We went to bed and I tried to read further, though it became hard to concentrate after I found a long blonde hair caught on the headboard that belonged neither to M nor to me, and hinted at the many guests who had stayed in the Mortal Man before us, one of whom was perhaps now on another continent, unaware of having left a part of herself behind. We fell into fitful sleep to the sound of the owl outside.
3.
William Wordsworth was born in 1770 in the small town of Cockermouth, on the northern edge of the Lake District. He spent, in his words, 'half his boyhood in running wild among the Mountains' and, aside from interludes in London and Cambridge and travels around Europe, lived his whole life in the Lake District: first in a modest two-storeyed stone dwelling, Dove Cottage, in the village of Grasmere, and then, as his fame increased, in a more substantial home in nearby Rydal.
And almost every day, he went on a long walk in the mountains or along the lakeshores. He was unbothered by the rain, which, as he admitted, tended to fall in the Lake District 'with a vigour and perseverance that may remind the disappointed traveller of those deluges of rain which fall among the Abyssinian mountains for the annual supply of the Nile'. His acquaintance Thomas de Quincey estimated that Wordsworth had walked 175,000 to 180,000 miles in his life-all the more remarkable, added De Quincey, given his physique: 'For Wordsworth was, upon the whole, not a well-made man. His legs were pointedly condemned by all the female connoisseurs in legs that I ever heard lecture upon the topic.' Sadly, continued De Quincey, 'the total effect of Wordsworth's person was always worst in a state of motion, for, according to the remark I have heard from many country people, “he walked like a cade”-a cade being some sort of insect which advances by an oblique motion'.
It was during his cadeish walks that Wordsworth derived the inspiration for many of his poems, including To a Butterfly, To the Cuckoo, To a Skylark, To the Daisy and To the Small Celandine-poems about natural phenomena which poets had hitherto looked at casually or ritualistically, but which Wordsworth now declared to be the noblest subjects of his craft. On 16 March 1802-according to the journal of his sister Dorothy, a record of her sibling's movements around the Lake District-Wordsworth walked across a bridge at Brothers Water, a placid lake near Patterdale, then sat down to write the following:
The cock is crowing
The stream is flowing
The small birds twitter,
The lake doth glitter …
There's joy in the mountains；
There's life in the fountains;
Small clouds are sailing,
Blue sky prevailing
A few weeks afterwards, the poet found himself moved to write by the beauty of a sparrow's nest:
Look, five blue eggs are gleaming there!
Few visions have I seen more fair,
Nor many prospects of delight
More pleasing than that simple sight!
A need to express joy that he experienced again a few summers later on hearing the sound of a nightingale:
O Nightingale! thou surely art
A creature of a fiery heart
Thou sing'st as if the god of wine
Had help'd thee to a Valentine.
They were not haphazard articulations of pleasure. Behind them lay a well-developed philosophy of nature, which-infusing all of Wordsworth's work-made an original and, in the history of Western thought, hugely influential claim about our requirements for happiness and the origins of our unhappiness. The poet proposed that Nature, which he took to comprise, among other elements, birds, streams, daffodils and sheep, was an indispensable corrective to the psychological damage inflicted by life in the city.
The message met with vicious initial resistance. Lord Byron, reviewing Wordsworth's Poems in Two Volumes in 1807, was bewildered at how a grown man could make such claims on behalf of flowers and animals. 'What will any reader out of the nursery say to such namby-pamby … an imitation of such minstrelsy as soothed our cries in the cradle?' The Edinburgh Review sympathized, declaring Wordsworth's poetry 'a piece of babyish absurdity', and wondered whether it was not a deliberate attempt by the author to turn himself into a laughing stock. 'It is possible that the sight of a garden spade or a sparrow's nest might really have suggested to Wordsworth a train of powerful impressions … but it is certain that to most minds, such associations will always appear forced, strained and unnatural. All the world laughs at Elegiac stanzas to a Sucking-pig, A Hymn on Washing-day, Sonnets to one's Grandmother, or Pindaric odes on Gooseberry-pie; and yet, it seems, it is not easy to convince Mr Wordsworth of this.'
Parodies of the poet's work began to circulate in the literary journals:
When I see a cloud,
I think out loud,
How lovely it is,
To see the sky like this
ran one.
Was it a robin that I saw?
Was it a pigeon or a daw?
ran another.
