Читать книгу The Making of Poetry - Adam Nicolson - Страница 11

June 1797

Coleridge stayed at Racedown for the next three weeks, and the talk began. For months Wordsworth’s poetry had been fragmentary, fierce and strange, moving between the worlds of doubt and guilt, finding significance on the borders of madness. He read his poems to Coleridge. A set of sketches and revisions of one of them has survived on the reverse side of the same large folio sheet as his lines on the baker’s cart, with further thoughts and rethoughts of it on a neighbouring sheet, both now in the Wordsworth archive at Dove Cottage.

Looking at these repetitive, hesitant drafts of something Wordsworth would come to call ‘Incipient Madness’ is like observing a man feeling for poetry with his fingertips in the dark.

There were at least twelve uncertain and twitchy stages. From the first moment are three words:

You see the

It is a tiny eruptive nodule of poetic substance focused on a ruined building, a small cottage or shed.

He pulls back a foot or two and starts again:

Though open to the sky yet stained with smoke

You see the swallows nest has dropp’d away

A wretched covert ’tis for man or beast

And when the poor mans horse that shelters there

Turns from the beating wind and open sky

The iron links with which his feet are clogg’d

Mix their dull clanking with the heavy sound

Of falling rain a melancholy

That has come easily, without correction, on this otherwise heavily corrected sheet, so materially realised that it seems likely to have been something seen by Wordsworth on his walks in Dorset. This poetry is already autobiographical, and its atmosphere describes the man Wordsworth was in his darkest hours. ‘You’ is ‘you’ the reader or the passer-by; it is also Wordsworth himself, and the ‘you’ also seems identified with the horse and his hobbling chains, both man and animal a prisoner, dulled by the conditions life has imposed, sheltering in a wreck of a building for which all hope is gone and which even the swallows have deserted. Coleridge accused Wordsworth of being a ‘spectator ab extra’ – an observer from outside whatever conditions or predicament he was describing – but here the ‘covert’, the hiding place, is wretched for man or beast, no matter which, and all these creatures – Wordsworth, the horse, the poor man, the swallow, you – are inhabiting the same desolate landscape.

But the setting is not entirely true. There is a whiff of cliché in the air. The magazines of the 1790s were full of tragic scenes of rural poverty, and the word ‘melancholy’ seems to bring the movement to a halt. So Wordsworth stops and tries again:

And when the poor mans horse that hither comes

For shelter turns ab

That too, for whatever reason, is a dead end. And he takes another run:

And open sky the passenger may hear

The iron links with which his feet are were clogged

Mix their dull clanking with the heavy sound

Of falling rain, a melancholy thing

To any man who has a heart to feel. –

Those final words at last ring with an air of Wordsworth’s own truth. That is his subject: the grandeur in the beatings of the heart.

But whatever this poem is, it won’t come clean. He introduces his own recent visit to the cottage:

But two nights gone

I chanced to I passed this cottage and within I heard

The poor man’s lonely horse who that hither comes

For shelter, turning from the beating rain

And open sky, and as he turned, I heard

At one level the horse was a ‘who’, but Wordsworth revises that to the more conventionally impersonal ‘that’. The various elements and players need to be organised: himself, the horse, the place, the stormy night, the connections between them. The revisions now turn scratchy and directionless:

I heard him turning from the beating wind –

And open sky and as he turn’d I heard

But he cannot decide what the horse is doing there: ‘to weather the night storm’ or ‘to weather out the tempests’? ‘Within these walls’, ‘within these roofless walls’, or ‘these fractur’d walls’? Then, at draft twelve of these few recalcitrant lines, another set of ingredients appears which suddenly mobilises this dark fragment of experience:

But two nights gone, I cross’d this dreary moor

In the still clear moonlight, when reached the hut

I looked within but all was still and dark

Only within the ruin, I beheld

At a small distance on the dusky ground

A broken pain which glitter’d to the moon

And seemed akin to life. – Another time

The winds of autumn drove me oer the heath

Heath in a dark night by the storm compelled

the hardships of that season

I crossed the dreary moor

Those lines are still in thrall to an earlier way of doing poetry – ‘dusky’ is dead jargon; ‘glitter’d to’ is patently false language – but that broken pain/pane of glass on the dark floor of the ruined shed, a lifeless thing that seems to be full of life, grips and obsesses him:

I found my sickly heart had tied itself

Even to this speck of glass – It could produce

a feeling as of absence

on the moment when my sight

Should feed on it again. For many a long month

I felt Confirm’d this strange incontinence; my eye

Did every evening measure the moon’s height

And forth I went before her yellow beams

Could overtop the elm-trees oer the heath

I sought the r and I found

That speck more precious to my soul

Than was the moon in heaven

Here now at last are the elements for a strange and lonely poem of experience on the edges of despair, an act of empathy. It is driven by an obsessive and disordered frame of mind, dissociated from the normalities of human love and community, in a world where, in its final form, a looming morbidity infects and pollutes all living things. It is a poem written by the desperate man Coleridge had come to cure.

