Читать книгу The Making of Poetry: Coleridge, the Wordsworths and Their Year of Marvels - Adam Nicolson - Страница 9

June 1797

Early in June 1797, Coleridge was walking south through the lanes of Somerset and Dorset to visit Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy. I walked with him, the same lanes, the same air, absorbed in his frame of mind, my first embedding.

He was in the full flood of existence, bubbling and boiling with its possibilities and beauties, its conundrums and agonies, ensnared in ‘the quick-set hedge of embarrassment’ – money troubles always meant that ‘whichever way I turn a thorn runs into me’ – but ever alive to all that life could offer.

June in the west of England is frothing into colour and show: cow parsley and foxgloves, dark red campions mixed in with the alkanet and the nettles. The bees visiting each dangled foxglove hood in turn, as if turning in at a row of shops, pausing at each entrance, hesitating on the lip and then moving inside. The hawthorns are still clotted with blossom, the air double-creamy for yards around them. The elders are in bloom, their disk-like flower-heads held out into the roadway, dinner plates on the fingertips of an upturned hand. The first of the hay is being made in the paddocks and meadows, the swathes cut and laid across the buttercup hills. Bees in the brambles, honeysuckle in the hedges, the apple trees still just in blossom. Sprinkles of stitchwort. Every morning with a gloss on it, brushed and burnished.

The sociable time

His mind is full of starlings

A few years later Coleridge told a friend exactly how he felt when he found himself steaming along an inviting road like this, less a single man than a swarm of living things, animate nature itself, his mind as alive and mobile and endlessly self-reshaping as a concatenation of starlings oscillating and refiguring around his head. It was on the road like this, he told Tom Wedgwood, that

my spirit courses, drives, and eddies, like a Leaf in Autumn; a wild activity, of thoughts, imaginations, feelings, and impulses of motion, rises up from within me; a sort of bottom-wind, that blows to no point of the compass, comes from I know not whence, but agitates the whole of me; my whole being is filled with waves that roll and stumble, one this way, and one that way, like things that have no common master … Life seems to me then a universal spirit, that neither has, nor can have, an opposite. ‘God is everywhere,’ I have exclaimed, ‘and works everywhere, and where is there room for death?’

Coleridge, aged twenty-four, slightly fat – his friends called him ‘pursy’ – but strong, quite capable of forty miles between a summer dawn and dusk, or more than seventy miles over two days, had been on the road for three days, feeling ‘almost shillingless’ and chewing over his desperate need for cash. He had just come from seeing Joseph Cottle, his publisher in Bristol. Coleridge needed him for his money, and Cottle had offered ‘to buy an unlimited number of verses’. Cottle had ambitions as a poet himself: ‘The scatter’d cots/Sprinkling the vallies round, most gaily look./The very trees wave concord …’ It was an unequal relationship. Coleridge could flatter him when he needed to – ‘My dear Cottle’ – and just as easily dismiss him: ‘It is not impossible,’ he signed off one letter to this idealistic, helpful and generous bookseller-publisher, who did his best to promote the early careers of Coleridge, Southey and Wordsworth, ‘that in the course of two or three months I may see you.’

Now, though, Coleridge had shaken him out of his hair and the dust of Bristol from his feet, and was hungrily en route to the man he wanted to meet. He had given a sermon at the Unitarian chapel in Bridgwater, which ‘most of the better people in the town’ had attended, and the following day breakfasted with a much-adored minister in Taunton – ‘the more I see of that man, the more I love him’. The congregation in Bridgwater had admired his sermon, but was that right? Was admiration the reaction a sermon should evoke? He had ‘endeavoured to awaken a Zeal for Christianity by shewing the contemptibleness & evil of lukewarmness’, but even as those words came to him, he must have laughed. Lukewarmness was not a Coleridgean quality. He had a predilection for the extreme. Put him on a public platform and Coleridge would appear ‘like a comet or a meteor in our horizon’. He usually wrote his lectures or sermons in advance, but more often than not

against [my] better interests [I] was carried away with an ebullient Fancy, a flowing Utterance, a light and dancing Heart, & a disposition to catch fire by the very rapidity of my own motion, & to speak vehemently from mere verbal associations.

Now he was bowling down the summer lanes to meet Wordsworth. They had been corresponding for eighteen months, and Coleridge already admired him. He knew him as a poet, had met him in Bristol, and they had briefly stayed together in Somerset. He had quoted him in a poem of his own, and been quoted by Wordsworth in return. Coleridge already thought that Wordsworth was the greatest of men and ‘the best poet of the age’.

South Somerset and Dorset looked then, as they do now in midsummer, like southern comfort, with big, gentle, ten-mile views, the hills coming to well-coiffed peaks, rolled and tufted, bobbled with woods. But there was an illusion at work. These southern counties in the late 1790s were a pit of desperation, one of the poorest places in England. Anyone alive to political or human realities would be enraged by what they saw. Harvests had been bad. Long-term malnutrition kept the average height of the poor under five foot. The diet was ruinously thin: broth made of flour and onions and water for breakfast, meat maybe twice a week, otherwise the relentless repetition of bread and cheese. Bullock’s cheek was sometimes bought to flavour the broth. Potatoes were mashed with fat taken from that broth, and sometimes with salt alone.

In the evenings of early June, as the long days of the hay harvest made their demands on this underfed workforce, the labourers, watched by the diary-keeping gentry, were driven to the limits of exhaustion. William Holland, vicar of Over Stowey in Somerset, observed William Perrott, his aged parish clerk, always known as ‘Mr Amen’, struggling with the haymaking. He

looked like a hunted hare towards the end of the day, very stiff, could hardly move along, with his neck stretched out and his eyes hollowed into his head.

Mr Amen and two others had mown three and a half acres in the day, scything five tons of grass. Holland gave them ‘drink and some victuals, though the last not in the agreement’.

It was a world of brutal inequality. Your average high gentry family in the 1790s might be living off an income of £4,000 or more. There was scarcely any tax: Land Tax, Window Tax and Carriage Tax might add up to no more than £30 out of that £4,000. Local rates, to pay for the poorhouses in towns and villages, were levied, but came to only £10 extra per gentry family a year. Gifts were made to charity, to teach poor children or for the local infirmary, but the rich almost never gave away more than 1 per cent of their annual income.

Among the poor, general life expectancy was under forty. More than half of all babies born did not live beyond childhood. ‘Bad teeth, skin diseases, sores, bronchitis and rheumatism were rampant. Diagnosis was more by the eye than the touch.’ Most treatments were folk remedies in the form of leaves, roots, bark, spices and powders, and most were useless. There was no need for the poets to imagine or devise instances of human suffering. The wrongness of the social, economic and political system in England was apparent at every turn of every lane.

Coleridge, his person perhaps a little ‘slovenly’, as certain upright citizens had judged, with his stockings dirty and his hair uncombed, was walking through a country in crisis. New commercial capital coming into rural England meant that the landscape of small yeoman farms, which had been there for at least a thousand years, was being erased. What had been a class of independent farming families was now thrown back on work as servants, as piece workers in the woollen mills or as labourers on farms they had once called their own. By the late 1790s, Durweston near Blandford in Dorset, where there had been thirty or even forty smallholdings in 1775, was now concentrated into two large farms. The prevailing spirit among the dispossessed was unadulterated despair. Sir Frederic Morton Eden, the pioneering student of poverty in rural England, wrote of the Dorset poor in 1796 that the ex-yeoman families were ‘regardless of futurity’. It is a resonant phrase, which would not have been out of place in one of Wordsworth’s poems. Most of rural England was in a state of suspension, threatened by life without ambition or hope. The bonds of rural society had been broken, and this new class of the poor ‘spend their little wages as they receive them, without reserving a provision for old age’.

