William Wordsworth A Poet's Guide to Britain


William Wordsworth

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This is the Skirrid on the edge of the Black Mountains in South Wales.

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It's a place that I love.

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I've been coming here nearly all of my life and I will never tire

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of the incredibly dramatic views that you get off this ridge.

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Look at that - absolutely stunning.

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When I first started to write poetry,

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this hill and all of the landscape around here

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found their way into the work that I was writing.

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I think that in Britain our poets have always had

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a very intense relationship with the places that matter to them.

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In this series I'll be looking at six of my favourite poems

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that have come out of this ongoing conversation

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between the British landscape and her poets.

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There are places that speak, telling the stories of us and them.

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A village asleep, loaded with dream.

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An ocean, flicking its pages over the sand.

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Eventually we reply.

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A conversation of place and page over time,

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inscribing the map so that each, In turn, might hold the line.

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The most famous conversation between a poet and the British landscape

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was that between William Wordsworth and the Lake District.

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When you think of Wordsworth, the images

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that probably come to mind

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are lakes, wandering clouds and daffodils.

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And yet, in 1802,

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when Wordsworth wrote in would become one of his best-known poems,

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"Earth hath not anything to show more fair",

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the beautiful view he was writing about

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wasn't a mountain or some flowers he'd stumbled upon

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or anything in his beloved Lake District.

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He was writing instead about this place -

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London.

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Earth has not anything to show more fair:

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Dull would he be of soul who could pass by

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A sight so touching in its majesty:

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This city now doth like a garment wear

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The beauty of the morning;

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silent, bare,

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Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie

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Open unto the fields, and to the sky,

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All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.

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Never did sun more beautifully steep

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In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;

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Ne'er saw I, never felt a calm so deep!

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The river glideth at his own sweet will:

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Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;

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And all that mighty heart is lying still!

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This poem by Wordsworth, a 14-line sonnet about London at dawn,

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is one of the great love songs to this city.

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It's a really fantastic piece of writing

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that I think does all the things that a good poem should,

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in that over an incredibly short space of page,

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it really takes us somewhere.

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It really manages to change the weather in our heads.

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It's also a poem that's very much of its time

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and yet manages to travel remarkably well,

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in that were we to walk across Westminster Bridge now,

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we would still have the same basic experience

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that Wordsworth is talking about.

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There'd still be that moment of stillness

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in between all that activity on the banks.

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You only have to talk to the people who cross it every morning

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on their way to work to get a sense of this.

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It's two hours from house to work. I don't mind a bit.

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I can walk across here and it's just glorious.

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At 8 o'clock, half seven when not many people are around that's the best time.

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The best thing for me about seeing the river in the morning,

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is it's a very small world shared with very few people.

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So very early in the morning when just the sun's coming up,

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it feels like a little town.

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All the beautiful buildings, they kind of stand out.

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-You know, Lambeth Bridge.

-You're reminded this is a city

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who's main feature is the lovely river running through it.

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I think these are exactly the feelings that Wordsworth describes.

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This is a beautifully simple poem about the city at dawn.

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So how come it was written by a poet from the Lake District?

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What was Wordsworth doing on Westminster Bridge that morning?

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Where was he going? What was on his mind?

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The story behind the poem

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is the surprising tale of Wordsworth's love life,

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the complex tale of his love for three different women.

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To get to the bottom of this story,

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I headed for more familiar Wordsworth territory,

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the Lake District.

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Lakeland poet William Wordsworth was of course one of the towering figures of English Romanticism,

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alongside Keats, Byron, Shelley and Wordsworth's close friend Coleridge.

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When he started writing at the end of the 18th century he was an idealistic radical.

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By the end of his life in the middle of the 19th,

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he'd become the revered and grand old man of English verse.

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The Lakes is where Wordsworth was born and bred,

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lived much of his life,

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and where his poetry seems indelibly inked on the landscape.

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For Wordsworth as a writer, the landscape of the Lake District

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was so much more than just his poetic canvas.

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It was his teacher, his muse, or as he said himself,

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"The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse

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"The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul

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"Of all my moral being."

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Although Wordsworth was raised in the Lakes, at 17 he moved away,

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first to university in Cambridge.

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After that he became something of a nomad,

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spending much much of his time hiking across England and Wales

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and further afield on trips to Switzerland, Germany, Austria and Revolutionary France.

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During those years, he was restlessly searching for a purpose for his life

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and defining his ideas about nature, religion and politics.

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In 1800, at the age of 29, Wordsworth found himself once again

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without a permanent residence

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and with a growing certainty that he was ready to go back home.