Incipient Madness

I crossed the dreary I crossed the dreary moor

In the clear moonlight when I reached the hut

I enter’d in, but all was still and dark

Only within the ruin I beheld

At a small distance, on the dusky ground

A broken pane which glitter’d to in the moon

And seemed akin to life. There is a mood

A settled temper of the heart, when grief,

Becomes an instinct, fastening on the all things

That promise food, doth like a sucking babe

Create it where it is not. From this hour time

I found my sickly heart had tied itself

Even to this speck of glass – It could produce

a feeling as of absence

on the moment when my sight

Should feed on it again. For many a long month

I felt Confirm’d this strange incontinence; my eye

Did every evening measure the moon’s height

And forth I went soon as her yellow beams

Could overtop the elm-trees. Oer the heath

I went, I reached the cottage, and I found

Still undisturbed and glittering in its place

That speck of glass more precious to my soul

Than was the moon in heaven. Another time

The winds of Autumn drove me o’er the heath

One gloomy evening: By the storm compell’d

The poor man’s horse that feeds along the lanes

Had hither come within among these fractur’d walls

To weather out the night; and as I pass’d

While restlessly he turn’d from the fierce wind

And from the open sky, I heard, within,

The iron links with which his feet were clogg’d

Mix their dull clanking with the heavy sound noise

Of falling rain. I started from the spot

And heard the sound still following in the wind

These lines, firmly in a gothic tradition, nevertheless stand as a challenge to everything the eighteenth-century inheritance of elegant rural landscapes might have suggested or proposed. The heart of what Wordsworth sees is not the well-framed picture but the broken pane of glass, and the haunted sound of chains blown towards him on the vast and homeless winds of heaven. There is no connection yet to any larger significance – any movement beyond the gothic – that connection would have to wait until Coleridge had changed his relationship to the world.

There was one more poem, his most recent, that Wordsworth was keen to have Coleridge hear, and it marked an emergence from this darkness. He read him this first version of ‘The Ruined Cottage’, not giving it to him to read but making sure he heard it from his own lips. It is a descendant of the dark poetry which had poured out of him over the previous six or nine months, but this is different. In ‘The Ruined Cottage’, suffering and the disordered world are seen in tranquillity. The gothic furniture has been dispensed with, much of it hived off into ‘Incipient Madness’. Instead, a calm and beneficent air emerges from a sad and simple story of suffering and failure, nothing over-heightened, no melodramatic lighting, but a rich simplicity in language and setting by which the place itself of the ruined cottage and its surroundings comes to portray the people whose lives it describes. His previous rhetorical habits have dropped away. Abstractions and pat responses are banished in favour of the tender, corporeal realities in the life of a poor woman and her family.

In Wordsworth’s poem, the poet comes across a ruin and meets an old man, a pedlar, who had known the place many years before, when happiness had glowed from its windows. ‘I see around me here,’ the Pedlar says,

Things which you cannot see. We die, my Friend,

Nor we alone, but that which each man loved

And prized in his peculiar nook of earth

Dies with him, or is changed, and very soon

Even of the good is no memorial left.

In the garden is a neglected spring, and the poet goes to drink there:

A spider’s web hung to the water’s edge

And on the wet and slimy foot-stone lay

The useless fragment of a wooden bowl.

It moved my very heart.

A young woman, Margaret, had lived in the remote cottage, and always welcomed passers-by. Her husband Robert had worked in the garden, often late,

till the day-light

Was gone, and every leaf and flower were lost

In the dark hedges.

One or two other poets – Southey, Cowper – had managed to write of simplicity and suffering in this low, gentle, absorbent, un-self-proclaiming way, in which the reality underlying the poetry matters more than the surface of the poetry itself, but ‘The Ruined Cottage’ is something new in Wordsworth’s life. Its facts, like those leaves and flowers sinking back into the darkness of the evening hedge, have become the modest elements of an unquiet landscape. The whole poem exists in a border state, ‘without the application of gross and violent stimulus’, as he would describe the qualities of valuable poetry the following year, but attentive to the sorrows of the story it tells.

It is tempting to think, given the permeability of the boundary in Wordsworth’s mind between the remembered and the imagined, between some other reality and his own experience, that there is autobiography underlying this tale of distress. Margaret is one of the many women in Wordsworth’s poetry who are left with their children to fend for themselves, and suffer as a result. He said himself that in ‘several passages describing the employment & demeanour of Margaret during her affliction, I was indebted to observations made in Dorsetshire’, but there was a more powerful stimulus than the poor he met on the paths and roads of Dorset: the knowledge and memory of the woman and child he had abandoned in France.

This sort of figure had haunted Wordsworth’s imagination before he had met – or left – Annette Vallon, and they appear, usually in much more exaggerated form, in the poetry of many of his contemporaries. But here, in the simple, first version of ‘The Ruined Cottage’, there is a kind of conceptual democracy at work, by which Margaret’s modest truth is allowed to be as valid as any other. There is no need to exaggerate, because exaggeration is a form of obscurity. And so the poem looks carefully at the quiet facts around her. The bad years had come – war and summers when ‘the fields were left with half a harvest’, a sickness everywhere and no work:

shoals of artizans

Were from their daily labour turned away

To hang for bread on parish charity,

They and their wives and children, happier far

Could they have lived as do the little birds

That peck along the hedges or the kite

That makes her dwelling in the mountain rocks.

Robert was driven to the army as the only source of employment, and before he went, left for Margaret and their children a bag holding ten guineas, eight months’ pay for a labourer, given as a bounty to all who volunteered. She waited five years for him to return, a kind of vacuity in her:

in that broken arbour she would sit

The idle length of half a sabbath day;

There, where you see the toadstool’s lazy head;

And when a dog passed by she still would quit

The shade and look abroad.

Dorothy copied out for Coleridge the lines describing Margaret’s paused and eviscerated life, in which, sitting in the ruin of her cottage,

Her tattered clothes were ruffled by the wind

Even at the side of her own fire

and he sent them in amazement in a letter to a Bristol friend, evidence that Wordsworth had broken through to a new level of poetic speech, in which the story was embodied in language that claimed no status greater than what it described. Wordsworth’s language had itself become the medium for empathy and democracy, and for that Coleridge recognised greatness in him.