Snapshots of Grasmere

Even in August, the Lake District is smothered in clouds.

It rained; we got wet; we stopped for a nice cuppa.

I know that those beautiful green hills

draw legions of walkers

But for me, this was the quintessence

of our visit to Grasmere.

Apparently, Dorothy Wordsworth managed to spend

24 pounds on tea in one year.

The rent on Dove Cottage was only 8 pounds,

just to put it into perspective.

Sticky Toffee Pudding

is on every menu.

Do try it if you get the chance.

For such a tiny village, there is a

dense concentration of cafes and tea-shops.

There is plenty of daffodil kitsch, too.

You can try to "wander lonely as a cloud"

around Grasmere,

but I doubt you will manage it.

Dove Cottage

was once a public house.

Perhaps the conviviality lived on

in the walls and slate floor and buttery?

I wonder what Dorothy and William drank

with their many illustrious guests:

Coleridge (who lived with them, off and on)

and Walter Scott and Robert Southey

and Charles and Mary Lamb (another famous sister)

and Thomas De Quincey, the infamous opium-eater

who later took over the lease.

So much poetry in those walls,

but no desk.

William Wordsworth wrote in a cutlass chair,

so-called because you could sit in it

without removing your sword.

I'm fairly sure

despite his Revolutionary and Romantic reputation

he subscribed to the

"pen is mightier than the sword" philosophy.

Anyway, his sister tended to act

as his amanuensis.

The house was incredibly dark

with a coal-burning stove

and not much ventilation.

No wonder the Wordsworths

spent most of their time

in Nature.

Dove Cottage was "acquired for the nation" in 1890.

(Wordsworth's Lakeland.)

Such a plain gravestone for Dorothy.

Ernest de Selincourt described her literary contributions:

"probably the most remarkable and the most distinguished

of English prose writers

who never wrote a line for the general public."

Her Grasmere Journals,

just four small notebooks,

were written for William's pleasure.

Her observances inspired some of his

most memorable poems.

I tried to read The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth

while we were in Grasmere,

but I kept getting distracted by other things,

like The Lives of the English Rakes,

found in a bookshop in Bowness.

Gray and green

are the colours of Grasmere.

If we had stayed longer,

I might have grown a layer of moss, too.

This pond is just outside of Grasmere

in some woods familiar to William and Dorothy.

William liked to declaim as he walked,

and Dorothy collected his words like

so many drops of rain.

I tried to get Sigmund to compose some poetry

on the spot

but he declined.

He still feels bitter about studying

The Prelude when he was a schoolboy.

This is the most charming

of the many, many sheep pictures

that I felt compelled to snap.

Sheep are a common sight in the Lake District.

Although the Wordsworth industry dominates Grasmere

it isn't terribly touristy.

This circus tent was an incongruous sight.

Dorothy Wordsworth finally gets her 15 minutes

I would hardly describe myself as Wordsworthian; indeed, in my Wordworth/Keats seminar in grad. school I had a tendency to skim the old fellow and then improvise madly when asked to elaborate on the text. I always thought Wordsworth was a bit of a bore, actually.

I am not terribly Wordsworthian when it comes to appreciating the glories of nature, either. I function best in that temperate zone between 60 and 80 F. and will notoriously avoid venturing out in hostile weathers. This works out pretty well for me as I am perfectly happy to spend the entire day in bed reading -- if I am allowed to do so. (Of course I am not allowed to do so, but I do always insist on a leisurely weekend session spanning at least two cups of tea.)

Having thus established that I am not in any way obsessed with Wordsworth, I will now devote my second in a two-part series of blogs on, or at least concerning, him. Blame it on the daffodils, which are just about to peak . . . that is if their tender frilled heads aren't ripped off by the gale-force winds that are supposed to hit tomorrow.

Having recently mentioned Wordworth's famous image of the dancing golden daffodils, I was intrigued to learn that he basically ripped off his sister Dorothy for this, one of his best-known phrases. Apparently, the words were lifted straight from her private journal.

A biography of Dorothy Wordsworth, devoted sister to William, has just been published over here and all of the papers have been falling about to describe her rather strange and emotionally incestuous relationship with her brother. The theory is that William plundered Dorothy's journals on a regular basis: not just for her words, but also for access to her emotional experience.

"She was intense, romantic in the sense of having a heightened sensibility, and her emotional responses were both encouraged and cannibalised by her brother in the service of his work."
(Virginia Rounding, The Observor)

I've had a pet theory for years that "unemotional" (ie, repressed and not very talkative) men invariably choose women with strongly emotional and gregarious natures -- and then feed off them. However, the very repressiveness of their own taciturn nature tends to have a dampening -- whether deliberately or just inevitably -- effect on the singing-bird nature of the woman.

The review suggests that Dorothy started going off the deep end later in life -- the pressures on her to act decorously and modestly at odds, apparently, with her rather wild, emotional nature. After her brother married, she continued to live with the couple in a somewhat awkward threesome. Then when William dies, she ends up being taken care of by his wife -- quite mad by the end.

Although literary criticism has always been aware of her important role in William's life, it does make me cheerful to think of her journals living on and being reassessed -- 200 years after they were written. Wordsworth may have gotten the credit for the dancing golden daffodils, but perhaps Dorothy was the one who truly thrilled to them.