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In the autumn of that year

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he returned on a walking tour with Coleridge.

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It was on that walking tour that he discovered this cottage.

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Immediately it seemed like the ideal place

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in which to begin a new chapter of his life.

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At this point in his life, it's fair to say that in the eyes of the world

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at the age of 29 Wordsworth had achieved relatively little.

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But once ensconced in this place, all of that began to change.

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When he moved in here the house was cold,

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apparently one of the chimneys smoked very badly.

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But Wordsworth didn't mind.

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He was just ecstatic to finally have a home.

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The publication of the radical collection

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of his and Coleridge's verse, Lyrical Ballads,

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had started to make his name.

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But with the new-found security of this place,

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over the next three years Wordsworth would go on

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to write some of the best poetry of his life.

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But Wordsworth didn't come to Dove Cottage on his own.

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He moved in with his sister Dorothy.

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William and Dorothy were brought up separately,

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after the death of first their mother and then their father.

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However, they retained a strong emotional bond

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and in their mid-20s,

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out of friendship and convenience, they began living together.

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By the time they moved to Grasmere, five years later,

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they were clearly devoted companions.

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The fascinatingly intimate journal that Dorothy kept

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about their time together here

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is the main source of information about their daily routine.

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It's also clear from the pages of this journal,

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that brother and sister shared and discussed

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many of the experiences that would go on to become Wordsworth's poems.

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There's still a strong echo at Dove Cottage

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of that intense literary and personal relationship

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between brother and sister.

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Although neither these rooms, Dorothy's journal, nor Wordsworth's poems,

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answer the many outstanding questions about their artistic and emotional interaction.

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I was once fortunate enough to be the writer-in-residence at the Wordsworth Trust here in Grasmere.

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The man with that job today is Adam O'Riordan.

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I wondered what his response was to living with William and Dorothy.

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There is this sense of the things

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that Dorothy and William and Coleridge

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and everyone else was pushing towards do still live on here in a way.

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I guess the role of the poet-in-residence is to embody that

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and to be that, if that doesn't sound too grand, which it's not.

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You're keeping that going, you're writing the poems.

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There is something so winning and drawing

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about re-imagining the intimacies that existed between the Wordsworths,

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between Dorothy and Mary and William, and what went on in that house.

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It is a great starting point for poems.

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I know other poems have written successfully about them,

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but they're great places to go to fire your imagination.

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A Double Wash Stand.

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Before the age condemned

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such joint ablutions

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You dip your hands in the tepid water

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as geese come in low across the lake

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landing on their shadows,

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their shadows becoming their wake

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breaking apart the imago they seem to chase.

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So you break this tension, shattering your own reflections.

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There's a complicity in getting clean together

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who knows what distances you travelled in your sleep

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back towards one another,

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and the secrets that those distances will keep,

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each movement fluid and practised in the winter air.

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You revel in this intimate act, not quite each other's double.

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Your easy mime of mannerisms from other lives

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like brother and sister.

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No, I mean man and wife.

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There will always be speculation about William and Dorothy's relationship at Dove Cottage

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but she certainly wasn't the only woman in Wordsworth's life.

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One of his closest friends at the time

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was a Lakeland girl, Mary Hutchinson.

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Wordsworth had actually been in the same school as Mary Hutchinson,

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so he'd known her almost all of his life.

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In the summer of 1787 she joined William and Dorothy on their rambles

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through the woods and hills of Penrith.

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Since their arrival at Dove Cottage, she'd been a regular visitor.

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At some point, we think around the end of 1801,

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William decided to ask her to marry him.

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His marriage to Mary and her settling in at Dove Cottage

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would be the final keystone in the architecture of this newly settled life

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that Wordsworth was building for himself at Grasmere.

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In early 1802, William and Mary were more than ready to get married,

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but there was a problem.

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Several hundred miles away from here in Grasmere there was another woman

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who had been calling herself Mrs Wordsworth for the last ten years.

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Annette Vallon, the third woman in this story, had met Wordsworth

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when as a hot-blooded young graduate he travelled to France

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to take a look at the Revolution in action.

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He met Annette in the city of Orleans.

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One thing led to another

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and a couple of months after they met she was pregnant.

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Wordsworth left France before the baby was born,

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and although he may have planned to return,

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a few weeks after he came back, France declared war on England.

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Return to Annette and his newly-born daughter Caroline became impossible

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and gradually Wordsworth's thoughts of France began to fade.

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In the spring of 1802, Wordsworth realised that

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he just couldn't get married to Mary

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without first going to France to speak with Annette face to face.

