Like so many, lockdown and the pandemic has afforded me new reasons to explore my local environment, the City as well as Nature. It is an activity I loved pursuing when I first arrived, but it fell by the wayside as I pursued career goals and life became, well, busy.
Together with my partner - who is often the first to suggest it! - I soon found myself walking and cycling many miles in and around London, and I also started reading enthusiastically on relevant topics. After a trip to Epping, for example, I read poetry by John Clare and imagined him walking around High Beach while slowly regaining his spirits. Indeed, it is possible to walk in his footsteps.
The Romantic poets offer a rich bounty for ramblers and lovers of Nature everywhere. While London is also associated with William Blake and Percy Bysshe Shelley, I've actually never been to the area of the Lake Poets where the Wordsworths and their ilk spent many years. It probably shouldn't have been, but to me it was a surprise to learn that when they first moved to the area it was still considered a wilderness.
Jack Thurston, referring to Daniel Defoe's travels through the North and Cumbria in the 1720s, puts it thus:
"Fear and loathing was the most common reaction to wild and unruly landscapes in those days. It was not without reason. The condition of roads ranged from terrible to non-existent, and travelling was painfully slow. What's more, the weather could be genuinely life-threatening, as Defoe discovered when he was caught in a snowstorm in the South Pennines in August" (Thurston, Lost Lanes North, p.16).
When the Wordsworths settled there it was no doubt becoming more habitable, but not by much. Their literary legacy is now a part of the establishment, so it is instructive to consider that settling there was in fact a countercultural move, an "act of defiance, a wholehearted rejection of the fashionable, metropolitan way of life". It completely changed my perspective on their practice.
There is no question as to Wordsworth's deep love for Nature and the English countryside. Not only his poetry, but just as importantly, his actions attest to this fact. He is estimated to have walked around 175,000 miles. To put that into perspective, you would have to walk a distance of nine and a half miles every single day for 50 years! It is not hard to imagine William and Dorothy walking silently among the fells, each delighting in or meditating on their surroundings and composing thoughts and words for poetry or diary.
William's dictum that "Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity" takes on a unique meaning for writing practice when we consider that this is not recollection in the silent privacy of a room. Wordsworth would have been considering those lines in the open air, while walking!
David Gange mentions the historian G.M. Trevelyan who, not unlike Wordsworth, sought to find an antidote to the "absurdity of the city's speed and steel" in romantic wildness that stimulates the imagination. Of past masters Trevelyan particularly esteemed Thomas Carlyle:
"Carlyle walked large distances, gesticulating his way across the moor as he muttered purple prose. While wandering, he dreamed up vivid portraits of great events, expressed with unique intensity in a style soon christened 'Carlylese'. When walking, his companions wrote, Carlyle became a feature of the landscape: 'a living, not extinct volcano whose lava-torrents of fever-frenzy enveloped all things'" - (Gange, The Frayed Atlantic Edge, p. 148).
Neither Trevelyan nor Carlyle saw history or literature as "a thing to be done at a desk in an urban room without something elemental to ignite the imagination". Writing is merely an extension of walking and meditating, and of being immersed in Nature; or to put it differently, "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings [...] recollected in tranquillity".
In The Frayed Atlantic Edge David Gange explores by kayak many of the coastal areas where communities once thrived on open farming and crofting as well as various local industries. One of the most serious blows to local communities' way of life came in the form of the Education Act of 1872, which eroded local Gaelic identity by forcing Gaelic-speaking children to learn only in English. It had a deeply demoralising effect. Another serious blow came in the form of the infamous Clearances when landlords at first sought "agricultural improvement", enclosing the open farmlands of their tenants, and then helped them emigrate once they fell into poverty. As with Wordsworth, cultural practitioners who came to these fringes to foreground romantic wildness over mechnanising efficiency were considered radical, making countercultural statements against the centralising, hegemonising tendencies of the South and of London.
The city can also be a place of creative immersion and rambling, of course, as exemplified by the flaneur and psychogeographer. In this case Blake or De Quincey would instead be our guide. Peter Ackroyd, in London: The Biography, observes that William Wordsworth links the City in The Prelude to a prison:
Of bondage, from yon City’s walls set free,
A prison where he hath been long immured.
