English Lake District and the Borders tour: the Wordsworth circles, Keswick & a stone circle (2)

Tarn Haws — a place we stopped at where three lakes intertwined nestled in hills (@Dorothy Glass, one of the people who had a remarkable camera, attached to a computer back in the hotel)

“Prologue to the Lakes District” with apologies to Geoffrey Chaucer
By Margaret Lapetina August 2018

In August, after daffodils ended season
Come Pilgrims from the colonies, for this reason–
To the lakes , to walk the fells , all most enthused
Road scholars, –funny spelling though
They mused.

A group of scholars, you know who you are
For Romanticism to Turbulence travelled far.
To share their knowledge they did yearn
And gladly would they teach and gladly learn.

Our psychologist bard named Bob
Reading Wordsworth did a daffydilly job
After dinner in the poet’s home.
For his pains, he was lauded and
Did admit to being chuffed when we applauded.

Poor Dora, sister-bound to William
In her time not praised for her words’ worth.
Today, the world would not dare ignore her
She might have had the chance to be our Nora.
Nora writes, and researches, publishes and edits;
Commands our great respect, to her great credit.

Sisters L. And G, all smiles and harmony
Long grown in years of mutuality
At dinner played a trivia game with Rick
Alas, they say he drove them quick–
To drink!

The doctor, Steve, in lean and quiet power
Eschews the scalpel now to photograph the flower
He wandered every bastle tower, strode on every trail
He seemed to take delight in fine detail

Suzanne ,the Carolina girl
Enjoys this second chance at traveling her world
To England is in thrall.

A late arrival, Cape Cod Sarah
Lifelong learner, seeks it all.
We hear she has a special yen for Hadrian’s wall.
From loss to strength; though short she stands quite tall
And thus is to be well admired by all.

Our Dave, who on his sweater sports a safety pin
Will help to bring the next election in.
With Sandy he has sailed Italy before
And now they stand in Windemere in awe.

On seeing Carlisle church’s window art
Dorothy, an expert in this part,
Taught some of us the elements to parse
The mysteries of the stunning stained glass

A Rick there was, and that a worthy man
To subjects erudite and small his fine mind ran
Over dinner he brings laughter and good talk
Outside he seeks to help all ladies as they walk.
In darkness he will offer light
He is the very perfect gentle knight

Host Peter J would rather make his way
By foot, we guess ,on fells than drive the bus each day.
He entertains with facts, tales nice or gory
Driving over Hardknott telling stories.
By far the best, the Wednesday highlight
Was dodging bullets in the twilight
Through the military camp …
No wonder he prefers the sweet green fell
He makes us love it and the sheep as well.
And so we thank you, from our 16 seater, Peter.

What irony prevails to name host Anne, Anne Strange?
Could not the world agree to rearrange a
name to celebrate her warmth and charm, her ease
To call her Anne the Friendly, pilgrims please?
For cycling through the sun and rain in Spain
next week
she’ll do 200 kilometers, no strain.
A riding holiday to end the year.
And so we wish her well, Anne-not- Strange, my dear

Road scholars we, though not of Chaucer’s place;
I hope, time comes, to see again each face …

Dear Friends and readers,

I’m back from my Road Scholar touring experience, and like last August’s at Aigas House, in Inverness, Scotland, I mean to share what I can. I’ve written a different sort of framework: A Canterbuy Tale, the human dimension because this time the people on the tour made the experience what it was a lot more than last, where (without meaning to regret this at all) the time was shaped far more by John Lister-Kaye, Lady Lucy, and the various interns. Romance and Turbulence, the title given the itinerary by Road Scholar, is a mix of cultural, landscape, social and physical activity (moderate) events. Accordingly, I’ll divide my story into artists (the Wordsworths, Beatrice Potter, Johns Ruskin); ruins and archeaological sites; landscapes and towns. There were three lectures and a film and I’ll bring them in as they occurred. Within this division, I’m more or less going chronologically.

The first evening we were together, Peter, one of our guides, walked with us from Lindeth Howe Hotel to Lake Windermere, the largest of the lakes. We were near the busy town of Bowness from which many cruise boats (day long, a couple of hours) come and go. Lots of shops, quick food areas, tourist items on sale (for local English people too) and an amusement park. Eventually we discovered there are long lines for the ferries up and down the lake to various smaller towns.

The next day we spent the morning at Wordsworth sites. First Dove Cottage (not far from the hotel).