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Thanks to a recent peace treaty with the French,

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this was, for the first time in a decade, actually possible.

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On 9th July, William left Grasmere for London on his way to Calais.

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As ever, he wasn't travelling on his own.

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His companion was his sister, Dorothy.

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Wordsworth had both enjoyed and suffered the maelstrom of London

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on a number of occasions before 1802,

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and his poetic responses sum up the sensory overload

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that the capital made on his Lakelander sensibility.

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The quick dance Of colour, lights, and forms;

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the Babel din;

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The endless stream of men and moving things

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The comers and the goers face to face, face after face.

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This was the city in which William and Dorothy found themselves,

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when early on the morning of July 31st, 1802

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they arrived at Charing Cross to catch a stagecoach for Dover.

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The Wordsworths had taken their seats on the top of the carriage,

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quite possibly because they were cheaper.

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This meant they were able to see over the bridge's parapet,

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which was much higher than it is now.

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As they crossed over Westminster Bridge they were both enraptured by the view,

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which more than likely remained their topic of conversation

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as the coach carried on towards Dover.

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When Dorothy wrote about their trip to France some months later,

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her journal seems to pause for a moment

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to pay special attention to the view from the bridge.

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"It was a beautiful morning.

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"The city, St Paul's, with the river and a multitude of little boats,

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"made a most beautiful sight as we crossed Westminster Bridge.

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"The houses were not overhung by their cloud of smoke

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"and they were spread out endlessly,

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"yet the sun shone so brightly with such a pure light

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"that there was even something

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"like the purity of one of nature's own grand spectacles."

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This entry from Dorothy's journal

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clearly shares William's images and words

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and we can only imagine that it was their conversation

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on the bridge that morning which brought the poem to life.

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Earth has not anything to show more fair:

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Dull would he be of soul who could pass by

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A sight so touching in its majesty

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This city now doth, like a garment,

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wear the beauty of the morning; silent, bare

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Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie

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Open unto the fields and to the skies

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All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.

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Never did sun more beautifully steep

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in his first splendour, valley, rock or hill;

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Ne'er saw I, never felt a calm so deep!

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The river glideth at his own sweet will:

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Dear God! The very houses seem asleep;

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And all that mighty heart is lying still!

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The basic experience that Wordsworth is describing

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and is making us live again in this poem,

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is one that of course all of us experience all the time in cities.

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When you're on one side of the river

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and you're in those very close horizons of the streets

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and you've got buildings all around you,

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you've got a lot of noise and activity.

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Then you step out onto the bridge and you walk across the bridge

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and then suddenly there's this space in the air.

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You haven't got buildings in front of your eyes.

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You've got the river there.

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The movement of the poem is very simple,

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from that opening line of astonished statement

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through to that sense of a very deep calmness.

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But across that movement, the poem is charged crucially by a sense of brevity,

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and you can really get a sense of that brevity of experience

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that Wordsworth was talking about when you see the bridge here.

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Then of course there's the brevity of the form, the sonnet,

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which I think really gives the poem its potency, its power.

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It's within those tight 14 lines

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that Wordsworth has to capture this moment of rare beauty.

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I mean, if you just have a look at that opening line,

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"Earth has not anything to show more fair:"

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The weight on that first syllable is total.

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Imagine how much weaker it would have been if he'd said "the world"

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and we didn't have that weight until the second syllable.

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That continues onto the second line when Wordsworth says,

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"Dull would he be of soul who could pass by".

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And who wants to be thought of as being dull of soul?

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None of us. So we stay with the poet and we linger.

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And then again, the close of the poem is broken up

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with this quite surprising apostrophe - "Dear God!"

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- before it falls down to this sense of a very beautiful calmness.

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"he very houses seem asleep:

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"And all that mighty heart is lying still!"

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It's a sublime vision of London, in which the city becomes

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a sleeping, breathing, organic creature.

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The poet Simon Armitage is a fan of Wordsworth,

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who shares my passion for this poem.

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It came as a great shock to me. I look at this poem, with the line,

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"Earth has not anything to show more fair",

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and I think it's going to be about a mountain or a lake or something.

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It turns out to be a poem about London,

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which you would imagine to be Wordsworth's nemesis, really.

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I think I always went on to think about it for a long time afterwards

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as a poem which simply celebrated the city

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and was a kind of anomaly in his work.

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But actually having gone back to the poem a number of times,

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I have a different reading of it now.

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If you look closely at the poem, the city cannot exist as something

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beautiful and miraculous without nature's presence.