You need to shed any sense of Arcadian wellbeing. Britain was at war with France, press gangs were roaming the country to find men for the navy, informers were everywhere, and the Home Office files were bulging with letters from all corners, reporting on possible and known suspects. Prices were rising, and the country was full of maimed soldiers and desperate widows. Fences were often stolen for firewood. If you owned a cow and kept it in a field, you could expect it to have been milked by the hungry overnight. Hayricks by the road were regularly ‘plucked’ by the poor wanting to feed their own animals. Anyone growing peas would find them ‘swarming with the workhouse children’ in the weeks when the pods ripened. The dark, sunburned faces of the people were creased into premature old age. For meat they occasionally ate badgers, or the ‘Carrion Beef’ of a cow that had died in calving. The Reverend Holland, recording his parish visits in his journal, described how he called on a woman ‘in a most desperate way with a broken leg. She was glad to see me, and would crawl to the door.’ Otherwise, he sent his wife on the necessary visits. She

walked as far as the poor sick girl, who is indeed in a most deplorable state. I am advised not to go in to her as she is in a kind of putrid state – and indeed my wife I believe does not go in, but we send her something every day.

For all these and other outrages, for all his own anxieties, affected by toothache and neuralgia, by hideous dreams and pervasive worry, Coleridge was always able to dance and balloon into unbridled delight at the beauties of existence. Many years later, thinking of this wonderful summer, he wrote a short and Blake-like poem, a spontaneous aria celebrating the rich simplicity of friendship as ‘a shelt’ring tree’, and all the joys

that came down shower-like,

Of Beauty, Truth and Liberty,

When I was young, ere I was old!

The ideal of friendship hovers over this whole story as its subtle and fickle if ministering angel, but it is not Coleridge’s aria as much as his description of how it came to him that opens the door on to the form and habits of his mind in 1797. The poem was ‘an air’, he wrote, remembering the year of his youth in Somerset,

that whizzed δία ẻνκέφαλου [dhia enkephalou] (right across the diameter of my Brain) exactly like a Hummel Bee … close by my ear, at once sharp and burry, right over the summit of Quantock at earliest Dawn just between the Nightingale that I stopt to hear in the Copse at the foot of Quantock, and the first Sky-Lark that was a Song-Fountain, dashing up and sparkling to the Ear’s eye, in full column, or ornamented shaft of sound in the order of Gothic Extravaganza, out of sight, over the Cornfields on the Descent of the Mountain on the other side – out of sight, tho twice I beheld its mute shoot downward in the sunshine like a falling star of silver.

It is a paragraph that describes quickness but must be read slowly, the trace of Coleridge’s mind in the process of thinking: a bumblebee shooting past his ear half a lifetime before, holding the space between nightingale and skylark, whose song is now in his memory like a mountain stream in the eye of the ear (!), then becoming a high, rippling, barley-twist column of knobbled medieval beauty, but invisible, the bird itself disappearing into the wide lit spaces of the sky, but its mute, its droppings, gliding out of that ecstatic empyrean with the brilliance and glitter of a streaking meteor, a blob of mercury hurtling from the blue. Could there ever be inconsistency in a mind that thought like this? In which such potent synaesthesiac category-shifts dissolved all boundaries of time and space? In which inconsistency felt like the pulse of life?

I know this stretch of country well. I spent most of my twenties on foot, disenchanted with the world of cities. Paying for myself by writing about it in newspapers and magazines, I walked thousands of miles here in England, the same in France, and then in Europe, in Greece and Italy, not in pursuit of anything in particular except perhaps the reassurance of being able to engage with the physical world day after day, in fog and rain and snow, in the burnishing sunshine, usually alone, sleeping out in a small tent or in mountain bothies or in Greece inside the flea-ridden chapels. I was merely doing what Wordsworth and Coleridge, by some subterranean routes, flowing through the thousands of capillaries in Western culture, had taught me to do. All the years of education seemed less important than this. I once walked sixty miles in twenty hours across the Cotentin in northern France, most of the day and then all night, with a friend, an Anglo-Saxon scholar who had become a soldier, and who Coleridge-like for mile after mile didn’t draw breath. We began at Cherbourg, had dinner in Briquebec, coq au vin and a bottle of wine. Had I read Alcuin’s letters? Should he learn Farsi? What effect would living in a granite world like the Cotentin have on your mind, on your expectations of the solidity of things? Every hour or so we smoked a cigarette, leaning against one of those granite walls, sitting on the verge. The sun rose on the Normandy beaches and we swam in the golden, blue-eyed surf.

What is it about walking for days on end? Partly it is the love of self-reliance, of not needing to be dependent on anything or anyone. It is psychically naked, with the curious effect that this self-reliance seems to make your own skin more permeable. Alone on foot, not in any great heroic landscapes – these are not high mountain singular mist-visions – but in just such a place as the Somerset Levels, where the knitted ordinariness of everyday life forms the texture of the landscape through which you move – the small farms, the stalled animals, the life of the hedges – you become absorbent, inseparable from the world around you. Walking in that way is a dissolution of the self, not a magnification of it, a release from burdens, in which all you have to do is walk and be, as plainly existent as grass growing, continuous with everything that is.

The great land-artist Richard Long was my hero, and I wrote to him, wanting to talk about his absorption in the walked line, but he replied courteously by letter to say that there was nothing much we could discuss that he or I didn’t already know. And I wondered then if Romanticism, to which this habit of being was clearly the heir, alone out on the road, scarcely communicative with anyone except the self, was little but a form of loneliness, and of legitimising loneliness by being alone.

I spent one of those summers in the Levels, dropping into just the relationship with the country that Coleridge and Wordsworth had invented here two centuries before, at exactly their age, in my mid-twenties. One long afternoon remains in my memory when the water in the summer Levels, as always, was penned up in the rhynes that divide the low, damp fields, making wet fences between them.

Each rhyne shelters a particular world of butterbur or kingcup, water-mint or a flashy wedding show of flag-irises. If you sit on the bank, the high water in the field soaks up into the cloth of your trousers, so that the invitation to swim, to move over from watery peat to peaty water, is irresistible. Slowly that afternoon I lowered my body into the blood-warm cider-soup, crusty with frog-bit and duckweed, with seeds and reed shells. My feet were in the half-mud of the rhyne floor, a soft half-substance as if I were sinking into the folds of a brain. The arrowhead and bulrushes quivered in my wash and away down the rhyne – or so I always imagined – the eels released their bubbles as they shifted away from the disturbance.

This was embeddedness. The breadth of the water grows as you come near it to a generous private width, lobed into by the irises and the reeds. The air is warm and heady. Away down the rhyne a swan claps its wings. The meadows riffle in the wind. Heat and vapour wobble in the air above them. Everything hangs in suspension, and your skin turns a golden unnatural brown in the whisky water. Three hundred and fifty million years ago all life was water-life, and to float in a summer rhyne seemed then like a return to ancientness, to the deepest possible co-presence with the earth.

That idea – that the contented life was the earth-connected life, even that goodness was embeddedness – had its roots in the 1790s, perhaps drawing on what Wordsworth and Coleridge had read of Rousseau, or perhaps inheriting from him as I had inherited from them. Co-presence with the natural world, a closeness that was inaccessible in what Coleridge always described as the ‘dim’ light of the city – the persistent coal smog of eighteenth-century London – was somehow a release into a form of wellbeing which normal political, commercial, professional or even educational life would not only fail to approach but would actually disrupt and destroy. It is a powerful connection to make: love of nature as the route both to a love of truth and to a love of man.

