Wordsworth Museum(3). 글라스미어(Grasmere)

Wordsworth Museum(3). 글라스미어(Grasmere). 영국(England)

wordsworth.org.uk

 

Wordsworth & the French Revolution 1789-1794

■ Wordsworth's tour through France & Switzerland with his friend Robert Jones. They left London on 10th July 1790 and returned to England at the end of September

■ Wordsworth's journey to France in 1791. He left Brighton for Dieppe on 20th November, he returns to England in November or December 1792

■ In October 1793 Wordsworth possibly visits France for the last time before 1802 when the Peace of Amiens allowed him to return and discuss with Annetre his wish to marrry Mary Hutchinson.

 

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive

But to be young was very heaven

The Prelude X lines 692-693

 

Wordsworth first visited France during the summer of 1790; one year after the fall of the Bastille. As he and his friend Robert Jones walked through the country they found 'benevolence and blessedness / Spread like a fragrance everywhere'.

 

'a substantial dread'

In September 1792, a massacre of political prisoners took place in Paris. Robespierre and Jacobins were strengthened by the event, which proved to be a stage in the progress of the Revolution towards dictatorship and the Reign of Terror. Arriving in Paris a month later, Wordsworth saw the marks where the bodies had been burned, and slept in a room that seemed

    a place of fear,

    Unfit for the repose of night,

    Defenceless as a wood where tigers roam.

                          The Prelude X lines 80-82

 

The Waterfall at Lauterbrunnen

Written at a small village on the road between Grindlewald to Lauterbrunne, and part of a long letter sent by William to Dorothy in September 1790:

At this moment when many of these landscapes are floating before my mind, I feel a high enjoyment in reflecting that perhaps scarce a day of my life will pass in which I shall not derive some happiness from these images.

 

Descriptive Sketches, 1793

This poem was written in France in 1792, partly under Beaupuy's influence. It takes the form of a picturesque tour based on Wordsworth's experience of France and Switzerland in 1790, but ends as a declaration of faith in liberty and the Revolution. Descriptive Sketches seems to have been the first of Wordsworth's poems to catch the attention of Coleridge, who saw in it a mixtur of harshness and 'images all a-glow' (Biographia Literaria). The poem is open here at the lines which were used 12 years later to form the basis of Wordsworth's famous account of the Climbing of Snowdon in Prelude Book XIII.

 

Michel Beaupuy (1755-96)

 

At Blois in the early summer of 1792 Wordsworth came under the influence of Michel Beaupuy. Beaupuy was an army officer and a member of nobility, and yet a Republican. Talking with him, Wordsworth came to understand and to share the ideals of the Revolution:

 

                         And when we chanced

One day to meet a hunger-bitten girl

Who crept along fitting her languid self

Unto a hifer's motion - by a cord

Tied to her arm, and picking thus from the lane

Its sustenance, while the girl with her two hands

Was busy knitting in a heartless mood

Of solitude - and at the sight my friend

In agitation said, 'Tis against that

Which we are fighting'.

(1805 Prelude, IX, 511-20)

 

A photocopy of the original letter from Annette Vallon to Wordsworth, dated 20th March 1793, which was confiscated by the French authorities.

 

Annette Vallon (1766-1841)

Wordsworth seems to have met Annette Vallon in Orleans in December 1791, travelling with her to Blois (her home town) about the following April. Their child was baptized, as Anne-Caroline Wordsworth, in Orleans Cathedral on 15 December 1792, but by this time Wordsworth was back in London. His intention was to raise money to bring Annette and Caroline to England, and get married. In the event, however, war was declared in February 1793. At times Wordsworth and Annette seem to have been able to correspond, and by chance two extremely tender letters from her have been preserved because they were confiscated by the French police. Looking forward to their future happiness she writes: 'At last I shall enjoy that calm which I can feel only when I am near you - only when I can tell you with my own voice that I love you.'

 

There seems to be little reason why it should not have been a very happy marriage; but the war dragged on. It was not until the Peace of Amiens in 1802 that they were able to meet again, and by then Wordsworth was engaged to Mary Hutchinson.

 

DC MS 10: A Night on Salisbury Plain.

Wordsworth's three-day walk across Salisbury Plain took place in August 1793.

The poem he began to compose as he walked is mainly an impassioned protest against the war with France. Dorothy wrote it out in this notebook the following April, when they were staying together at Windy Brow farmhouse near Keswick.

 

DC MS 62: Vaudracour and Julia.

Vaudracour and Julia were a pair of lovers who lived in France just before the Revolution. Wordsworth seems to have heard their unhappy story at Blois in 1792, and for a time intended to turn it into a novel. Finally, however, he use it in Book IX of The Prelude as a way of telling very obliquely the story of his own thwarted love for Annette Vallon. In 1820 it was published as a separate poem. The handwritting (see below right) is Wordsworth's. In reverse on the left hand page is a transcription, by Mary, his wife, of part of The White Doe of Rylstone.

 

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 Windy Brow : 1793-1795

During the winter of 1793 Wordsworth stayed with an old school friend, William Calvert (1770-1829), and his younger brother Raisley, at Windy Brow, their farmhouse near Keswick.

