I'm currently in Grasmere, the town where Wordsworth's Dove Cottage is located. Grasmere is in the heart of the Lake District and surrounded on all sides by sweeping fells and fields of grazing sheep and cattle. Spring is everywhere, although I arrived a little too late for daffodils. There are still batches of them here and there, but some of them are already starting to wilt. Dove Cottage and the nearby Wordsworth Trust museum have Wordsworth's "I wandered Lonely as a Cloud" or what's more commonly known as his "Daffodils" poem posted everywhere. It's one of his most famous and it's a poem that's well known and become a standard in many English classes:
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the Milky Way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The waves beside them danced, but they
Out-did the sparkling leaves in glee:
A Poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
--W. Wordsworth
Some of you may know that the poem was inspired after William and his sister Dorothy took a walk (as they often did) and encountered a huge expanse of daffodils next to Ullswater Lake. Dorothy actually recorded her observations in what are now known as "The Grasmere Journals"--preserved at the Wordsworth Museum. It was interesting to see all the manuscripts (Dorothy's handwriting is very difficult to read), but it's clear that she had a keen eye for observation and was meticulous in her recordings of daily life. Here's an excerpt from April 15, 1802--the day she encountered the daffodils with Wordsworth:
The wind was furious... the Lake was rough... When we were in the woods beyond Gowbarrow park we saw a few daffodils close to the water side, we fancied that the lake had floated the seeds ashore & that the little colony had so sprung up -- But as we went along there were more & yet more & at last under the boughs of the trees, we saw that there was a long belt of them along the shore, about the breadth of a country turnpike road. I never saw daffodils so beautiful they grew among the mossy stones about & about them, some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness & the rest tossed & reeled & danced & seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the Lake, they looked so gay ever glancing ever changing. This wind blew directly over the lake to them. There was here & there a little knot & a few stragglers a few yards higher up but they were so few as not to disturb the simplicity & unity & life of that one busy highway... -- Rain came on, we were wet.
William didn't write the poem until two years after their actual encounter, but the echoes between Dorothy's written account of their walk and the eventual poem are hard to miss.
Dorothy also wrote a lot about drinking tea, which was a sign of privilege and luxury in their day. In fact, they even had a locked box where they stored their tea since it was so valuable! Dorothy therefore took great pride in serving tea to guests. Once, she paid around what would today be equivalent to 60 GB Pounds for 1 pound of tea. As a result, she often reused tea bags multiple times, dried them and then passed them along to friends! (I wonder if they knew or just thought she was really generous...) The tour of Dove Cottage was actually really insightful. The house itself is pretty small, but the garden is beautiful with rows of bluebells everywhere, which is supposedly just how Wordsworth and Dorothy originally landscaped the plot. Did you know that Wordsworth said that if he wasn't a poet, he would've been a landscape designer? After seeing the garden, I believe it. The house was originally a pub called the "Dove and Olive" and the dim atmosphere reflects its initial purpose resulting in Dorothy's idea to place the sitting room on the second floor where there's more light.
The Wordsworths loved to walk and would often go on lengthy excursions (upwards of 8 miles) on foot, which Dorothy would later recount in her journals saying: "Tonight we went for a pleasant walk" as if 8 miles was just a leisurely stroll. I guess it was their way of getting out and experiencing Grasmere, which William deemed: "The loveliest spot man hath ever found"! Yesterday I hiked a trail called Easedale Tarn, which was a path that the Wordsworths often took and greatly enjoyed. I didn't have proper hiking gear and probably looked like a fool wearing my nike running shoes up the steep incline, but it was worth the views from the top. I actually didn't make it all the way to the tarn (which is a 6 mile hike, I'm told) and only to a waterfall called Sour Milk Gill. Could they have picked a more unappealing name for a waterfall?! What's funny is that the hike takes you through fields where cattle and sheep are grazing right beside you. At one point in the hike, I was the only person for miles around and I came across a single sheep standing in the middle of the path. He was just munching on grass and looking straight at me as if he could care less that I was trying to pass. He didn't want to budge and I was too amused to walk around. Aren't sheep supposed to be sheepish? This one wasn't and even let me get close to take pictures. All the photos in this post were taken with my phone since I didn't bring my cord to upload the pictures I took on my actual camera. I'll have to post them later.
Anyway, today I decided to continue with my hiking adventures and walked around Grasmere Lake and Rydal Lake in order to reach Wordsworth's other estate, Rydal Mount. It took me over 3 hours to reach there (I got lost in the process) and when I finally arrived, the kind lady at reception informed me that the Mount was closed as someone had rented it out for a luncheon! So, sadly I'll have to make the trek back out there on Saturday. At least I got some exercise.
The Wordsworth Trust puts together a season of poetry readings and events. Starting this month, they've organized weekly poetry readings for every Tuesday night. I was lucky enough to be able to drop in on one and discover several really good poets I hadn't previously heard of: Chase Twichell, Emma Jones, and Andrew Forster. Chase Twichell is actually an American poet and her environmentally conscious poems as well as poems about her father who had dementia were extremely moving. I was also surprised to discover that she is co-translator of Tagore (the poet I studied in India and Bangladesh) along with Tony Stewart (one of my contacts from Bangladesh). What a small world! Emma Jones, an Australian poet and the current Wordsworth Trust Poet in Residence, introduced the two other poets but didn't read herself. I wish she had, since I started reading her work online afterward. You can read more about Emma here. I'll leave you with one of her poems published in Slate last year:
Paradise
What you wanted was simple:
a house with a fence and a kind of gulled
light arching up from it to shake in the poplars
or some other brand of European tree
(or was it American?) you'd plant
just for the birds to nest in and so
the crows who'd settle there
could settle like pilgrims.
Darling, all day I've watched the garden make its way
down the road. It stops at the houses
where the lights are on and the hose reel is tidy
and climbs to the windows to look inside
like a child with its eyes of flared rhododendrons
and sunflowers that shutter the wind like bombs
so buttered and brave the sweet peas gallop
and the undergrowths fizz through the fences
and pause at some to shake into asters and weep.
The garden is a mythical beast and a pilgrim.
And when the houses stroll out it eats up
their papers and screens their evangelical dogs.
Barbeque eater,
yankee doodle,
if the garden should leave
where would we age
and park our poodle?
"This is paradise," you said,
a young expansive American saint.
And widened your arms to take it in,
that suburb, spread, with seas in it.
--Emma Jones, The Striped World