No room in the world was closed to Coleridge. As he said to a friend, ‘I hate the word but.’ Every connection needed to be an and. Every corridor and every chamber branching off it was available to the roaming, skipping investigations of his mind, not ponderous but almost gravity-free, and in each store and warehouse to which he pushed open the door he found lying in wait for him caves of beauty and significance.

He walked as he talked, never pursuing a single line direct, but famously moving from one side of the lane or the path to another so that his companion would always have to shift to accommodate him. His mode was multiple but not anarchic. He could not put up with nonsense, and consistently searched for systematic connections across the whole width of what he had to know. That was the essence of his life: a never-ending appetite for all that was and had been, struggling with the need to bring it into a single frame of understanding.

Any talk of mere personality he detested: there was more to wisdom than the idiosyncrasies of the individual. Nor did he live in an unbroken morning of bland optimism. Excitement and despondency alternated within him. And he knew of his own failings. Forgive me, he would remark to his listeners, if sometimes you hear in what I say a verb orphaned of its subjective noun or a subjective noun widowed of its verb. He could get lost in his paragraphs like a man in a thicket. His relationship to knowledge was so hungry that knowledge itself came to live in his mind as an infinite sequence of overlapping and self-generating circles, in which no understanding of one circle could be complete without an understanding of its neighbour, an unending progression of unfolding spheres, like the universes that expand from the black holes each one contains, a multiverse strung out across space and time. It is little wonder that even his great and encompassing mind eventually faded under the strain of the challenge.

The energy, if undeniable, was fervid and troubled, drawing into itself at different times schemes for everything: a book on the modern Latin poets, an Epic Poem on the Origin of Evil, something on William Godwin, an Opera, a Liturgy, a Tragedy, editions of English eighteenth-century poets, a book on Milton, on the Greek tragedians, on the technicalities of scansion, on the laws upon wrecks, a poem in the style of Dante on Thor, on his hero the philosopher David Hartley, on the obscurities of Behmen, Helmont, Swedenborg, Philo Judaeus, Porphyry, Plotinus, Platypus, Mesmer, an address to Poverty, on the art of prolonging life – by getting up in the morning, an Ode to a Looking Glass, hymns to the Sun, the Moon and the Elements, an Ode to Southey, an Ode to a Moth, a history of night, or of privacy, or of silence, or the self.

For I am now busy on the subject, and shall in a very few weeks go to Press with a volume on the prose writings of Hall, Milton and Taylor; and shall immediately follow it up with an Essay on the writings of Dr. Johnson and Gibbon. And in these two volumes I flatter myself I shall present a fair History of English Prose … I have since my twentieth year meditated an heroic poem on the Siege of Jerusalem by Titus. This is the Pride and the Stronghold of my Hope. But I never think of it except in my best moods.

It was a fountain of being, in which the pressure was always ready to flow, no urging needed. ‘My heart seraglios a whole host of joys,’ he wrote in his notebook, a new verb for the promiscuity of knowledge and happiness.

He knew too, in a way that was profoundly different from Wordsworth, that the endless liquidity of his self-conception, the flux and reflux of his mind, the stream of the organism called Coleridge, was the lens through which he perceived the world. He thought he had ‘a smack of Hamlet myself’, as a figure who partly observed and partly created the world around him. Hamlet’s thoughts, Coleridge said in his lectures on Shakespeare, ‘and the images of his fancy, are far more vivid than his actual perceptions, and his very perceptions, instantly passing through the medium of his contemplations, acquire, as they pass, a form and a colour not naturally their own’. What was within him imposed itself on what he saw. ‘All actual objects are faint and dead to him.’

He was aware that his perceptions of the outward world were so shaped by what he already knew and remembered that when, for example, he saw the moon, he did not see a moon but instead experienced ‘the dim awakening of a forgotten or hidden truth of my inner nature’. A nightingale’s song, or the sound of a stream as it fell and slid over the rocks in its bed, or the frost creeping over the roofs of the village, or the swifts screech-screaming in the streets of Nether Stowey, or Stowey’s own flowing gutter, or a cockerel in a farmyard holding its tattered tail aloft: all of these phenomena seemed to be aspects of himself. Anything his eye saw was ‘supported by the images of memory flowing in on the impulses of immediate impression’. Nothing was uninflected by what he knew, trying to find a steady path through the jangling crowd of objects vibrating in his brain.

He could be teased. He knew he was ‘a thought-bewilder’d man’, and he knew he wasn’t like the man who had once been his best friend, the poet Robert Southey. Southey, although undoubtedly capable of great and empathetic poetry, had an austerity and a self-preservative strictness about him. Coleridge had called him ‘a man of perpendicular Virtue … enlightened and unluxurious’. But those Roman virtues were accompanied by a deep self-regard. Southey was neat, clever, handsome, conceited, ‘a coxcomb’ in Wordsworth’s eyes, well-mannered and well-ordered, a man who, Coleridge thought, had surrendered his idealism – they had planned to set up a Utopian community together in America – to a rational and rather mean self-interest. In their bruising and final argument in 1795, when Southey had decided to abandon any communitarian plans, Coleridge had told him, ‘You are lost to me, because you are lost to Virtue.’ Southey was someone, as Coleridge wrote later, who had ‘the power of saying one thing at a time’. Can you imagine, one thing at a time! The sterility of it!

Coleridge knew he was not like that but instead ‘a Surinam toad’, a creature which has the habit of embedding her eggs in pouches set in the skin of her back. Up to a hundred of them can grow there, developing into little toadlets that, when the time comes, jump out of their nests, waving their tiny hands as they emerge and drop off their mother into the roadway, scattering around her like the pips from a pomegranate as she continues on her way through life.

That is the beautiful South American amphibian walking down the road to the Wordsworths on the afternoon of 4 or 5 June 1797 – the exact date is unclear – a man who investigates everything and strews and sprinkles his own progeny around him, a king with guineas at his own coronation, a fountain of largesse, the volcano of ideas. He knew of course how he did not conform to the required ideal of manly self-containment, and that he spawned plans like a herring, but he recognised there was beauty in that. Orderliness is no more than a narrowing funnel through which to experience the world. Every step an arrival is the walker’s credo; there can be no restrictive plot or narrative that remains true. That is the source of Coleridgean wonder. What happens happens, looseness is all and absorbency beauty. The good man blesses everything unawares.

‘Southey once said to me,’ Coleridge wrote to his son Hartley in 1820,

You are nosing every nettle along the Hedge, while the Greyhound (meaning himself, I presume) wants only to get to sight of the Hare, & FLASH! – strait as a line! – he has it in his mouth! –

Coleridge thought that the kind of remark a cannibal would make to an anatomist as he watched him dissect a body, commenting on the time the doctor was taking to prepare his dinner. Must a man wait a whole day before he is allowed to eat? But it was the journey Coleridge valued as much as the arrival.

The fact is – I do not care two-pence for the Hare; but I value most highly the excellencies of scent, patience, discrimination, free Activity; and find a Hare in every Nettle I make myself acquainted with.

That June afternoon, Coleridge, with a mind full of every hare in every nettle he had passed on the way, arrived at Racedown, the house in Dorset where the Wordsworths were living. Coleridge famously did not come down the path that led from the turnpike, but across the field, diagonally, over a gate in the corner, and bounding through the corn to the garden where Wordsworth brother and sister were working.