 It was here that Wordsworth completed 'A night on Salisbury plain', the only major poem of this period, begun in August 1793

 

Reunited with Dorothy

In the spiring of 1794 Wordsworth borrowed Windy Brow for about six weeks, and stayed there with his sister, Dorothy. Soon after they had arrived. Dorothy wrote to her friend Jane Pollard:

 

 

 

 

 

Raisley Calvert's Legacy

William and Dorothy left Windy Brow in May 1794, but, in June Wordsworth was back there nursing Raisley Calvert's who was dying of consumption. He stayed with him until his death in January 1795. However, well before this, Calvert, confident that Wordsworth 'had powers and attainments which might be of use to mankind', bequeathed him a legacy of ￡600, which was later increased to ￡900.

 No longer beset by financial worries, Wordsworth was now free to concentrate fully on writing poetry.

 

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The West Country 1795-1798

 During the summer of 1795 Wordsworth was offered a rent-free house in Dorset by two young friend, John and Azariah Pinneym, sons of Bristol sugar merchant. In August he travelled to Bristol, and, for the next three years, lived and worked as a poet in the West Country.

 

Wordsworth

 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge 1772-1834
In 1795, Coleridge, like Wordsworth, was a radical in politics and the two men first met at a political meeting in Bristol. Robert Southey (1774-1843) was also at this meeting ~ previously he and Coleridge had formed a plan to establish a 'Pantisocracy': an ideal egalitarian community in which three hours labour would supply all material needs. It was part of the plan that they were to marry the Fricker sisters and emigrate to America; but quarrels developed and the enterprise was abandoned. However, Coleridge did marry Sara Fricker on the 4th of October 1795

 

'That summer when on Quantock's grassy Hills / Far ranging...'

                                                                              The Prelude XIII 393-4

 

The vital friendship between Wordsworth and Coleridge began in the summer of 1797. Their direct interest in politics lessened and they became each other's audience. Both were writing at their best. Wordsworth beagn his first great poem 'The Ruined Cottage' (which finally became Book 1 of The Excursion) and oleridge, like Wordsworth, attempted a tragedy, Osorio. He also explored, in the language of everyday speech, a vision of man in harmony with the living universe. The result was his 'conversation poems'. one of these was 'Frost at Midnight' in which Coleridge addresses his son Hartley:

 

Hartley Coleridge

At the age of 10

 

But thou, my babe ! shalt wander like a breeze

By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags

Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,

Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores

And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear

The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible

Of that eternal language, which the God

Utters, who from eternity doth teach

Himself in all, and all things in himself.

Great universal Teacher ! he shall mould

Thy spirit, and by giving make in ask.

 

Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,

Whether the summer clothe the general earth

With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing

Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch

Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch

Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drop fall

Heard only in the trances of the blast,

Or if some secret ministry of frost

Shall hang them up in silent icicles,

Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.

 

 

Coleridge

Both of these prints are based on portraits made by Hancock in 1798

 

Colerige said of Wordsworth that he was a man with 'no inequalities,' in later years Wordsworth called his friend 'the most wonderful man i ever knew'.

 

Lyrical Ballads

In November 1797, the two poets, while walking with Dorothy in the Quantock Hills, conceived of a plan to raise money. Within twelve months, they had compsed a series of poems which were published by their friend Joseph Cottle as the Lyrical Ballads (Bristol 1798). In this volume, the creative visions of each poet were complementary; Coleridge sought to make the supernatural have an everyday reality (as in 'The Ancient Mariner'), and Wordsworth aimed to give ordinary experience a power which was equal to that of the supernatural. The Lyrical Ballads were to broaden our human sympathies and to show that delicacy and depth of feeling was not limited to any one class of men and women.

 

 

William Hazlitt 1778-1830

At Alfoxden Wordsworth met the youthful William Hazlitt and, during a walk to Coleridge's house at Nether Stowey (where Hazlitt was staying), Wordsworth discovered that Hazlitt was obsessed with metaphysical abstraction. This encounter lies behind two polemical poems, one of which is 'The Tables Turned':

 

The Tables Turned

 

Up! up! my Friend, and quit your books;

Or surely you'll grow double:

Up! up! my Friend, and clear your looks;

Why all this toil and trouble?

 

The sun, above the mountain's head,

A freshening lustre mellow

Through all the long green fields has spread,

His first sweet evening yellow.

 

Books! 'tis a dull and endless strife:

Come, hear the woodland linnet,

How sweet his music! on my life,

There's more of wisdom in it.

 

And hark! how blithe the throstle sings!

He, too, is no mean preacher:

Come forth into the light of things,

Let Nature be your Teacher.

 

She has a world of ready wealth,

Our minds and hearts to bless ~

Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health,

Truth breathed by cheerfulness.

 

One impulse from a vernal wood

May teach you more of man,

Of moral evil and of good,

Than all the sages can.

 

Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;

Our meddling intellect

Mis~shapes the beauteous forms of things:~

We murder to disseet.

 

Enough of Science and of Art;

Close up those barren leaves;

Come forth, and bring with you a heart

That watches and receives.

