Wordsworth Write-Walk
Wordsworth dated his Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour the 13th July 1798 and this year, on the same date, we walked in his footsteps. Philip Rush looks back at this recent extreme writing workshop.
Dorothy’s journals for this period are lost—though there are quotations from them in a Victorian book—and so we don’t know for sure where Wordsworth’s ‘dark sycamore’ was, but it was ‘above Tintern Abbey’ and therefore probably not ‘above Monmouth Bridge’, and the river is clearly stated to be no longer tidal. This only leaves a short stretch of the Wye, and so we met at Redbrook, parked tidily for a quid or two and set off. I confess, with apologies, that an eighteen-month spell of para-isolation has left me cavalier in my attitude to toilets, and this cost me at the start when I was asked where they could be found. I had no idea. The woman in the shop apologised and said there were none available, although they were building some near the church. No-one could quite be expected to hold on that long.
We stood beside the river, its noises audible in the gaps between the occasional vehicle on the main road, and the poem was read aloud to mark the beginning of our walk.
Our chosen path climbed steeply along the Offa’s Dyke national trail to the ditches and woods of Highbury. Mark pointed out, wittily but pretty accurately, that exactly a millennium divided the building of Offa’s big defensive dyke and Wordsworth’s rather shorter poem. At the deer-proof gate we paused and heard the first set of today’s poems which focused on the different kinds of ‘short poems’ to be found concealed in Wordsworth’s lines. In these following lines from the Wye we can detect something of the Homeric ‘epic simile’:
like a roe
I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides
Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams,
Wherever nature led: more like a man
Flying from something that he dreads, than one
Who sought the thing he loved.
Homer squeezes into his Iliad loads of details of Greek country life by using them as similes for episodes in the war; taken on their own they are charming poems in their own right. (Is ‘charming’ too patronising? Possibly.)
As for the Trojans,
they were like thousands of ewes
standing in a rich man’s farm,
bleating constantly,
waiting for someone to come and collect white milk,
as they hear lambs call.
Just like that,
the din rose up throughout the widespread Trojan force.
The woods combined old yews, hazel coppicing, and whitebeams; the sky was bright, though a few drops of rain speckled and rattled the leaves above us, but the woods were dark. We learned to use the word ‘susurration’ to describe the sound of young leaves in a soft breeze, and appreciated the silence of the yew.
At the end of the woods we gathered in a rough circle like a band of Robin Hood’s poetry gang to listen to some ‘gnomic’ verses, including this from Auden’s translation of The Elder Edda:
If you know a friend you can fully trust,
Go often to his house:
Grass and brambles grow quickly
Upon the untrodden track.
Wordsworth’s advice is his poem is given in a kind of prayer for his sister:
‘Therefore let the moon
Shine on thee in thy solitary walk;
And let the misty mountain-winds be free
To blow against thee.
The path drops out of the woods to a crossroads with a holloway and we turned left, to the south-east, and
followed the holloway, with its roots at eye-level and its deep walls, at first down, and then up to the great view-point where basically all of the details in Wordsworth’s poem are laid out for inspection, including pastoral farms ‘green to the very door’ and hedgerows like ‘little lines of sportive wood run wild’.
We read some Spanish Coplas here, and some versions of the ‘copla’ by Machado, such as this:
At the roadside
there’s a stone spring
and a small earthen jug—
glug, glug—that no-one removes.
A path now descended steeply from the track to meet the Offa’s Dyke Path at the eaves of the wood. The meadows were covered here and there with bracken, tall bracken and then short bracken, damp to the touch and smelling of holidays. A huge linden tree—to be precise a ‘large-leaved lime’—was in full bloom and buzzed with bees, invisible bees, too busy to be discerned.
The woods were dark again and we emerged to bright sun, a blue sky and the sight of the old Dyke crossing the field just above us. The farmer had used it to support a stock fence, which is the kind of thing Offa had in mind.
On our return to the cross roads, we were finally allowed to enjoy that most famous of short-poem forms, the haiku. Wordsworth, alas, did not know it, but he was a master of the form. Here is the one buried in his sonnet on Westminster Bridge:
This City now doth,
like a garment, wear
the beauty of the morning.
Matthew Paul may have had more trouble once upon a time with his map-reading than we had on the Wordsworth walk, perhaps because it had be reconnoitred for us in the springtime when the woods were full of bluebells:
nowhere to be seen
in the heart of the Great Wood:
the path to the downs
We turned left at the cross-roads and followed the lane down to the village where we had parked. The lane began muddy and squelchy and a hazel tree had shed a huge bough, sprouting into coppicing like an array of organ pipes, but then there was a section of holloway before the surface improved like a diagram of English road building from Roman times till 1798; by the time we reached the first houses of Redbrook we encountered the stuff of the future, tarmac.
Wordsworth was waiting for us and set us a challenge. ‘When you have finished a few short poems, which had their beginnings in this walk of yours, I want you to translate them into words used in my Lines and no others! You will find you will have to twist your sense and find new meanings!’
He was very keen to join us in The Boat for a pint of Kington ale, but he had somewhere to get to and slipped away.
Poet and publisher Philip Rush was born and grew up in Middlesex and London. He taught English in Gloucestershire schools for forty years. He has been running an independent poetry press, Yew Tree Press, for several years now and hosts regular poetry events at the Museum in the Park in Stroud. He endorses poems which combine the surface appeal of well-composed prose with the meditative qualities of a period of silence or of a walk through familiar countryside.