- (lines 7-8)
Elsewhere he also suggests that Wordsworth "recoiled from an innate and exuberant theatricality" in the city, observed in the cacophony of advertisements and the anarchic spirit of a place like Bartholomew Fair. Ackroyd on the other hand revels in the elemental and devouring properties of the City, which enables its enduring greatness, and he appears to consider Wordsworth constitutionally unsuitable to appreciate it. Be that as it may, Wordsworth has more in common with the city flaneur than at first meets the eye. In Michael: A Pastoral Poem (1800), the poet writes:
If from the public way you turn your steps
Up the tumultuous brook of Greenhead Ghyll,
You will suppose that with an upright path
Your feet must struggle; in such bold ascent
The pastoral mountains front you, face to face.
But, courage! for around that boisterous brook
The mountains have all opened out themselves,
And made a hidden valley of their own.
No habitation can be seen; but they
Who journey thither find themselves alone
With a few sheep, with rocks and stones, and kites
That overhead are sailing in the sky.
It is in truth an utter solitude;
Nor should I have made mention of this Dell
But for one object which you might pass by,
Might see and notice not. Beside the brook
Appears a struggling heap of unhewn stones!
And to that simple object appertains
A story—unenriched with strange events,
- (lines 1-19)
Is such a chance encounter with a random pile of rocks with its own unique story not the very stuff of psychogeography? Indeed, Wordsworth's oeuvre might even be considered 'psychogeography of the countryside'! Incidentally, although Wordsworth wrote many poems that take local people as their subject, none of those I've read personally highlights the discrepancy between the romantic pastoral and the metropolitan centre as poignantly as Michael.
Whether it's in the City or in Nature, there is something inherently exhilarating about being out in the open air and among the elements. It is an experience that is difficult to reason about clearly from a sofa indoors, and perhaps an experience that is even a little alien to many citydwellers. Cloud cover, the cold and the rain is rarely enticing from the warm comfort of the living room, and we grudgingly weather it with a brolly until we get to the muddy, slippery floors of the nearest tube station.
But once I get on the bike something strange happens. At first it is uncomfortable, and then within minutes I am suddenly used to it: the bite of the cold and the feeling of rain on my face herald the joy and freedom of moving around as I breathe the air. It is hard to explain. Out in the countryside this experience is further amplified. Jack Thurston describes it as follows:
"On a bicycle you travel at the speed of the land. You don't just see and hear the world and the weather change around you but you smell it and feel it. Physical effort heightens the sense and you feel everything with a greater clarity - the wind in your hair, the sun on your back, a drenching by rain or the chill of a crisp winter's day. You feel each incline in your legs, in your lungs, and the swooping descent in your stomach, the sway as you lean the bike this way and that to climb a hill or round a bend. The bicycle is a total immersion machine." (Lost Lanes North, p. 13).
Another poet who gave himself over to living close to Nature and immersing himself in the setting is W.S. Graham. He is a modernist romantic poet whose works were neglected during his own lifetime, but have grown in importance in recent decades. He moved from his native Greenock in Scotland to Ireland, and later to Cornwall, which is where he wrote much of his work. David Gange notes that he was a "passionate but foolish lover of the outdoors whose jaunts to wild places sometimes flirted with catastrophe" (The Frayed Atlantic Edge, p. 317). He lived by the sea, and wrote about the sea. In The Nightfishing, a highly ambitious landmark of a poem, the poet is so thoroughly engaged in the activity of setting out amidst the waves, it is difficult to separate the poet's self from the boat and the haul and the sea, and the very act of writing:
In those words through which I move, leaving a cry
Formed in exact degree and set dead at
The mingling flood, I am put forward on to
Live water, clad in oil, burnt by salt
To life. Here, braced, announced on to the slow
Heaving seaboards, almost I am now too
Lulled. And my watch is blear. The early grey
Air is blowing.
- (stanza 20)
If we consider the close relationship between the mind, the self, the body, and the environment, it should be little wonder that the manner in which we occupy and surround ourselves - what we immerse ourselves in - pervades our souls. To put that in perspective, contrast it with Thomas Berardi's observations regarding the incredible economic and capitalist success of South Korea, as quoted by Slavoj Žižek:
"After coloinzation and wars, after dictatorship and starvation, the South Korean mind, liberated by the burden of the natural body, smoothly entered the digital sphere with a lower degree of cultural resistance than virtually any other populations in the world." (Trouble in Paradise, p.6 - my emphasis)
The mind, untethered by the body, adapts more easily to the homogenising and automating demands of virtual and digital acceleration driving capitalism in the 21st century. By contrast, the physical body, when immersed in the slow-moving physical world is naturally at odds with such a fast-paced, fast-changing world.