He comes like a comet to their door

It is rather a busy road now, with cars coming fast around blind corners, but Coleridge’s gate is still there, if almost never used nowadays, sagging on its hinges and half-buried in the strands of a hawthorn hedge. Through its straggling opening, one can look down at the house the Wordsworths were living in. There is no access for modern pilgrims, but this is what I imagine: Coleridge bursting down the slope where the corncrakes had been croaking, as they had been all summer, across the green corn that the farmer Joseph Gill had yet to cut or get the men to cut for him. Each blue-green spear standing in that field blazingly alive. The poet’s long leaping footsteps, looping up and over and into the corn, his legs swathed in it and breaking through it, with his bag on his hip swinging up and out at each extended pace, leaving a dragged wake of stems behind him, breaking what had been the perfection of that field, so that afterwards, that evening, looking up at the way by which he had arrived, his mark was there on the country like the tail of a comet or the track of a meteor or the blunderings of a dog in the corn.

The house itself was the opposite of everything Coleridge brought to it. It was a gentleman’s residence, a cliff of brick and grey stucco, sash windows, symmetry, multi-flue chimneys, outhouses, red stretchers with black headers laid in diaper-diamonds across its surface. ‘An excellent house’, Wordsworth called it to a friend; ‘a very good house, and in a pleasant situation’, his sister said. This was no poet’s cottage, and Coleridge casually referred to it in a letter to Cottle as ‘the mansion of our friend Wordsworth’. A tight parapeted formality confronted the visitor. There were two parlours, one with a fine Axminster carpet, one with an oil cloth on the floor, a kitchen and scullery, a pantry, a servants’ hall and a butler’s pantry. Above, four excellent bedchambers looked out over the willows and alders of the valley below the house, each chamber with a closet. There were four further bedchambers on the floor above.

Furnishings were not lacking: mahogany chairs and table, a tea chest and a reading stand, two bookcases filled with the classics and works of history and theology. There was a leather sofa, a pier glass in a gilded frame, a pianoforte, two blue and white Delft flower stands, a well-furnished hearth and a dinner service in Queen’s Ware. Linen sheets were provided, and Betty Daly, at one and a half guineas a year, plus two shillings a week when the gentlemen were in residence, could come in to air and clean the house and do the laundry. Peggy Marsh worked as her maid. Wineglasses, tumblers and decanters could be provided, but these were all to be returned to Joseph Gill, the manager of house, farm and adjoining brickyard, when not required. A picture of Leda, naked with swan, in a gilt frame, belonging to the owners of the house, the Pinneys of Bristol, slave-owning plantation landlords and sugar-traders, was not required by the Wordsworths, and had been packed up and sent away.

It seems in retrospect the most unlikely situation for a man on the lip of revolution, but beneath the surface there is a more complex set of social and emotional conditions in play.

Wordsworth, aged twenty-seven, and his sister Dorothy, a year and a half younger, are borrowing, not renting, the house. They cannot afford the rent, and it has been lent to them by two young radical Bristol friends, the Pinneys, who have not told their far-from-radical father that they have lent out his house for nothing. The Wordsworths are camping here, happy to find a temporary perch in their peripatetic and impoverished life. They are living – or meant to be living – on the proceeds of a legacy which a young friend of Wordsworth had left to him when he died two years earlier. Wordsworth has in turn lent the money out to two other London friends who are meant to be paying him interest – at a handsome 10 per cent a year – but who regularly fail to come up with the payments or are late in doing so. For pin money Dorothy is now making shirts for her brother Richard, a London lawyer, cutting and sewing the linen from a huge bolt delivered to the house, for which she is also hemming sheets.

The Wordsworths in their gentleman’s house have to borrow money from Joseph Gill, the farmer (himself a cousin of the Pinneys, but drunk and disintegrated after a life in the Caribbean), and are given coal during the winter by other neighbours. There is meant to be a gardener, but he is ‘saucy’ and won’t do what either Wordsworth or Gill asks him, so Wordsworth does some of the gardening himself, uprooting hedges, planting potatoes and picking beans. He is, rather to his sister’s surprise, ‘dextrous with a spade’. She hires a boy to mow the lawns. Like the rural poor around them, they eat only vegetables and broth, and drink tea.

‘I have lately been living upon air and the essence of carrots cabbages turnips and other esculent vegetables, not excluding parsley the product of my garden,’ Wordsworth writes to a friend. They buy the worst of the meat at sixpence a pound from a butcher who comes with his cart from Crewkerne, and must depend for their clothes on the cast-offs from Richard in London. At times the whole household falls ill with coughs and colds. They walk everywhere, and the house has a ‘perambulator’, a measuring wheel which can clock off the distances along the road, although, as Wordsworth notes carefully in the inventory, its handle was already broken on their arrival. When the young Pinneys come from time to time, a moneyed interlude intervenes, during which Wordsworth goes shooting and hare-coursing with them and there is wine and meat and gravy, but when the Pinneys go back to Bristol, the austerity returns. Wordsworth must ask Gill to borrow household equipment, one tumbler or four sheets of paper at a time, and Gill carefully records each request in his diary.

Behind this there is a deeper personal history, hinged precisely to the gap between poverty and gentility. The Wordsworths’ father had been law agent to Sir James Lowther, a great landowner in Westmorland. John Wordsworth was a power in the land himself, a coroner worth some £10,000 when he died, living with silver coffee pots and handsome watches, a life lubricated with good port and madeira. He had brought up his children in the most handsome of houses in Cockermouth, with a beautiful garden at the back along whose boundary the River Derwent ran, and the sound of whose water came in through the windows of the bedrooms. But both Wordsworth parents had died when the children were young, the mother of pneumonia in March 1778, when William was seven, their father of a dropsy after spending a night out, lost on the winter fells, five years later. With his father’s death, their world collapsed. Sir James Lowther, soon to be the Earl of Lonsdale, owed John Wordsworth £4,625, but for years the Lonsdale estate refused to pay over the money. The key to the house the Wordsworths had lived in was surrendered to the Lonsdale agent, and the children were dispersed among their relatives, where they were treated as poor relations, humiliated and patronised by the servants and made to feel ashamed of who they were. ‘How we are squandered abroad!’ Dorothy had written of these years.

In 1787 Wordsworth was sent to Cambridge, and encouraged by those relations to think of a career in the Church. But at Cambridge, while ferociously aware of his own great gifts, he had refused to engage with the route required by a conventional career, and had been ‘an idler among academic bowers’. The great emotional and intellectual experience of his time as an undergraduate was not at Cambridge itself, but on a heroic three-thousand-mile walk in the summer and autumn of 1790 through France in the first glow of its revolutionary fever, to Switzerland and the epic landscapes of the Alps. France then was ‘standing on the top of golden hours/And human nature seeming born again’.

After he had left university, with no good degree, he went to London, directionless and unfocused, unable to commit to any life in the Church, the law, university, politics or commerce. He felt ‘rotted’:

my life became

A floating island, an amphibious thing

Unsound, of spungy texture.

But the scent of liberty was coming across the Channel. A decade earlier, the Americans had cast themselves free. Now an ancient European monarchy was heading for a rational, liberated future. Richard Price, a suddenly famous dissenting minister-turned-lecturer, was drawing vast crowds to his London talks. ‘A general amendment’, he told his excited audience, was beginning in human affairs:

the dominion of kings [is] changed for the dominion of laws, and the dominion of priests giving way to the dominion of reason and conscience. Be encouraged, all ye friends of freedom, and writers in its defence!

