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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      Jungle Lane

      The boundary between the cultivated lowland and the hill is quite sharp, no suburban blurring. A stream runs along the floor of the lane itself. Hazels and field maples arch it over into a green tunnel ‘so overshadow’d, it might seem one bower’, and the sun pushes in there in narrow rods, so that the watery floor is spattered and mapped in leopardskin light.

      This is the first slight lift of the hills away from Nether Stowey, but the sensation is not of climbing on to the hill but into it, following the wet shaded path as if into a vein. Even on a hot summer day the damp hangs and clings in there. Big lolling hart’s-tongue ferns, feathery polypody ferns and others more like giant shuttlecocks, with the luxuriant undergrowth of dog’s mercury around them, make a jungled Amazonian lushness beside the stream. A broad-bladed frondy apron of fern spreads over the water. This is an English rainforest, coomby with buttercups and little cranesbills, water dropwort and fat, snaking ivies on the trunks of the trees, the whole place womblike, interior. Beyond the hedges, the sunlit meadows beside the lane are spangled with daisies as if they belonged to another and more obvious world.

      In the early morning, when the leaves are grey with dew, the air in these oakwoods is as cool as a glass of cider. Cloud floats in the tops of the woods like another element, another sphere between you and the blue of the sky. Occasionally a big old pollard oak hangs its branches over the path. This is not wild country, not impressive in the way of grand or famous landscapes – far more intimate than that, and thick with the sensation that Wordsworth came to embrace in the course of this year. In some unused manuscript lines from 1798 he described how, after he had been walking for a long time in a remote and lonely place, away from people,

      If, looking round, I have perchance perceived

      Some vestiges of human hands, some stir

      Of human passion, they to me are sweet

      As light at day break or the sudden sound

      Of music to a blind man’s ear who sits

      Alone & silent in the summer shade.

      They are as a creation in my heart …

      Those words record the education of a mind, the sudden seeing of what had not been seen before. Man and nature fuse in those places. Human presence is no pollution in these woods, but the means by which a communal, multi-generational beauty has evolved, the co-production of man and the world of which he is a part. This is also part of the great gospel of interfusion of all in all and each in each to which this year is dedicated. When the wind is right, the bells of Holford church reach deep into the air between the trees.

      Ahead, the lit outlines of the open-headed hills, a sun-drenched roof for the world. Over to the north, the Bristol Channel, with its two little islands, and the hazed Welsh mountains beyond them, to the east the milky distance of the low moors of the Somerset Levels, and on the far side the steady line of the Mendips.

      It is a place, in that sunshine, to lie down and look: the woods on the lower slopes of these hills, the scatter of big farms and fields beyond them, multicoloured, green and tan, the shadowed hollows and dips in the farmland, the grey-blue plume of a distant bonfire smoking in the sun. Pies and doughnuts of woods dropped across the chequered fields.

      Wordsworth loved to remember precisely how ‘in many a walk’, as he wrote later in his notebook, when they had reached this top and

      reclined

      At midday upon beds of forest moss

      Have we to Nature and her impulses

      Of our whole being made free gift, – and when

      Our trance had left us, oft have we by aid

      Of the impressions which it left behind

      Looked inward on ourselves, and learn’d, perhaps,

      Something of what we are.

      It was true for Coleridge too. He described in his notebook how, when he forgot a name, only by not thinking of it could he remember it:

      Consciousness is given up and all is quiet – when the nerves are asleep, or off their guard – and then the name pops up, makes its way and there it is! Not assisted by any association, but the very contrary – the suspension and sedation of all associations.

      Sedation was one of the roots of understanding. Too much noise interfered with the mind’s engagement in the world. Only when you reduced the vibrations coming into your mind, and into your self, could things begin to seem as they were.

      Many years later, on a return visit to the Quantocks, but filled with regret for the passing of time, Coleridge lay in reverie in just one such nook on the margins of wood and heath, easing himself back on to the perfect elastic mattress of the heather, but dreaming of love lost and love never to be had.

      How warm this woodland wild Recess!

      Love surely hath been breathing here;

      And this sweet bed of heath, my dear!

      Swells up, then sinks with faint caress,

      As if to have you yet more near.

      On sea-ward Quantock’s heathy hills,

      Where quiet sounds from hidden rills

      Float here and there, like things astray

      And high o’er head the sky-lark shrills.

      This is where the wavering wind-songs of the Aeolian harp could soothe and seduce the mind. When the wind was right, a long, continuous and minimal music eased out of it. The sound belonged on empty heights like these – not the buffeting white noise of wind in the ear or in a chimney but something more hidden, tapered,