Dove cottage — before renovated for conservation and tourist gazing by the Wordsworth Trust site

What is most memorable is how small and plain the rooms are, low the ceilings, yet at the same time it was not a hovel, but a gentleman’s residence. The house had much of the original furniture, and you saw chairs and tables one could sit in and work at, provision for different kinds of tasks, all set out in an orderly way. Downstairs one or two of the rooms had been part of an inn; there was a separate place in one room for cooking, in another for quiet activity. Upstairs was room that was flooded with light and it has a day bed, a desk, chairs, a built-in bookcase: William Wordsworth’s study; there was a room for the children, which was lined with newsprint paper to keep out the cold. The people in the rooms talked of how Wordsworth deliberately lived more meagrely than he had to in order to participate in the community: well he was and was not one of them. So too undoubtedly his sister, their poetic and political visitors. At Rydal Mount, it was emphasized that he was a generous man to all the people he and Dorothy came into contact with — he had more money then. That he was liked by the local community and sociable enough. I imagine he was respected if thought a bit odd.

From the outside

We then went into the directly nearby Wordsworth Museum. What an astonishing array of Wordsworthiana this place has — and impressive rich archive of manuscripts and older printed books. There were several full exhibits (lots of plaques, writing, pictures, book printed and manuscript) about the various woman associated with Wordsworth — taking off from the book The Passionate Sisterhood. The men were not left out: relics of Shelley, Southey and the radical Thelwall, an exhibit about DeQuincey (for a while a good friend of the Wordsworths). I was very impressed by the numbers of letters, pictures, paraphernalia of all sorts, and the lists of manuscripts just in the open rooms. The portraits were remarkable; a number I had never seen before (DeQuincy, again early on a frequent visitor)

Robert Southey — this was one there (he supported several of these people eventually)

Every attempt was made to bring the women to the fore in all the museums we were in; one of the exhibits here was titled to emphasize the women who lived in the cottage and visited, and kept it up and wrote. I was surprised at the amount of material about Mary Shelley, for after all she never came here and was not directly part of this group until after Shelley’s death and she became a woman of letters herself. But there is so much more about her to show visually than some of the Wordsworth women.

Here is one by Sara Coleridge, Samuel’s daughter, which reveals that she needed opium to help her sleep: an eerie poem: life was not so easy in that cottage or the others these people inhabited:

The Poppies Blooming all around
My Herbert loves to see,
Some pearly white, some dark as night,
Some red as cramasie;
He loves their colours fresh and fine
As fair as fair may be,
But little does my darling know
How good they are to me.
He views their clustering petals gay
¬And shakes their nut-brown seeds.
But they to him are nothing more
Than other brilliant weeds;

O how should’st thou with beaming brow
With eye and cheek so bright
Know aught of that blossom’s pow’r,
Or sorrows of the night!
When poor mama long restless lies
She drinks the poppy’s juice;
That liquor soon can close her eyes
And slumber soft produce.
0′ then my sweet my happy boy
Will thank the poppy flow’r
Which brings the sleep to dear mama
At midnight’s darksome hour.

From Peter Swaab’s edition of Sara Coleridge: Collected Poems, 2007:

She was Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s daughter; she was Robert Southey’s niece; she was an accomplished translator who was proficient in six languages and who published her first translation (a three-volume treatise, from the Latin, about equestrian tribes in Paraguay) when she was just eighteen; she was a nineteenth-century mother who suffered from bouts of anxiety, post-natal depression and, finally, breast cancer; she was a writer of children’s books, a theologian, an editor of her father’s works; she was an artist’s model, first for William Collins’ painting in oils of her as Wordsworth’s Highland Girl in 1818 and then for a watercolour by Edward Nash in 1820. Invariably, all these other facets of Coleridge’s life and work jostle with her poetry for scholarly attention. Faced with the difficult task of selecting a particular angle or approach, no one to date who has made the decision to write about Sara Coleridge has chosen to make her poetry a prime focus of study. And the reason for this, I think, is because Coleridge’s poetry is markedly different from the kind of poetry we’re more used to reading.