Language itself performs a linking and cultivating function. Wordsworth may have loved the countryside he wrote about, but the beauty of his works also invited the public to a part of the country that has today become rather more tamed, not least in order to cater to all the tourists. Here we see the structural dissonance of the relationship between the city and the countryside. It is a tension between the demands of modern civilisation and the rhythms of Nature that are nowhere better expressed than in the symptoms of climate change, which looks likely to be humanity's defining struggle during at least the first half of the 21st century.
A city like London, with its rivers, parks, canals, gardens and woodlands, offers many hybrid environments in which we may tune into the outdoor experience. Not all of us are artists or poets like the Wordsworths or W.S. Graham. Most of us are simply trying to earn our keep. But perhaps by being immersed in Nature we, too, can tap into that exhilarating creativity that they accessed and - who knows - learn to fully live in our bodies and rediscover our tether to Mother Nature.
Finally, here is Grasmere (a fragment) by Dorothy Wordsworth:
Peaceful our valley, fair and green,
And beautiful her cottages,
Each in its nook, its sheltered hold,
Or underneath its tuft of trees.
Many and beautiful they are;
But there is one that I love best,
A lowly shed, in truth, it is,
A brother of the rest.
Yet when I sit on rock or hill,
Down looking on the valley fair,
That Cottage with its clustering trees
Summons my heart; it settles there.
Others there are whose small domain
Of fertile fields and hedgerows green
Might more seduce a wanderer's mind
To wish that there his home had been.
Such wish be his! I blame him not,
My fancies they perchance are wild
--I love that house because it is
The very Mountains' child.
Fields hath it of its own, green fields,
But they are rocky steep and bare;
Their fence is of the mountain stone,
And moss and lichen flourish there.
And when the storm comes from the North
It lingers near that pastoral spot,
And, piping through the mossy walls,
It seems delighted with its lot.
And let it take its own delight;
And let it range the pastures bare;
Until it reach that group of trees,
--It may not enter there!
A green unfading grove it is,
Skirted with many a lesser tree,
Hazel and holly, beech and oak,
A bright and flourishing company.
Precious the shelter of those trees;
They screen the cottage that I love;
The sunshine pierces to the roof,
And the tall pine-trees tower above.
When first I saw that dear abode,
It was a lovely winter's day:
After a night of perilous storm
The west wind ruled with gentle sway;
A day so mild, it might have been
The first day of the gladsome spring;
The robins warbled, and I heard
One solitary throstle sing.
A Stranger, Grasmere, in thy Vale,
All faces then to me unknown,
I left my sole companion-friend
To wander out alone.
Lured by a little winding path,
I quitted soon the public road,
A smooth and tempting path it was,
By sheep and shepherds trod.
Eastward, toward the lofty hills,
This pathway led me on
Until I reached a stately Rock,
With velvet moss o'ergrown.
With russet oak and tufts of fern
Its top was richly garlanded;
Its sides adorned with eglantine
Bedropp'd with hips of glossy red.
There, too, in many a sheltered chink
The foxglove's broad leaves flourished fair,
And silver birch whose purple twigs
Bend to the softest breathing air.
Beneath that Rock my course I stayed,
And, looking to its summit high,
"Thou wear'st," said I, "a splendid garb,
Here winter keeps his revelry.
"Full long a dweller on the Plains,
I griev'd when summer days were gone;
No more I'll grieve; for Winter here
Hath pleasure gardens of his own.
"What need of flowers? The splendid moss
Is gayer than an April mead;
More rich its hues of various green,
Orange, and gold, & glittering red."
--Beside that gay and lovely Rock
There came with merry voice
A foaming streamlet glancing by;
It seemed to say "Rejoice!"
My youthful wishes all fulfill'd,
Wishes matured by thoughtful choice,
I stood an Inmate of this vale
How could I but rejoice?