Once again, Wordsworth was drawn to France, not only to escape the urgings of his relatives, who had in mind a rural curacy, but to taste and know the sources of the future. This time he went to the Loire valley, where, even as the massacres were committed in Paris and the French Republic was being declared, he met two people who had a shaping influence on his life and thought. The first was an officer in the army, Armand-Michel Bacharetie de Beaupuy, known simply as Michel Beaupuy, an aristocrat from the Périgord, now in his mid-thirties, and a republican idealist, who in Wordsworth’s loving remembering of him in The Prelude sounds like a vision of the perfect man. They talked politics and the virtues of change, weighing the best of ancient republican systems against the extremes of revolutionary violence, sifting what seemed good from the horrors and strains of the moment.

Injuries

Made him more gracious, and his nature then

Did breathe its sweetness out most sensibly,

As aromatic flowers on Alpine turf,

When foot hath crushed them.

By birth he ranked

With the most noble, but unto the poor

Among mankind he was in service bound,

As by some tie invisible, oaths professed

To a religious order. Man he loved

As man, and, to the mean and the obscure,

And all the homely in their homely works,

Transferred a courtesy which had no air

Of condescension; but did rather seem

A passion and a gallantry, like that

Which he, a soldier, in his idler day

Had paid to woman: somewhat vain he was,

Or seemed so – yet it was not vanity,

But fondness, and a kind of radiant joy

That covered him about when he was intent

On works of love or freedom.

Beaupuy looked like an oasis in a bitter world, a source of hope and goodness in a violent time, a demonstration that human nature was capable of fineness and grace. With him, walking along the road in Touraine, Wordsworth had a sudden, formative encounter, one of those spots of time that make us what we are, remembered for the rest of his life:

And when we chanced

One day to meet a hunger-bitten girl,

Who crept along fitting her languid self

Unto a heifer’s motion – by a cord

Tied to her arm, and picking thus from the lane

Its sustenance, while the girl with her two hands

Was busy knitting in a heartless mood

Of solitude – and at the sight my friend

In agitation said, ‘’Tis against that

That we are fighting,’ I with him believed

Devoutly that a spirit was abroad

Which could not be withstood, that poverty,

At least like this, would in a little time

Be found no more, that we should see the earth

Unthwarted in her wish to recompense

The industrious, and the lowly child of toil,

All institutes for ever blotted out

That legalized exclusion, empty pomp

Abolished, sensual state and cruel power

Whether by edict of the one or few –

And finally, as sum and crown of all,

Should see the people having a strong hand

In making their own laws; whence better days

To all mankind.

It is difficult to judge how much The Prelude attributes later thoughts and ideas to earlier events – Wordsworth was imperious in his relationship to time – but that moment with Beaupuy, who in 1796 would be killed by a cannonball in battle against the Austrians, and the simplicity and passion of the remembered words, ‘’Tis against that/That we are fighting,’ seem now to stand as one of the sources of Wordsworth’s later life. Beaupuy’s name is among those cut into the stones of the Arc de Triomphe, but these lines, in which he is described in the beautiful, supple, easy blank verse of The Prelude, are a true memorial.

At the same time, Wordsworth fell in love with a young French woman. Annette Vallon was four years older than him. Their story, which was only ever known within the family circle in Wordsworth’s lifetime, is exceptionally opaque. She was the daughter of a surgeon in Blois. Nearly nothing is known about her, except that during the years of the Revolutionary wars, in which her Catholic and Royalist family suffered at the hands of the Republic, she and her sisters behaved with extraordinary and resourceful courage, running messages for the Royalists, concealing enemies of the state, smuggling them to safety, evading the secret police, in turn, of the Terror, the Directoire and Napoleon, risking all. Wordsworth had fallen in love with a woman of mettle and fire. She had first encountered him late in 1791, at the house in Orléans of André-Augustin Dufour, a magistrate’s clerk, and may have begun by teaching him French, but soon they moved together to Blois. In the spring of 1792 she became pregnant with their child.

Wordsworth scarcely communicated with anyone at home, only asking his brother Richard for some money, but saying nothing of Annette. In December 1792 their daughter, Anne-Caroline Vallon, was born and baptised in Orléans, the French clerk carefully recording the impossible name ‘Anne Caroline Wordswodsth, daughter of Williams Wordswodsth, Anglois, and of Marie Anne Vallon’. Wordsworth had made arrangements for Dufour to represent him at the baptism, by which time he himself had gone, leaving Annette unmarried and unsupported. Astonishingly, he did not return immediately to England, but spent six weeks in Paris witnessing the drama of revolution.

It is, at the least, chaotic behaviour. Although their politics were directly opposed, Annette certainly expected him to marry her. She called herself Annette Williams, and her distraught letters long for his return, for him to be present in her life and the life of their daughter. Only obliquely did Wordsworth ever write of her, as an interlude in The Prelude, in which there is no suggestion that the love affair he describes was anything more than a story told to him by Beaupuy. But it is filled with memories of the ‘delirious hour’, the ‘happy time of youthful lovers’ he had known with her, the promise of that Loire valley beginning:

his present mind

was under fascination; he beheld

A vision, and he lov’d the thing he saw.

Arabian fiction never fill’d the world

With half the wonders that were wrought for him.

Earth liv’d in one great presence of the spring …

all paradise

Could by the simple opening of a door

Let itself in upon him, pathways, walks

Swarm’d with enchantment, till his spirit sank

Beneath the burthen, overbless’d for life.

It may be that, at the height of the reign of Terror late in 1793, with Britain at war with France, Wordsworth quickly and secretly returned to see her – there are suggestions of that in The Prelude – but he was soon gone, and her piteous letters resumed:

Come, my friend, my husband, receive the tender kisses of your wife, of your daughter. She is so pretty, this poor little one, so pretty that the tenderness I feel for her would drive me mad if I didn’t always hold her in my arms. She looks like you more and more each day. I believe that I hold you in my arms. Her little heart beats against mine and I feel as if it is your heart beating against me. ‘Caroline, in a month, in a fortnight, in a week, you will see the most cherished of men, the tenderest of men’ … Always love your little daughter and your Annette, who kisses you a thousand times on the mouth, on the eyes … I will write to you on Sunday. Goodbye, I love you for life. Speak to me of the war, what you think of it, because it worries me so much.

Wordsworth never received that particular letter, as it was impounded by the Committee of Surveillance, and was only discovered in the 1920s, with one other, hidden in the files of a sub-police station in the Loire valley. But others of the same kind, all now destroyed, crossed the Channel, filled with appeals to a desperate conscience.

On his return to London, Wordsworth sank into the deepest depression of his life, besieged by guilt and ‘dead to deeper hope’, his soul dropping to its ‘last and lowest ebb’. He had lost all faith in human endeavour. His abandonment of Annette and Caroline was fused in his mind with the fate of the Revolution in France and the turn to repression in England, with his own lack of any future and the absence of much hope for the ideals Beaupuy had embraced and the happiness Annette may have represented.

Wordsworth wandered lost through these years. After 1793 France was at war with England, and Wordsworth, in love with liberty and in love with his own country, found himself torn in two. He moved from place to place – Wales, Yorkshire, the Isle of Wight, Salisbury Plain, London, Westmorland, Cambridge – without employment, without prospects, without money, without love, almost without friends, living sometimes in London, mixing in the circles around the rationalist republican William Godwin, involved with radical politics, writing at least one long attack on the Church and the establishment, sometimes in the north of England, occasionally reunited with his adoring sister Dorothy, just as often apart from her.