 

Racedown

From September 1795 to July 1797, William and Dorothy lived at Racedown Lodge in Dorset.

Wordsworth was despondent : the course of the French Revolution had become destructiv and his separation from Annette Vallon was enforced by war. It was Dorothy who helped him to recover: 'she gave me eyes, she gave me cars'.

At Racedown he wrote a play - The Borderers - which Robert Southey though highly of: 'there is a man, whose name is not known in the world-Wordsworth- who has written a great part of a tragedy, upon a very strange and unpleasant subject - but it is equal to any dramatic pieces that I have ever seen'. Southey's opinion was not shared by the manager of Covent Garden however, who rejected it as a stage production.

Wordsworth also contributed towards a satire against aristocrats (an imitation of Juvenal's Eighth Satire), translated from French and, with Dorothy, from Italian: and he revised the poem 'Salisbury Plain'. 'to expose' he said 'the vices of the penal law and the calamities of war as they affect individuals'.

 

Alfoxden

Through Coleridge's neighbour Thomas Poole (a wealthy tanner), Wordsworth leased Alfoxden House in July 1797. This house was set in its own park, on the edge of the Quantock Hills.

 

 

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 The West Country 1795-1798

 

S.T. Coleridge

a portrait by P. Vandyke in 1798

 

In 1797 Dorothy Wordsworth described Coleridge to Mary Hutchinson, Wordsworth's future wife:

 

'His eye is large and full, not dark but grey; such an eye as would receive from a heavy soul the dullest ｅxpression; but it speaks every emotion of his animated mind; it has more of the 'poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling' than I ever witnessed. He has fine dark eyebrows, and an overhanging forehead. The first thing that was read after he came was William's new poem The Ruined Cottage with which he was much delighted...'

Wordsworth's own memory of Coleridge's arrival at Racedown was still vivid over forty years later :

 

'He dis not keep to the high road, but leaped over a gate and bounded down a pathless field, by which he cut off an angle.'

 

William Wordsworth

a portrait by William Shuter in 1798

 

Wordsworth sat for this portrait on the 26th of April. on the 6th of June William Hazlitt met the poet for the first time :

 

'I think I see him now... He was quaintly dressed (according to the costume of that unconstrained period) in a brown fustian jacket and striped pantaloons... There was a severe worn pressure of thought about his temples, a fire in his eye (as if he saw something in objects more than the outward appearance) an intense high narrow forehead, a Roman nose, cheeks furrowed by strong purpose and feeling, and a convulsive inclination to laughter about the mouth a good deal at variance with the solemn, stately ｅxpression of the rest of his face.'

 

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

And now there came both mist and snow,

And it grew wondrous cold;

And ice, mast-high, camce floating by,

As green as emerald.

 

And through the drifts the snowy clifts

Did send a dismal sheen:

Nor shapes of men nor beasts we ken-

The ice was all between.

 

The ice was here, the ice was there,

The ice was all around:

It crakced and growled, and roared and howled,

Like noises in a swound!

 

At length did cross an Albatross,

Thorough the fog it came;

As if it had been a Christian soul,

We hailed it in God's name.

 

It ate the food it ne'er had eat.

And round and round it flew.

The ice did split with a thunder-fit

The helmsman cteered us through!

 

                                 ines 51-70

 

The Ruined Cottage

Across a bare wide Common I had toiled

With languid feet which by the slippery ground

Were baffled still; and when I sought repose

On the brown earth my limbs from very heat

Could find no rest nor my weak arm disperse

The insect host which gathered round my face

And joined their murmers to the tedious noise

Of seeds of bursing gorse which crakled round.

I rose and turned towards a group of trees

Which midway in the level stood alone,

And thither come at length, beneath a shade

Of clustering elms that sprang from the same root

I found a ruined Cottage, four clay walls

That stared upon each other. - 'Twas a spot!'

The wandering gypsey in a stormy night

Woudl pass it with his moveables to house

On the open plain beneath the imperfect arch

Of a cold lime-kiln. As I looked around

Beside the door I saw an aged Man

Stretched on a bench whose edge with short bright moss

Was green and sudded o'er with fungus flowers;

An iron-pointed stff lay at his side.

                                                                 lines 18-59

 

 

 

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 Germany 1798-1799

In the spring of 1798, Willam, Dorothy and Coleridge decided that they would go to live in Germany, chiefly in order to learn the language.

 

They left England in mid September with a friend of Coleridge named John Chester. After a fortnight the party split up, Coleridge going on to Ratzeburg and Gottingen, and William and Dorothy spending what proved to be the coldest winter of the century at Goslar in the Harz Mountains.

 

A letter from William and Dorothy to Coleridge - 21st December 1798

Far from home (and without the distractions of company and books), Wordsworth became preoccupied with memories of a childhood spent in the Lake District. Almost at once he began work on the first version of his great autobiographical poem The Prelude. Dorothy is cramming as much of her brother's recent poetry as she can into her letter. To the left is Lucy Grey. Then comes Nutting, followed by The Prelude descriptions of skating on Esthwaite Water and (bottom right) the stealing of the boat in Patterdale.

 

 

 

 

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