Wordsworth was stoic. 'Trouble not yourself upon the present reception of these poems,' he advised Lady Beaumont. 'Of what moment is that when compared with what I trust is their destiny, to console the afflicted, to add sunshine to daylight by making the happy happier, to teach the young and the gracious of every age to see, to think and feel, and therefore to become more actively and securely virtuous; this is their office, which I trust they will faithfully perform long after we (that is, all that is mortal of us) are mouldered in our graves.'
He was wrong only about how long it would take. 'Up to 1820, the name of Wordsworth was trampled under foot,' explained De Quincey, 'from 1820 to 1830 it was militant; and from 1830 to 1835 it has been triumphant.' Taste underwent a slow but radical transformation. The reading public gradually ceased guffawing and learnt to be charmed and even recite by heart hymns to butterflies and sonnets on celandines. Wordsworth's poetry attracted tourists to the places that had inspired it. New hotels were opened in Windermere, Rydal and Grasmere. By 1845, it was estimated that there were more tourists in the Lake District than sheep. They prized glimpses of the cadeish creature in his garden in Rydal, and on hillsides and lakeshores sought out the sites whose power he had described in verse. On the death of Southey in 1843, Wordsworth was appointed Poet Laureate. Plans were drawn up by a group of well-wishers in London to have the Lake District renamed Wordsworthshire.
By the time of the poet's death at the age of eighty in 1850 (by which year half of the population of England and Wales was urban), serious critical opinion seemed almost universally sympathetic to his suggestion that regular travel through nature was a necessary antidote to the evils of the city.
4.
Part of the complaint was directed towards the smoke, congestion, poverty and ugliness of cities, but clean-air bills and slum clearance would not by themselves have eradicated Wordsworth's critique. For it was the effect of cities on our souls, rather than on our health, that concerned him.
The poet accused cities of fostering a family of lifedestroying emotions: anxiety about our position in the social hierarchy, envy at the success of others, pride and a desire to shine in the eyes of strangers. City-dwellers had no perspective, he alleged; they were in thrall to what was spoken of in the street or at the dinner table. However well provided for, they had a relentless desire for new things, which they did not genuinely lack and on which happiness did not depend. And in this crowded, anxious sphere, it seemed harder than on an isolated homestead to begin sincere relationships with others. 'One thought baffled my understanding,' wrote Wordsworth of his residence in London, 'how men lived even next-door neighbours, as we say, yet still strangers, and knowing not each other's names.'
Myself afflicted by a few of these ills, I had, several months before my journey to the Lake District, emerged from a gathering held in the centre of London, that 'turbulent world/of men and things' (The Prelude). Walking away from the venue, envious and worried about my position, I found myself deriving unexpected relief from the sight of a vast object overhead which, despite the darkness, I attempted to photograph with a pocket camera-and which served to bring home to me, as rarely before, the redemptive power of natural forces with which so much of Wordsworth's poetry was concerned. The cloud had floated over that part of the city only a few minutes before and, given the strong westerly wind, was not destined to remain above it long. The lights of surrounding offices lent to its edges an almost decadent fluorescent orange glow, making it look like a grave old man bedecked with party decorations, and yet its granite grey centre testified to its origins in the slow interplay of air and sea. Soon it would be over the fields of Essex, then the marshes and oil refineries, before heading out over the mutinous North Sea waves.
Keeping my eyes fixed on the apparition while walking towards the bus stop, I felt my anxieties abate, and turned over in my mind lines that the cadeish poet had once composed in honour of a Welsh valley.
… ［Nature］ can so inform
The mind that is within us, so impress
With quietness and beauty, and so feed
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,
Rash judgements, nor the sneers of selfish men,
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all
The dreary intercourse of daily life,
Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb
Our chearful faith that all which we behold
Is full of blessings.
Lines written a few miles
above Tintern Abbey
5.
In the summer of 1798, Wordsworth and his sister went on a walking holiday along the Wye valley in Wales, where William had a moment of revelation about the power of Nature which was to resonate through his poetry for the rest of his life. It was his second visit to the valley; he had walked along it five years before and in the intervening period he had gone through a succession of unhappy experiences. He had spent time in London, a city he feared, he had altered his political views by reading Godwin, he had transformed his sense of a poet's mission through his friendship with Coleridge and he had travelled across a revolutionary France wrecked by Robespierre's Great Terror.