When it came to writing poetry, Sara Coleridge stuck closely to the advice Robert Southey later gave a young Charlotte Brontë. She was content to “write poetry for its own sake; not in a spirit of emulation, and not with a view to celebrity.” She was, in the best sense of the word, an amateur who pursued poetry-writing for the same reasons that anyone pursues any recreational hobby: “Just as I would have any one learn music who has an opportunity, though few can be composers, or even performers of great merit,” she explained, “I would have any one, who really and truly has leisure and ability, make verses. I think it a more refining and happy-making occupation than any other pastime-accomplishment

The piece de resistance was a talk by Melissa Mitchell, Assistant Curator about what we can learn from working in archives on manuscripts. Ms Mitchell quoted Philip Larkin on two values: the magical, a relic before the present person’s eyes and in hand of the literal circumstances of the writing; the intimate: we reach a level of closeness and shared experience to see private letters. She had a digital copy of a letter in the museum written at age 16 by Dorothy Wordsworth to a friend, Jane Pollard: the sheets are completely filled and only cross-hatched (to save money) on the outer part of the paper which served as an envelope. One feels one gets close to the creative process by what Dorothy describes of her behavior towards others and by what intelligent company reviewers could glean from visits. We see how sad Dorothy could be, how her aunt and uncle behaved meanly, coldly, harshly to her (their standards for dealing with wards is I hope not replicated today). Dorothy’s hope lies in joining her brothers, she dreams of sharing a cottage and making a garden.

Here is one by Dorothy after many years of living with William, and then with his wife and children and amid all the other romantic poets and writers: she still was a person who remained apart in herself:

Floating Island

Harmonious powers with nature work
On sky, earth, river, lake and sea;
Sunshine and cloud, whirlwind and breeze,
All in one duteous task agree.

Once did I see a slip of earth
By throbbing waves long undermined,
Loosed from its hold—how, no one knew,
But all might see it float, obedient to the wind,

Might see it from the mossy shore
Dissevered, float upon the lake,
Float with its crest of trees adorned,
On which the warbling birds their pastime take.

Food, shelter, safety, there they find;
There berries ripen, flowerets bloom;
There insects live their lives—and die:
A peopled world it is, in size a tiny room.

And thus through many seasons’ space
This little island may survive,
But nature (though we mark her not)
Will take away, may cease to give.

Perchance when you are wandering forth
Upon some vacant sunny day
Without an object, hope, or fear,
Thither your eyes may turn—the isle is passed away,

Buried beneath the glittering lake,
Its place no longer to be found.
Yet the lost fragments shall remain
To fertilize some other ground.
(1828-29; 1842)

See my “Foremother poet: Dorothy Wordsworth (1771-1855).

Mitchell didn’t finish her talk as there were so many good questions and the answers took her in other directions from this letter and manuscripts as such. We don’t have all Dorothy left as her grandson crossed out lines to make her writing illegible. Dorothy was a deeply passionate young woman, she seemed so different from many people, slightly (or a lot) wild. Mitchell took down from the shelves of the room (like Chawton a room set aside for first editions of the writers of the era) a first edition of Milton which had been Wordsworth’s own copy; it was rebound either by Wordsworth or shortly after his death and Ms Mitchell read aloud a description on the inside by Mary Wordsworth about the rebinding of the book. It was an emotional experience to hear this kind of talk. Mitchell told of the story of Dorothy’s anguish the night before William married Mary (and how Dorothy wore the wedding ring that night on her hand) and the finding of the love letters of Mary and Wm which show they were tenderly in love. At the top of the museum is an exhibit intended to remind the visitor of Dorothy’s last years suffering senile dementia: the state of medicine at the era is seen in a replica of her last bed and the treatments attempted to alleviate her helplessness.

The politics of era and fine line these writers had to walk not only socially but politically, was eschewed and the presence of Pitt’s gov’t. We were not quite told how William was just finally (through patronage) offered a paying job, nor of the kind of surveillance, pressure and destruction that could be wreaked on any of the individuals in the circle who became too overtly radical in his public lifetime. Think of the imprisonment of Leigh Hunt, with whom, and about which experience Daisy Hay opens her book (see below). I cover this in my review of Kenneth Johstone’s Unusual Suspects: Pitt’s Reign of Alarm and the Lost Generation of the 1790s:

The bookshop is worth going to because upstairs they have older used books and the volumes up and downstairs have been carefully chosen and culled to include the best scholarship on the writing and visual art of the region. I bought two paperbacks I could carry by authors whose essays I’ve enjoyed:

We had lunch as a group in an old pub in Keswick and then were left to our own devices for a couple of hours. I found a good bookstore with little trouble. It was place for local people to sit in the square and talk, there were all sorts of ordinary shops and tourist places intermingled. I went to an art exhibit of lovely watercolors and then in the church found an historical exhibit about mining in the area and some remarkable chalk drawings of the mines and quarries sometimes executed with the picturesque in mind. I wished I had had room in my case to bring back some of these pictures that I saw.