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The city is entirely transfigured by the morning sun.

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Not only that, it's framed as well.

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There's a phrase in the poem about

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being open to the fields and the sunlight.

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Every part of the city has a border of nature.

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There's the sky, there's the sun, there's the fields,

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and there is the river.

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After crossing Westminster Bridge, the Wordsworths travelled to Dover

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and then took a boat that evening over to Calais.

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They arrived early the next morning.

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William went on shore and met Annette almost immediately.

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In 1802, Calais was no more glamorous a town than it is today.

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But it must have been a fascinating place to visit

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immediately after ten years of war between England and France.

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Dorothy's journal is quiet detailed about some of their time here.

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She complains about the bad smells in their lodgings

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and she waxes lyrical about the phosphorescence in the sea.

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She is frustratingly quiet on the things we really want to know about.

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What was it like for William and Annette to see one another again?

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Was there still any spark?

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How was it for William to meet his nine-year-old daughter

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for the first time in his life?

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His already imperfect French would have been fairly rusty,

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so how did they even manage to talk to one another?

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What we do know is that they spent a lot of time together on the beach.

0:20:310:20:35

"We walked by the sea shore almost every evening

0:20:370:20:39

"with Annette and Caroline, or William and I alone.

0:20:390:20:43

"I had a bad cold and could not bathe at once, but William did."

0:20:430:20:48

This beach holiday lasted for a whole month,

0:20:480:20:51

and whilst there's no surviving record,

0:20:510:20:53

William and Annette obviously reached some kind of agreement

0:20:530:20:57

which allowed him to marry with a clear conscience.

0:20:570:21:00

The month on the beach also afforded William

0:21:020:21:04

plenty of time for writing poetry.

0:21:040:21:06

Wordsworth loved to form his poems while he was walking,

0:21:070:21:11

ideally across uninterrupted ground

0:21:110:21:13

so that his rhythms and thoughts weren't disturbed.

0:21:130:21:17

So the impressive expanse here would have been the perfect place for him to compose,

0:21:170:21:23

especially because the 12 or 13 poems that he wrote over that month

0:21:230:21:28

were all sonnets, 14 lines, tightly packed,

0:21:280:21:32

and easy to hold in the mind as Wordsworth strode along these sands.

0:21:320:21:38

Once again, Dorothy had a crucial hand in this.

0:21:380:21:41

She had been reading

0:21:410:21:42

the sonnets of the great John Milton to her brother.

0:21:420:21:45

It was these that influenced him to experiment with the sonnet himself.

0:21:450:21:49

Including one fantastic poem which I've always read as kind of

0:21:490:21:54

a counterpoint to his sonnet about the dawn in London,

0:21:540:21:57

in which he mentions his daughter Caroline.

0:21:570:22:00

The poem begins with the evocative lines...

0:22:020:22:04

It is a beauteous evening, calm and free,

0:22:040:22:08

The holy time is quiet as a Nun

0:22:080:22:11

And concludes with these words for his young daughter...

0:22:140:22:17

Dear Child! dear Girl! That walkest with me here,

0:22:170:22:21

If thou appear untouched by solemn thought,

0:22:210:22:24

Thy nature is not therefore less divine:

0:22:240:22:27

It's curious that this brief and unique reference to the poet's daughter,

0:22:430:22:47

although fond, seems strangely detached.

0:22:470:22:50

Especially when compared to the passion that Wordsworth expresses about London.

0:22:500:22:55

That summer of 1802, Wordsworth seems to have focused his energies

0:22:590:23:03

on refining his skills as a sonneteer.

0:23:030:23:05

The sonnets he wrote are all impressive,

0:23:050:23:08

and they provide an important context

0:23:080:23:11

for the sonnet on Westminster Bridge.

0:23:110:23:13

What is really fascinating

0:23:150:23:16

about the story around the writing of this poem,

0:23:160:23:19

is how it touches on so many exciting elements of Wordsworth.

0:23:190:23:24

Nowadays the reputation of Wordsworth is quite often drawn

0:23:240:23:28

from the later part of his life,

0:23:280:23:29

Wordsworth when he was in his establishment phase.

0:23:290:23:32

But the story around this poem

0:23:320:23:34

really reminds us exactly how incredibly radical he was.

0:23:340:23:38

It's worth remembering that as a young man,

0:23:380:23:41

Wordsworth had been an extensive traveller,

0:23:410:23:44

a sympathiser with the French Revolution,

0:23:440:23:46

a father outside of marriage,

0:23:460:23:48

and a poet who chose not to live in literary London,

0:23:480:23:51

but in the Lake District.

