Reading Dorothy Wordsworth

Dove Cottage from an illustration of 1882

Readers of this blog will have noticed that I have been using Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journal below the title heading to mark the progress of the year. In the current entry above she records travelling from London with William for his marriage to Mary Hutchinson following an extended stay in France where he settled his affairs with Annette Vallon, the mother of a child by him that he had never seen because of the impossibility of visiting France after the French Revolution.

Dorothy’s Journal was begun when she and her brother William settled for a while in Alfoxden, Somerset to be near Coleridge. The so-called Alfoxden Journal records everyday incidents and the responses to nature and the passing seasons during 1797 and 1798. It also records indirectly the development of the friendship between both the Wordsworths and Coleridge at this time. But it was not written for public consumption so gives glimpses rather than a full account of this process.

William was the main reader of the Journal and apparently encouraged Dorothy to continue the practice of keeping it when they set up home together at Dove Cottage in their native Lake District. The so called Grasmere Journal runs from May 1800 to January 1803. Many incidents recorded in the Journal also occur in William’s poems, notably the famous ‘Daffodils’ vision which Dorothy describes in some detail.


Reading between the lines of the Grasmere Journal, we perceive the developing relationship between William and Mary Hutchinson – and the parallel attraction between Sara Hutchison and Coleridge who could not pursue it because he was already married. Dorothy’s often matter-of-fact comments often reveal anxieties that were, perhaps, not fully on the surface. Her simple “poor Coleridge” is easy enough to put in context in retrospect, as the nature of the relationship with Sara is now well-known. Her feelings about William’s attraction to Mary emerge more subtly in images of domestic dislocation which display less obviously what must have been uncertainties about her own continuing close relationship with her brother after his marriage. These reached a culmination in the entry where she notes, following the positive comments on their arrival at the Hutchinson’s house, that she was ill for most of her stay.

Further on she records

“On Monday 4th October 1802 my brother William was married to Mary Hutchinson.”

A little further on in the same extended entry she writes:

“William had parted from me upstairs. I gave him the wedding ring – with how deep a blessing! I took it from my forefinger where I had worn it the whole of the night before – he slipped it again onto my finger and blessed me fervently. When they were absent my dear little Sara prepared the breakfast. I kept myself as quiet as I could, but when I saw the two men running up the walk, coming to tell us it was over, I could stand it no longer & threw myself on the bed where I lay in stillness, neither hearing nor seeing anything, till Sara came upstairs and said ‘They are coming’.”

These words are heavily scored through in the Journal and have been restored for publication. After this the tension eases and there is a detailed account of the several days the three of them took travelling back to Grasmere. Dorothy clearly felt in retrospect that her expression here was best hidden perhaps even from William’s eyes. The Journal continues in more relaxed manner for the rest of the year, then ends when the notebook runs out in January 1803. There are later diaries of trips to Scotland and the Continent. But here the Journal ends.

Should Dorothy’s private words, whether scored out or not, be revealed to the public gaze? Perhaps not. But I would not be without them. The Wordsworths have by now become an industry. Dove Cottage itself is visited by hordes of tourists annually “To sink their eyes into a room/Filled with the unused and unworn.” in Geoffrey Hill’s distanced view of the proceedings. It might be thought to say much about modern cultural fetishism, but the cottage was purchased for this purpose in 1890. The Wordsworths moved out in 1809 to a larger house at Rydal Mount and it was subsequently occupied by Thomas De Quincy. Leaving it temporarily before his marriage in 1802 William had written “Farewell thou little nook of mountain-ground” and described it as “The loveliest spot that man has ever found”. If it is hard to recover that loveliness as a modern visitor jostling others around the tiny spaces within the cottage, it can be intimately recreated in a quiet reading of Dorothy’s Journal.

