Adam Nicolson - The Making of Poetry

Over the smooth, curved carriage drive leading back to the village, buzzards turn in the wind off the sea. A dog barks in Holford Glen, and in response the buzzards catcall over the dying ashwoods. Looking down from the footbridge, the rocks and all the ferns beside them are invisible under the roof of summer leaves. As Alfoxden drops into its felt-lined dark, I stay up and walk along the easy way through the edge of the park. Miles off to the north, the surge of a westerly swell breaks and draws on the stones at East Quantoxhead.

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?

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