0:23:510:23:53

The poem moves between these two places that really formed Wordsworth -

0:23:530:23:57

the Lake District and the radical revolutionary France

0:23:570:24:02

that he had known as a young man.

0:24:020:24:04

And right in the middle, halfway between those two places, is London.

0:24:050:24:09

When you see the poem in this context, it's not surprising

0:24:090:24:12

that what Wordsworth writes is in its own way quite radical.

0:24:120:24:16

There's always been a tendency in, you know,

0:24:180:24:23

traditional forms of literature

0:24:230:24:25

to see the city as places of evil intent.

0:24:250:24:30

You know, filthy, murderous, inhuman places.

0:24:300:24:35

Wordsworth, in this poem, takes the opposite view.

0:24:350:24:40

I think that is quite a watershed moment really, in poetry.

0:24:420:24:46

Even the though the poem is, to a certain extent,

0:24:460:24:48

sentimental and romantic with a small R,

0:24:480:24:51

I still think it's a brave poem,

0:24:510:24:55

especially for somebody like Wordsworth

0:24:550:24:58

whose philosophies lie elsewhere,

0:24:580:25:01

to stand up and stay at this moment, "This is beauty".

0:25:010:25:05

A Vision.

0:25:100:25:12

The future was a beautiful place, once.

0:25:120:25:16

Remember the full-blown balsa-wood town

0:25:160:25:19

on public display in the Civic Hall?

0:25:190:25:22

Ring-bound sketches, artists' impressions,

0:25:220:25:26

blueprints of smoked glass and tubular steel,

0:25:260:25:31

board-game suburbs,

0:25:310:25:33

modes of transportation like fairground rides or executive toys.

0:25:330:25:39

Cities like dreams, cantilevered by light.

0:25:390:25:43

And people like us, at the bottle bank next to the cycle path,

0:25:430:25:48

or dog-walking over tended strips of Fuzzy-Felt grass,

0:25:480:25:53

or model drivers, motoring home in electric cars.

0:25:530:25:58

Or after the late show strolling the boulevard.

0:25:580:26:02

They were the plans,

0:26:020:26:04

all underwritten in the neat left-hand of architects...

0:26:040:26:08

a true, legible script.

0:26:080:26:11

I pulled that future out of the north wind at the landfill site,

0:26:120:26:17

stamped with today's date, riding the air with other such futures,

0:26:170:26:23

all unlived in and now fully extinct.

0:26:230:26:27

From London, the Wordsworths headed back north

0:26:410:26:43

where William finally got to marry Mary.

0:26:430:26:46

He brought his new bride back to Grasmere

0:26:460:26:48

where they lived for the rest of their lives,

0:26:480:26:50

eventually ending up here

0:26:500:26:52

at this grand Victorian villa in Rydal Mount,

0:26:520:26:56

just 20 minutes' walk away from Dove Cottage.

0:26:560:27:00

And Dorothy?

0:27:000:27:01

Well, she lived with her brother and his wife for the rest of her life

0:27:010:27:04

in what was a fairly unusual but remarkably successful domestic arrangement.

0:27:040:27:09

And what about the third woman from that summer of 1802,

0:27:110:27:14

Annette and her daughter Caroline?

0:27:140:27:16

As far as we know, Wordsworth only ever met them one more time

0:27:160:27:21

while on a holiday with his family in Paris 20 years later.

0:27:210:27:25

By which point he and Mary had three teenage children of their own.

0:27:250:27:29

In the end, we have no idea how Wordsworth

0:27:310:27:34

responded to the complex situation he found himself in that summer,

0:27:340:27:38

meeting his mistress and a daughter for the first time

0:27:380:27:42

on the eve of his marriage to Mary.

0:27:420:27:45

But what we do know is that as a result of that journey,

0:27:450:27:48

Wordsworth, our great poet of nature,

0:27:480:27:52

wrote one of the most euphoric poems about a city

0:27:520:27:54

in the English language.

0:27:540:27:56

What really fascinates me though

0:27:580:28:00

is how the resonance of the poem has actually strengthened over time.

0:28:000:28:05

What I mean by that is as the city of London

0:28:050:28:07

becomes increasingly built-up,

0:28:070:28:09

as it becomes increasingly more hectic around us,

0:28:090:28:12

the experience that the poem describes

0:28:120:28:14

of that great sense of relief that we get as we cross over the Thames,

0:28:140:28:19

has over the years actually become not less but more powerful.

0:28:190:28:24

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