Adam Nicolson - The Making of Poetry - Coleridge, the Wordsworths and Their Year of Marvels

You need to shed any sense of Arcadian wellbeing. Britain was at war with France, press gangs were roaming the country to find men for the navy, informers were everywhere, and the Home Office files were bulging with letters from all corners, reporting on possible and known suspects. Prices were rising, and the country was full of maimed soldiers and desperate widows. Fences were often stolen for firewood. If you owned a cow and kept it in a field, you could expect it to have been milked by the hungry overnight. Hayricks by the road were regularly ‘plucked’ by the poor wanting to feed their own animals. Anyone growing peas would find them ‘swarming with the workhouse children’ in the weeks when the pods ripened. The dark, sunburned faces of the people were creased into premature old age. For meat they occasionally ate badgers, or the ‘Carrion Beef’ of a cow that had died in calving. The Reverend Holland, recording his parish visits in his journal, described how he called on a woman ‘in a most desperate way with a broken leg. She was glad to see me, and would crawl to the door.’ Otherwise, he sent his wife on the necessary visits. She

walked as far as the poor sick girl, who is indeed in a most deplorable state. I am advised not to go in to her as she is in a kind of putrid state – and indeed my wife I believe does not go in, but we send her something every day.

For all these and other outrages, for all his own anxieties, affected by toothache and neuralgia, by hideous dreams and pervasive worry, Coleridge was always able to dance and balloon into unbridled delight at the beauties of existence. Many years later, thinking of this wonderful summer, he wrote a short and Blake-like poem, a spontaneous aria celebrating the rich simplicity of friendship as ‘a shelt’ring tree’, and all the joys

that came down shower-like,

Of Beauty, Truth and Liberty,

When I was young, ere I was old!

The ideal of friendship hovers over this whole story as its subtle and fickle if ministering angel, but it is not Coleridge’s aria as much as his description of how it came to him that opens the door on to the form and habits of his mind in 1797. The poem was ‘an air’, he wrote, remembering the year of his youth in Somerset,

that whizzed δία ẻνκέφαλου [ dhia enkephalou ] (right across the diameter of my Brain) exactly like a Hummel Bee … close by my ear, at once sharp and burry, right over the summit of Quantock at earliest Dawn just between the Nightingale that I stopt to hear in the Copse at the foot of Quantock, and the first Sky-Lark that was a Song-Fountain, dashing up and sparkling to the Ear’s eye, in full column, or ornamented shaft of sound in the order of Gothic Extravaganza, out of sight, over the Cornfields on the Descent of the Mountain on the other side – out of sight, tho twice I beheld its mute shoot downward in the sunshine like a falling star of silver.

It is a paragraph that describes quickness but must be read slowly, the trace of Coleridge’s mind in the process of thinking: a bumblebee shooting past his ear half a lifetime before, holding the space between nightingale and skylark, whose song is now in his memory like a mountain stream in the eye of the ear (!), then becoming a high, rippling, barley-twist column of knobbled medieval beauty, but invisible, the bird itself disappearing into the wide lit spaces of the sky, but its mute , its droppings, gliding out of that ecstatic empyrean with the brilliance and glitter of a streaking meteor, a blob of mercury hurtling from the blue. Could there ever be inconsistency in a mind that thought like this? In which such potent synaesthesiac category-shifts dissolved all boundaries of time and space? In which inconsistency felt like the pulse of life?

I know this stretch of country well. I spent most of my twenties on foot, disenchanted with the world of cities. Paying for myself by writing about it in newspapers and magazines, I walked thousands of miles here in England, the same in France, and then in Europe, in Greece and Italy, not in pursuit of anything in particular except perhaps the reassurance of being able to engage with the physical world day after day, in fog and rain and snow, in the burnishing sunshine, usually alone, sleeping out in a small tent or in mountain bothies or in Greece inside the flea-ridden chapels. I was merely doing what Wordsworth and Coleridge, by some subterranean routes, flowing through the thousands of capillaries in Western culture, had taught me to do. All the years of education seemed less important than this. I once walked sixty miles in twenty hours across the Cotentin in northern France, most of the day and then all night, with a friend, an Anglo-Saxon scholar who had become a soldier, and who Coleridge-like for mile after mile didn’t draw breath. We began at Cherbourg, had dinner in Briquebec, coq au vin and a bottle of wine. Had I read Alcuin’s letters? Should he learn Farsi? What effect would living in a granite world like the Cotentin have on your mind, on your expectations of the solidity of things? Every hour or so we smoked a cigarette, leaning against one of those granite walls, sitting on the verge. The sun rose on the Normandy beaches and we swam in the golden, blue-eyed surf.

What is it about walking for days on end? Partly it is the love of self-reliance, of not needing to be dependent on anything or anyone. It is psychically naked, with the curious effect that this self-reliance seems to make your own skin more permeable. Alone on foot, not in any great heroic landscapes – these are not high mountain singular mist-visions – but in just such a place as the Somerset Levels, where the knitted ordinariness of everyday life forms the texture of the landscape through which you move – the small farms, the stalled animals, the life of the hedges – you become absorbent, inseparable from the world around you. Walking in that way is a dissolution of the self, not a magnification of it, a release from burdens, in which all you have to do is walk and be, as plainly existent as grass growing, continuous with everything that is.

The great land-artist Richard Long was my hero, and I wrote to him, wanting to talk about his absorption in the walked line, but he replied courteously by letter to say that there was nothing much we could discuss that he or I didn’t already know. And I wondered then if Romanticism, to which this habit of being was clearly the heir, alone out on the road, scarcely communicative with anyone except the self, was little but a form of loneliness, and of legitimising loneliness by being alone.

I spent one of those summers in the Levels, dropping into just the relationship with the country that Coleridge and Wordsworth had invented here two centuries before, at exactly their age, in my mid-twenties. One long afternoon remains in my memory when the water in the summer Levels, as always, was penned up in the rhynes that divide the low, damp fields, making wet fences between them.

Each rhyne shelters a particular world of butterbur or kingcup, water-mint or a flashy wedding show of flag-irises. If you sit on the bank, the high water in the field soaks up into the cloth of your trousers, so that the invitation to swim, to move over from watery peat to peaty water, is irresistible. Slowly that afternoon I lowered my body into the blood-warm cider-soup, crusty with frog-bit and duckweed, with seeds and reed shells. My feet were in the half-mud of the rhyne floor, a soft half-substance as if I were sinking into the folds of a brain. The arrowhead and bulrushes quivered in my wash and away down the rhyne – or so I always imagined – the eels released their bubbles as they shifted away from the disturbance.

This was embeddedness. The breadth of the water grows as you come near it to a generous private width, lobed into by the irises and the reeds. The air is warm and heady. Away down the rhyne a swan claps its wings. The meadows riffle in the wind. Heat and vapour wobble in the air above them. Everything hangs in suspension, and your skin turns a golden unnatural brown in the whisky water. Three hundred and fifty million years ago all life was water-life, and to float in a summer rhyne seemed then like a return to ancientness, to the deepest possible co-presence with the earth.