Back by the Wye, Wordsworth found an elevated spot, sat under a sycamore tree, looked out across the valley and its river, cliffs, hedgerows and forests-and was inspired to write perhaps his greatest poem. At least, 'no poem of mine was composed under circumstances more pleasant for me to remember than this,' he later explained of Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey, which he subtitled On revisiting the banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13,1798, an ode to the restorative powers of nature.
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 …
With tranquil restoration.
The dichotomy of town and country formed a backbone to the poem, the latter repeatedly invoked as a counter to the pernicious influence of the former.
how oft,
In darkness, and amid the many shapes
Of joyless day-light; when the fretful stir
Unprofitable, and the fever of the world,
Have hung upon the beatings of my heart,
How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee
O sylvan Wye! Thou wanderer through the woods,
How often has my spirit turned to thee!
An expression of gratitude that was to recur in The Prelude, where the poet once more acknowledged his debt to Nature for allowing him to dwell in cities without succumbing to the base emotions he held they habitually fostered:
If, mingling with the world, I am content
With my own modest pleasures, and have lived
… removed
From little enmities and low desires,
The gift is yours …
Ye winds and sounding cataracts!'tis yours,
Ye mountains! thine, O Nature!
6.
Why? Why would proximity to a cataract, a mountain or any other part of nature render one less likely to experience 'enmities and low desires' than proximity to crowded streets?
The Lake District offered suggestions. M and I rose early on our first morning and went down to the Mortal Man's breakfast room, which was painted pink and overlooked a luxuriant valley. It was raining heavily, but the landlord assured us, before serving us porridge and informing us that eggs would cost extra, that this was but a passing shower. A tape recorder was playing Peruvian pipe music, interspersed with highlights of Handel's Messiah. Having eaten, we packed a rucksack and drove to the town of Ambleside, where we bought a few items to take with us on a walk: a compass, a waterproof map holder, water, chocolate and some sandwiches.
Little, Ambleside had the bustle of a metropolis. Lorries were noisily unloading their goods outside shops, there were placards everywhere advertising restaurants and hotels, and though it was still early the teashops were full. On racks outside newsagents, the papers carried the latest development in a political scandal in London.
A few miles north-west of the town, in the Great Langdale valley, the atmosphere was transformed. For the first time since arriving in the Lake District, we were in deep countryside, where nature was more in evidence than humans. On either side of the path stood a number of oak trees. Each one grew far from the shadow of its neighbour, in fields so appetizing to sheep as to have been eaten down to a perfect lawn. The oaks were of noble bearing: they did not trail their branches on the ground like willows, nor did their leaves have the dishevelled appearance of certain poplars, which can look from close-up as though they have been awoken in the middle of the night and not had time to fix their hair. Instead they gathered their lower branches tightly under themselves while their upper branches grew in small orderly steps, producing a rich green foliage in an almost perfect circle-like an archetypal tree drawn by a child.
The rain, which continued to fall confidently despite the promises of the landlord, gave us a sense of the mass of the oaks. From under their damp canopy, rain could be heard falling on 40,000 leaves, creating a harmonious pitter-patter, varying in pitch according to whether water dripped on to a large or a small leaf, a high or a low one, one loaded with accumulated water or not. The trees were an image of ordered complexity: the roots patiently drew nutrients from the soil, the capillaries of their trunks sent water twenty-five metres upwards, each branch took enough but not too much for the needs of its own leaves, each leaf contributed to the maintenance of the whole. The trees were an image of patience too, for they would sit out this rainy morning and the many that would follow it without complaint, adjusting themselves to the slow shift of the seasons-showing no ill-temper in a storm, no desire to wander from their spot for an impetuous journey across to another valley; content to keep their many slender fingers deep in the clammy soil, metres from their central stems and far from the tallest leaves which held the rainwater in their palms.
Wordsworth enjoyed sitting beneath oaks, listening to the rain or watching sunbeams fracture across their leaves. What he saw as the patience and dignity of the trees struck him as characteristic of Nature's works, which were to be valued for holding up:
before the mind intoxicate
With present objects, and the busy dance
Of things that pass away, a temperate show
Of objects that endure
Nature would, he proposed, dispose us to seek out in life and in each other, 'Whate'er there is desirable and good'. She was an 'image of right reason' that would temper the crooked impulses of urban life.
To accept even in part Wordsworth's argument may require that we accept a prior principle: that our identities are to a greater or lesser extent malleable; that we change according to whom-and sometimes