His depression was accompanied by radical, republican rage. Compassion, he wrote, was to be done away with. Liberty was to ‘borrow the very arms of despotism’, and ‘in order to reign in peace must establish herself by violence’. The contempt with which the Wordsworth family had been treated by the Earl of Lonsdale fuelled his hatred:

We are taught from infancy that we were born in a state of inferiority to our oppressors, that they were sent into the world to scourge and we to be scourged.

The British government was bent on suppressing the French contagion. In May 1794 Habeas Corpus was suspended and dozens of radicals were arrested. The following year seditious gatherings and pamphlets were banned. Free speech was gagged. Many writers, printers, publishers, booksellers and lecturers who had embraced the radical ideas of their generation were placed in the pillory, imprisoned for six months or more, harassed, interrogated, ruined or transported to Australia, from where few would ever return. Others were tried for treason or condemned to death in their absence. In these conditions, Wordsworth’s tirades were too extreme for any printer to risk their publication, and he remained almost unknown.

Wordsworth in Darkness

Through connections of the Godwin circle he met the Pinneys, whose house at Racedown was offered to Wordsworth brother and sister as a place of refuge away from the stress and strain of the city, from the stress and strain of his own mind.

In September 1795, Dorothy and William retreated to Dorset, taking with them little Basil Montagu, the son of a young lawyer also called Basil Montagu, whose wife had died in childbirth and who was struggling to bring up his son in his chambers in Lincoln’s Inn. The Wordsworths had the hope that other children might join them to make a little school at Racedown, whose fees they could add to the income from the investment of the legacy.

Darkness gathered around Wordsworth, although neither he nor his sister could admit as much in their letters. A disenchantment with political radicalism and its rationalist revolution had left him with a sense of having nowhere to go. He was afflicted with debilitating headaches. His nightmares of the Terror, as he would later tell Coleridge in The Prelude, had come with him:

I scarcely had one night of quiet sleep,

Such ghastly visions had I of despair

And tyranny, and implements of death,

And long orations which in dreams I pleaded

Before unjust Tribunals, with a voice

Labouring, a brain confounded, and a sense

Of treachery and desertion in the place

The holiest that I knew of, my own soul.

The sense of treachery and desertion was all-colonising: a betrayal of his own ideals, of the hope that had once glowed in France, of his youth, of his child, of her mother, of himself. It was an amalgam of fear and guilt. Wordsworth felt disconnected from the goings on of life and the world. He asked for newspapers to be sent to him, no matter if they were five days old by the time they arrived. He thought of himself as ‘a man in the moon’ who had no inkling of what was happening on earth. Coleridge would later describe Wordsworth’s ‘unseeking manners’, that drift towards isolation, the refusal to engage with anyone or anything beyond himself. A kind of sardonic humour seeped out of him. ‘Our present life is utterly barren of such events as merit even the short-lived chronicle of an accidental letter,’ Wordsworth wrote to his Cambridge friend William Mathews, now a bookseller in London.

We plant cabbages, and if retirement, in its full perfection, be as powerful in working transformation on one of Ovid’s Gods, you may perhaps suspect that into cabbages we shall be transformed.

He had heard that remarks of that sort were circulating in London. ‘As to writing, it is out of the question.’

Cynicism and bitterness, a dark estimation of himself and others: these were the outlines of a Wordsworth lost. ‘We are now at Racedown and both as happy as people can be who live in perfect solitude,’ he wrote to Mathews.

We do not see a soul. Now and then we meet a miserable peasant in the road or an accidental traveller. The country people here are wretchedly poor; ignorant and overwhelmed with every vice that usually attends ignorance in that class, viz – lying and picking and stealing &c &c

He had sunk inward, in a kind of paralysis, held in uncertainty and perplexity, not bounding down the flank of a wheatfield but stalled at the gate, balked and blocked. It was, he later wrote, ‘a weary labyrinth’. He turned to bitter satire, imitating Juvenal, in which with ‘knife in hand’ his aim was to ‘probe/The living body of society/Even to the heart’.

He made visits to London and Bristol, and on one of them, probably through the Pinneys, he met Coleridge and began to show him and send him the poetry he was writing. Coleridge’s letters to him from that time have disappeared, but through the course of 1796 it seems as if, perhaps under Coleridge’s habit of encouragement, Wordsworth began to emerge from the darkness, and to feel his powers returning as both a man and a poet.

Pieces survive in his notebooks from that year, never shown to anyone, in a form of almost undecorated poetry, never published, surviving only as fragments of rough manuscript on the back of sheets containing other lines. One describes an incident on the road outside Racedown, a transient scene reminiscent of the encounter with the poor girl with the heifer in the Loire valley five years before. A baker from Clapton, just outside Crewkerne, used to deliver to houses in the area, and regularly came past Racedown. The speaker begins by addressing a young woman he has met in the road:

I have seen the Baker’s horse

As he had been accustomed at your door

Stop with the loaded wain, when o’er his head

Smack went the whip, and you were left, as if

You were not born to live, or there had been

No bread in all the land. Five little ones,

They at the rumbling of the distant wheels

Had all come forth, and, ere the grove of birch

Concealed the wain, into their wretched hut

They all return’d. While in the road I stood

Pursuing with involuntary look

The Wain now seen no longer, to my side

came, pitcher in her hand

Filled from the spring; she saw what way my eyes

Were turn’d, and in a low and fearful voice

She said – that wagon does not care for us –

That wagon does not care for us. This is unfinished: he addresses the woman, but then describes to her the scene she would just have witnessed herself. She begins by standing next to her hut, but then arrives from the spring with her pitcher. Nor can he name her – Wordsworth left a blank at the beginning of the line. But in its under-qualities, its directness and the simplicity of its language, its rhymeless pentameters without an abstract noun or any large Miltonic reference to the important or the exotic, one part of what would happen this year is already underway. This is the first signpost towards Wordsworth’s future as a poet. The truth of her statement – that wagon does not care for us – emerges from under the carapace of the brutalised-civilised. It seems as if poetry, allied to the language of the real, can do what politics and revolution can never manage: make vivid and present the reality of suffering, of human experience, for which no exaggerated language or theatrics are required.

No graph of a life pursues a single line, and the man Coleridge had come to see and be with, to admire and encourage, is a hazy compound of mentalities and influences. With his hair cut short in the republican manner, and a heavy stubble on his cheek, there was an intense, haunted and self-possessed air to him. The artist Benjamin Robert Haydon later said that there was something ‘lecherous, animal & devouring’ in Wordsworth’s laugh, and there is no doubt of the almost predatory power that hung about him. He would always control anyone who came into his orbit. And his erotic life was real and vivid. When, later, after ten years of marriage, he was away from his wife for a few days, he wrote to her: ‘I tremble with sensations that almost overpower me,’ his mind filled with images and memories of ‘thy limbs as they are stretched upon the soft earth’ and ‘thy own involuntary sighs and ejaculations’.

The writing of poetry could take hold of him in what he called ‘the fit’, the need to get it down before it left his mind. His sister Dorothy watched him one morning at breakfast:

he, with his Basin of Broth before him untouched & a little plate of Bread & butter.

He had not slept well, but the idea of a poem had come to him.

