The Making of Poetry: Coleridge, the Wordsworths and Their Year of Marvels. Adam Nicolson. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Adam Nicolson
Издательство: HarperCollins
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Жанр произведения: Поэзия
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9780008126483
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The roof in places is breaking through, and the paint on the doors looks as if it has been peppered with gunshot. The walled garden is abandoned, and the trees lie collapsed and broken where they have fallen, vast twisted and spiralled chestnuts lying riven on the hillside, as if a war had been fought through them.

      Broken Park

      That very condition, on a thick summer evening, with the leaves darkening in the dusk, the bats flicking and scouting overhead, and the deer rustling their anxious, hidden bodies somewhere up in the bracken, has over the centuries absorbed, ironically enough, a Wordsworthian atmosphere. Now Alfoxden seems more than ever like his place, with an ancient grandeur, poised and beautifully placed between hill and sea, with its own apron of hedge and field spread out in front of it towards the grey waters of the Bristol Channel to the north. Everywhere the atmosphere is of decay and breakage, as if forgotten, a fraying cloth, a place shut up and shuttered, ragwort on the lawns and marsh thistles in ranks in front of the house like ushers at its death. On the upper edges of the park the rim of beech trees stands waiting for the old beast to lie down.

      His repeated habit in poetry, and perhaps in speech, was to use the double negative. Pleasures were not unwelcome, sounds not unheard, understandings not ungrasped. Even when he feels, for instance, the ‘mild creative breeze’ lifting within him, the very centre of his being as a poet, he calls it ‘a power/that does not come unrecognised’.

      Everything hangs there as a suggestion. The wind of poetry is no more than a breath of stirring air, and Wordsworth only half-knows it for what it is. That half-state, a not-unreality, is the condition of his inner life, his duskiness, and now, through neglect, is the very state that Alfoxden has come to. There are no mathematics here; the two negatives do not cancel each other out, or at least in their mutual cancelling leave the ghost of a third term, something which might have been or might yet be. The mild creative breeze is itself an aspect of the tentative, a half-feeling, a stirring of the inner atmosphere that might or might not be the making of poetry. There is no certainty that it is; nor any that it is not. That very hanging in a qualified neutrality, which smells of something and suggests something but isn’t quite the thing itself, is the revelatory thing. It is the simmering of a presence, not the memory of a presence but the promise of a presence which bears the same relationship to the future as a memory does to the past.

      There is the slightest undulation in the surface of the carriageway, an easy coming and going beneath the trunks of the ancient chestnuts. There is no need for light here. This was the way loved by Wordsworth for its continuousness, a zero space whose fluency of form allowed the steady, uninterrupted and murmured composition of his verses as he walked, a place in which his music could hold sway, the body-rhythm of a man who, in one half of his own self-conception, belonged in the park of a fine house, suited to a naturally Miltonic and magisterial frame of mind. Wordsworth had a powerful sense of his own promise, and, in 1797, of his failure to fulfil it. Alfoxden now is a picture of Wordsworth then. What could be more fitted to this great man in trouble than a house in ruins and a park in greater ruins, along whose lightless paths he must make his way to find the greatness he knows is in him?

       Walking

      July and August 1797

      Coleridge would not have taken long to urge his friends on their first walk out and up into the hills. This was to be the frame of their time here, an emblematic topography which came to play a central part in shaping the poetry they wrote in the course of the year. The whole pattern of life and work swings around the alternations of out and in, up and back, engaged and removed, obscure and revealed that the Quantocks provide.

      That drama and setting was a function of geology. The Quantocks are at least twice as old as the comfortable and rather soft Jurassic and Cretaceous rocks around Racedown in north Dorset. The ridge of the Quantocks, or the Quantock as it is called in Somerset, not plural but a single long hard object, stands out above the wet moors of the Levels to the east of them. That single line is a block on the horizon to the west as you approach from the lowlands, a black bulk in the light of the evening, its ridge-line rising and falling, with the trees of its woods standing out against the last of the light. Most of it is no more than 1,200 feet high, and the whole ridge is only about twelve miles long and four or five miles wide, but it looks and feels more than that, a distinct world, an upland province away from the willow and dairy country below it.

      Far more than Dorset, the Quantocks create the kind of highly figured topography to which the aesthetic needs of these people at this moment could respond. The geological structure of England is such that, almost without exception, the further south and east you go, the newer the rocks and the softer the landscapes. In many of the places Wordsworth had been living, in Cambridge and around London, you will find low-lying meadows and rivers brown with silt. Hardness and antiquity, higher hills and hard running water, high outcrops and the stony beds of streams, are all to be found only to the west and north. This was the shift Coleridge had urged on the Wordsworths late in June 1797, and from then, the year acquired its formative geological structure: friends coming to stay nearly always came from the soft east; whenever any of them wanted or needed to engage with the world of business or work, politics or the theatre, they would also travel east, to Bristol or on to London. But whenever they needed stimulus or adventure, beyond what the Quantocks themselves could provide, they walked west, to hardness, over the high tops and on into the wild woods and rocky valleys of Exmoor and Devon. Again and again in the poetry of this year, the implications of this hard but riven landform make themselves apparent: a clear and distinct difference between empty hill and occupied valley, high tops and buried combes, with the brilliant streams acting as the veins and arteries of the whole body of country.