Keswick, central town square

On the road again, “in the minibuses,” we passed by and made a quick visit (half an hour) to a famous slate mine, now turned into a perpetual shop for items made of slate for passersby and tourists to buy. One must keep in mind how what these sites are today are places for visitors to come and look at as snatched out and preserved pieces of history. That is their function and so they direct themselves to those who are using the sites to have (they hope) numinous or pleasant experiences. Every attempt is made to declare the site special, somehow lifted from the ordinary, and (to my mind) these are only successful when not too many people come to them and they remain relatively unchanged or are (as in this case) openly redirected as a store

Slate Mine — we stopped by several later in the week — I bought a new pair of earrings and a barret (to replace the one I had to give up going through security at one point because forsooth it made too much noise and I had a plane to catch and no time to cope with explanations)

Then we drove to a high point of a hill and looked down on Buttermere, a spectacularly beautiful lake just as the sky is darkening, whereupon we drove in another direction way, higher and higher, in circles, and suddenly found ourselves stopped at the bottom of a hill. Climb it and you find yourself in a small circle of neolithic stones.

Castlerigg can be found in wikipedia and is said to be among the most visited of the neolothic stone sites of Cumbria.  The question is of course what were these open air temples or airy-buildings for? I wish we had had more lectures or that the guides could have furnished more information, but what they said was true: we don’t know for sure what these circles were used for. This small one had the merit that on that day it appeared to our eyes relatively unknown (the guide suggested this) so there was no crowded parking lot, and only a few people around. It was late in the afternoon, and I could see it’s quietly taken care of or it would not last. It’s a kind of time capsule today; seen a couple of centuries ago Keats was not that impressed: “Scarce images of life, one here, one there,/Lay vast and edgeways; like a dismal cirque/Of Druid stones, upon a forlorn moor…“ Maybe the weather was bad that day: we had sun, if not as much as in the photo: its landspace is protected by the National Trust

Castlerigg

An extraordinarily good book I bought when visiting Stonehenge, Avebury (both crowded with tourists, restaurants, tours) and Stanton Drew (like Castlerigg left alone basically) with Jim, Laura, and Isobel, Christopher Chippindale in his Stonehenge Complete tells of how vulnerable these stones are to defacement and from the weather. Peter talked of control of the weather by neolithic farmers and told a couple of stories: I suspect cruel sacrifices may have gone on in one, but like many historical sites de mémoire, the shell of what was can now be made to harbour and represent quite different meanings. Such preserved places carve out a space which can image present-day human resistance to the destruction and chance and loss; they can stand for the opposing impulse: human resistance to taking into account what really was — though this was not true of the Road Scholar tour as we went to the grim prisons (I’ll talk of the Hermitage, a castle with dungeons on the Scottish side of the border and Etal Castle (near Flodden Field another day). They show us too since they have been left to survive what human beings potentially can reverence and make socially functioning places to come to and experience together. Somehow the places become something more in memory after we left them.

In the evening after dinner three of us, me, Barbara, and Sara, accompanied a seemingly tireless Peter on a sort of zig-zag hop until we reached the top of our local Windermere pond. He said he had had enough of being on a bus for many hours.  He is a 76 year old man, originally from London, now lives in a small house on a sort of island in Cumbria. He was ever pushing us higher and higher and we actually got to the top and gazed out across the landscape just near the hotel:

This is one of the hotel’s promotional shots: it does show the gardens which have been much developed since Beatrice Potter’s day: a short history:

it is not a big glamorous modern hotel; rather it is a converted and expanded country mansion (not that big originally, imagine 9 rooms on 2 floors, with a stable nearby, plus kitchen garden). It was owned by Beatrice Potter first as a summer home, then a place to put her aging mother. During WW1 a tiny hospital, then a bed and breakfast, now a hotel. It is just outside Bowness, a large town on one shore of Lake Windermere, not far from where Wordsworth once lived. I should add it now has 30 plus “guests, 4 common rooms (for different purposes), dining room with piano, bar, office, kitchens&c, three medium gardens (the largest of which supplies the photo perspective), parking lot …

Ellen