He ate not a morsel, nor put on his stockings but sate with his shirt neck unbuttoned, & his waistcoat open while he did it. The thought first came upon him as we were talking about the pleasure we both always feel at the sight of a Butterfly. I told him that I used to chase them a little, but I was afraid of brushing the dust off their wings, & did not catch them – He told me how they used to kill all the white ones when he went to school because they were Frenchmen …

Uniforms in the armies of Bourbon France had been white, decorated with golden fleur-de-lis, and any right-thinking English boy in the 1770s would have pursued them with a vengeance. Wordsworth was remembering that from the other side of a revolution that had replaced the white with the tri-colour, but in this tiny scene, away from public view or the need to present himself as he might have wanted to be known, something of the undressed Wordsworth appears: quietly and gently witty, preoccupied, getting up late, needing to catch the moment of writing a poem before it fled, his memories and the present moment interacting as two dimensions of one life, calmly there in the room but, in the writing of that poem, entirely removed, alone.

One further element reflects on Wordsworth in the late 1790s. In the archive at Dove Cottage in Westmorland is the extraordinary and rare survival of some of his clothes. His waistcoats and breeches from the last years of the eighteenth century open a shutter on to this gentleman-poet, governor-radical, man of the people who was also a man, in his own mind, set far above them. Much of the poetry he would write this year was intended, as he said, ‘to shew that men who did not wear fine cloaths can feel deeply’, and one might imagine that a poet who wrote those words might also wear the fustian and the grosgrain of the working man.

He did not. In Grasmere you can find his cream waistcoat with linen back and silk front, with a kind of spreading collar and decorated with embroidered flowers, its pockets edged with red braid, its twelve fabric-covered metal buttons each decorated with a flower. Beside it is a matching suit of waistcoat and breeches also in cream silk, this waistcoat with a stand-up collar, two small pockets with scallop-edged flaps, and eleven small buttons covered in fabric. The breeches are knee-length, gathered into a band at the knee and secured by four fabric-covered buttons and a strap fastening. A third waistcoat is in ivory silk, decorated in careful pale-blue, red and white embroidery, scattering his chest and stomach with perfect, crystalline lilies of the valley.

Are these really the clothes of the man who would write The Prelude? Was Wordsworth a dandy? In Germany late in 1798, according to his sister, he went out ‘walking by moonlight in his fur gown and a black fur cap in which he looks like any grand Signior’. The gown was green, ‘lined throughout with Fox’s skin’. At other moments he would appear in ‘a blue spencer’, a short double-breasted overcoat without tails, and a new pair of pantaloons. Perhaps one can see in this elegance and this air of distinction, this distance from mud and toil, a picture of the man who was living in Racedown and considering his position as an un-acknowledged legislator of the world, preparing to convey to that world his vision of completeness and authority. ‘The Poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth …’, he would write a year or two later. There is no retreat in those magnificent words to a cosy provincial irrelevance. The ambition is explicitly imperial. Here is a man who wanted to establish a form of poetry whose ligatures would bind up the whole of existence.

His sister Dorothy, part-hidden, is at the centre of this year. There is a surviving silhouette of her: small and bright, sharp, attentive, slight-bodied. Her hair is bound up, her whole being taut. A high lace collar, curly hair on her brow. Delicate, poised, a small bosom, half-open lips, drawn in this silhouette with all the expectations of femininity, her presence almost toylike, but nothing skittish or girlish: careful, exact, intelligent, enquiring.

Coleridge described her in a letter written a few weeks after he had arrived at Racedown:

Wordsworth & his exquisite Sister are with me – She is a woman indeed! – in mind, I mean, & heart – for her person is such, that if you expected to see a pretty woman, you would think her ordinary – if you expected to find an ordinary woman, you would think her pretty! – But her manners are simple, ardent, impressive –

Above all they noticed each other’s eyes. Hers were ‘watchful in minutest observation of nature – and her taste a perfect electrometer – it bends, protrudes, and draws in, at subtlest beauties & most recondite faults’. His were large and grey, lit and sparkling when animated, sometimes half-absent, as if he had sunk a quarter of an inch below the surface of the skin, but otherwise rolling bright towards you, as if the sight within them were not a receptive faculty but active, coming and reaching out to grasp his hearers. The lower part of his face could look somehow unbuttoned. His mouth was always hanging half open – he couldn’t breathe through his nose. ‘I have the brow of an angel, and the mouth of a beast,’ he used to say, the repeated binary vision of himself, great and weak, good and bad, never ceasing to oscillate between its poles.

She saw a poet in him. ‘He is a wonderful man,’ she wrote to her great friend Mary Hutchinson, who had been staying with them at Racedown and had left only a day or two earlier.

His conversation teems with soul, mind, and spirit. Then he is so benevolent, so good tempered and cheerful, and, like William, interests himself so much about every little trifle. At first I thought him very plain, that is, for about three minutes: he is pale and thin, has a wide mouth, thick lips, and not very good teeth, longish loose-growing half-curling rough black hair. But if you hear him speak for five minutes you think no more of them. His eye is large and full, and not dark but grey; such an eye as would receive from a heavy soul the dullest expression; but it speaks every emotion of his animated mind: it has more of ‘the poet’s eye in a fine frenzy rolling’ than I ever witnessed. He has fine dark eyebrows, and an overhanging forehead.

In return she sparkled with her own sharp-edged, discontinuous brilliance, a flashing light in her eyes, her mind not a grand instrument of connection like Coleridge’s, nor vastly present to itself like Wordsworth’s, but full of bright remembered visions, exactly recalled, seen in detail: the sky-blue hedge sparrows’ eggs in a childhood nest, the bilberries in the bowl of a black porringer. She had the gift of what Keats would later call ‘that trembling delicate and snail-horn perception of Beauty’, precise and sensitive, alert to variation. The sensitivity meant, as Coleridge noticed, that her horns would draw in at the slightest touch, and she would easily weep at things seen or remembered. She often felt her heart was full. Her separation from her brothers in childhood meant that she had been ‘put out of the way of many recollections in common’, and that separation only served to heighten the value of closeness for her. She and Wordsworth now shared their everyday life, but they also shared the experience of a mutual absence when young, and then the denial by the Lonsdale estate of their inheritance, the compulsory impoverishment in which they were both now living.

So much had been denied to them, and so much had been broken, that it was her duty to tend to her brother. She was both stronger and weaker than him. He may have been, as he wrote, the mountain and she its flowers, yet he was broken and she was the mender of him. She loved him but she could admonish him, just as later she could tell Coleridge not to publish an unkind review, as it was beneath him and its value as criticism was not greater than its cruelty.

Dorothy on the path of poetry

She saw her own and her brother’s situation clearly enough: ‘We have been endeared to each other by early misfortune,’ she told a friend. Their love may or may not have sublimated the sexual – there is no evidence at all of anything approaching incest – but the form it took was admiration, protection and education, enabling him to leave behind the extremes of his broken self within her shelter and become the greater and more vulnerable poet she believed him to be. He had been addicted to a kind of exclusive masculinity, and only within her care, the shield of her above and around him, could he find the courage to melt and grow.

In The Prelude he said as much to her:

I too exclusively esteemed that love,

And sought that beauty, which as Milton sings,

Hath terror in it. Thou didst soften down

This over-sternness; but for thee, sweet friend,

My soul, too reckless of mild grace, had been

Far longer what by Nature it was framed –

Longer retained its countenance severe –

A rock with torrents roaring, with the clouds

Familiar, and a favourite of the stars;

But thou didst plant its crevices with flowers,

Hang it with shrubs that twinkle in the breeze,

And teach the little birds to build their nests

And warble in its chambers.

Their intimacy was real. ‘Neither absence nor Distance nor Time can ever break the Chain that binds me to my Brothers,’ she wrote. They would wrap up together inside a single coat to stay warm. Her breath, he said, ‘was a kind of gentler spring/That went before my steps’.

Dorothy, or Dolly as she had been called by her parents, loved robins, and there was something robin-like about her: the needle brilliance of their song, their alert restlessness, the tiny, flicker-instant acuity of body and being. She was not sweet in her person, more ardent than that, with a gypsy wildness in her, so that her eyes burned and flashed for almost anyone who met her, like the gold leaf in the electrometer that Coleridge saw.

It was this quality, her ability to respond to the instant, with an immediate attachment to what was in front of her eyes, that allowed her to teach the men around her how to see the world. Joseph Gill’s diary shows that he bought her a notebook when they were at Racedown, but it has disappeared, and there is no written record of what she had been seeing there, as there is for part of the following year in Somerset. But when in March 1798 she wrote in her journal that ‘A quiet shower of snow was in the air,’ that is a moment, as Pamela Woof has written, that tells you who she was. The snow in Dorothy’s perception is ‘simultaneously both hovering and falling; the silent snow stays and does not stay in the air. Dorothy conveys at once the temporary and the timelessness.’ Those moments of transient beauty were part of her daily experience. She saw ‘the moonshine like herrings in the water’, and the moonlight lying on the hills like snow. Categories blurred: the change of season became an active, animated process: ‘The Fern of the mountain now spreads yellow veins among the trees’; the stars were ‘almost like butterflies or skylarks in motion & lightness’. She heard the ‘unseen birds singing in the mist’ and saw the ‘turf fading into mountain road’. She loved to look for nests in the privet and the roses; everything was part of a naked meeting with an exactly encountered and constantly shifting world.

There was nothing saccharine about this. She loved ‘the strength with which nature has endowed me’, and was indifferent to the demands and limits of femininity, loving solitary walks alone in the moonlight when in her early twenties, not submitting to the kind of ignorance thought suitable for many girls of her class and upbringing, socially engaged, giving money to beggars. She was busy, practical, organising a household around the poet who lived alongside her, broiling the gizzard of a hen with some mutton for his supper, baking bread and pies, sewing and laundering, writing letters, copying out his verses.

Over this entire relationship, of such intimacy and such mutual interpenetration – and with such undisputed dominance of male over female – hangs the question of Annette Vallon and her daughter Caroline. Racedown was a mirror-image of the situation Wordsworth had left behind in France. He and his sister were now living together in Dorset as he and the mother of his child were not in Blois. He was looking after and tending to a young child, Basil Montagu, as he was not his own daughter in France.

Guilt stalks these arrangements, and Dorothy’s unqualified admiration of and service for her brother look like the necessary balm for a man besieged by it. Racedown was a parodic rerunning of the married life William had not begun in France. He had saved both Dorothy and Basil from the isolation and difficulty to which they might otherwise have been condemned, but to save them he had left Annette and Caroline to the same fate.

Did Wordsworth abandon one woman and child to attend to another woman and child? And for his own convenience? Or was it that only with Dorothy, and not with Annette, could he see his way to being the poet he knew he wanted to be? Writing in The Prelude of his years of despair at Racedown – and never admitting in that poem or anywhere else to the existence of Annette or her child – he very nearly said that. Dorothy was his saviour because she saw a poet in him and was prepared to fight for that poet. She was

the belovèd woman in whose sight

Those days were passed – now speaking in a voice

Of sudden admonition like a brook

That did but cross a lonely road; and now

Seen, heard and felt, and caught at every turn,

Companion never lost through many a league –

Maintained for me a saving intercourse

With my true self (for, though impaired, and changed

Much, as it seemed, I was no further changed

Than as a clouded, not waning moon);

She, in the midst of all, preserved me still

A Poet, made me seek beneath that name,

My office upon earth.

It is the most beautiful metaphor of love, of a woman as a mountain brook coming and going along the same valley as the road the poet is taking, bringing her irrigating, generous presence to the drought of his journey and his despair. In later revisions he added the beautiful suggestion that in the darkness of the waning moon, ‘She whispered still that brightness would return’. The moon would wax again. Love is in that line, love given and heard. There is a suggestion, as often in what he would write about her, of suppressed desire, in the physical intimacy of ‘Seen, heard and felt, and caught at every turn’, in the giving liquidity of her presence, in the brook’s gentle washing of him and perhaps even in the atmosphere around ‘intercourse’, which by the late 1790s had already begun to carry the implications of ‘sexual connection’. There is no suggestion of equality between them. She is the servant, he the walking hero; she quietly attends, he struggles with his greatness. He relies on her and dominates her; he uses her and she conforms to the idea that she is there to be used. One version of her usefulness is the strictness with which she can admonish him. Both master and servant are happy for one to be reproved by the other, and to understand that admonition as a form of love.

Here then, on this summer evening in early June 1797, assembled together in the small parlour of Racedown, with the oil cloth on the floor, and an air of warmth and mutual affection and value in the room – all his life Coleridge would remember the welcome they gave him this evening – the sun dropping outside, these three people, each in their varied, multi-layered conditions of longing and despair, genius and trouble, sit down together to talk, to discuss what they have written and seen, what they might write, what they have been and what they might yet be. It is the seeding moment of this year.

Coleridge came to love and revere them both, as one sensibility in two people. Much later, he wrote to Dorothy about their brother, who had come along with him and Wordsworth on a walking tour through the north of England:

Your Br. John is one of you; a man who hath solitary usings of his own Intellect, deep in feeling, with a subtle Tact, a swift instinct of Truth & Beauty.

One of you: as if ‘Wordsworth’ is not the name of a person but a way of being, not entirely communicative to others, with a prompt tactility but unseen depths, both a flickering quickness and an immanence in all of them, as if their dwelling was some way far below the surface, profoundly attractive and curiously removed.

Sit in the valley of the little River Sydeford below the house, in the shadow of its willows and alders, with the evening hatch of olives speckling the yard of air above the water, the cattle grazing in the last sunlight on the sloping fields, their long-bodied shadows patched across the pasture, and an owl announcing itself in the wood across the valley, and it is not difficult to see the three of them there beyond the darkened panes of the parlour windows.

The owl is muted, like a trumpet with a cushion in its mouth. The robins are still singing in the hollies, one on each side of the river, bright as water. Next to them the owl is throaty-chesty. If a cough could sing, it would sound like this.

There is a sheet on the table, for want of a tablecloth. Coleridge is asleep upstairs. Wordsworth at the table looks across to Dorothy, where she is transcribing from his notebooks. Rough pages lie torn out between them, and she is copying in her neater more regular hand from his tragedy The Borderers.

He is looking at her, but there is a vacancy in his eye and he is looking across her, through her, his own pen poised over a notebook, as she is busy copying.

What is this word? she asks. Sublimity?

No, no. Sterility.

They sit there with a kind of contentment between them, no tension, a jointness, ease.

What does this say Will? I am the devil?

No, he half laughs with his outgoing breath. No, ‘I am the dark.’

The dark? She laughs at him.

It runs on to the next line: ‘I am the dark/Embracer of the superlunary world.’

As he speaks, the life-flame in him is barely visible. Only now and then, as some breeze blows over him, her breeze, a movement and change becomes apparent, a reanimation of the suspended life, a breath across coals. Wherever his vacant eye looks, he can see through to the bones and the soft inner parts. But that is because he is also transparent to himself, and in himself finds the boneyard of the past, a littered emptiness, the ashy remains of what he thought he might have been. Behind it, distant, is some other, larger and half-forgotten mountain world, his time in the Alps or in north Wales, his childhood in the Lakes. In certain lights he looks as gaunt as a new-dropped lamb.