‘Bewildered in the Mists’

Mountains Above Grisedale

Dorothy Wordsworth wrote this in her Journal in January 1802:

On Saturday January 23rd we left Eusemere at 10 o clock in the morning, I behind Wm, Mr C on his Galloway. The morning not very promising - the wind cold. The mountains large and dark but only thinly streaked with snow -  a strong wind. We dined in Grisdale on ham bread & milk. It rained all the way home. We struggled with the wind & often rested as we went along – A hail-shower met us before we reached the Tarn & the way often was difficult over the snow but at the Tarn the view closed in – we saw nothing but mists and snow & at first the ice on the Tarn below us, cracked and split yet without water, a dull grey white: we lost our path & could see the Tarn no longer. We made our way out with difficulty guided by a heap of stones which we well remembered – we were afraid of being bewildered in the mists till the Darkness should overtake us – we were long before we knew that we were in the right track but thanks to William’s skill we knew it long before we could see our way before us. There was no footmark on the snow either of man or beast. The Vale of Grasmere when the mists broke away looked soft & grave, of a yellow hue – it was dark before we reached home.

Dorothy also records that later in the evening they settled down by the fire and read tales of the Alps where people were lost in the mist. Was this by way of comforting themselves that they were safe? In February of the same year Dorothy’s Journal notes that three men, coming the same way in the dark, were lost and found dead. This was danger that was lived with routinely. Not, as today, by recreational ‘hill walkers’ but by people going about their everyday business.  Dorothy’s account of the walk is in one sense unremarkable, but it provides an evocative glimpse, as does much else in the Journal, of the everyday realities of life at the time and a felt identification with the landscape. The only intended reader was William who often consulted it to remind him of incidents which he then wrote about in his poems. Essential reading.

Dorothy Wordsworth : this day in 1801

Grasmere in the Snow

From the Journal of Dorothy Wordsworth  Saturday 12th December 1801:

A fine frosty morning - snow upon the ground ..... Helm Crag rose very bold and craggy, a being by itself, & behind it was the large ridge of mountain smooth as marble & snow white - all the mountains looked like solid stone on our left going from Grasmere i.e. White Moss & Nab Scar. The snow hid all the grass & all signs of vegetation & the rocks shewed themselves boldly everywhere & seemed more stony than rock or stone. The birches on the crags beautiful, Red-brown & glittering - the ashes glittering spears with their upright stems - the hips very beautiful & so good!! & dear Coleridge - I ate twenty for thee when I was by myself. I came home first - they walked too slow for me. William went to look at Langdale Pikes.

[.....]sate up late. The moon shone upon the water below Silver-how, & above it hung, combining with Silver-how on one side, a Bowl-shaped moon the curve downwards - the white fields, glittering Roof of Thomas Ashburner's house, the dark yew tree, the white fields - gay & beautiful. Wm lay with his curtains open that he might see it.

Jean Earle, the Wordsworths and Honesty

Dove Cottage

If metaphor works by transference of an ideal quality to a material object, metonymy works by transference between two material objects. There will always be some porosity between them but I think this is a good enough working definition of the difference between these two categories of figurative language. I want now to look at metonymy as an intermediate case between simile and metaphor.

In her poem ‘Honesty’, Jean Earle records her feelings about having been given a seed of the honesty flower collected from the garden of Dove Cottage, where Dorothy and William Wordsworth lived and which is now a museum. Jean Earle’s poetry characteristically displays a sophisticated use of the ‘naïve’ style. In her poem about the painting ‘Chasse au Tigre” by the ‘naïve’ painter Jean-Baptist Giraud (a detail from which appears on the cover of her Selected Poems) she says that, in viewing such paintings, “we look for truth”. Her ‘truth-seeking’ in the poem ‘Honesty’ clearly includes the ironic sub-text that the seed was dishonestly obtained. But it is the deeper ‘honesty’ of the main text that I want to discuss. Here is the poem:

Honesty

Always a ‘snapper-up of trifles’ –
Jars from a skip,
those rubber bands
Postmen let fly –
Some sad kitten –
After her trip, she brought me such a thing,
A seed of honesty
From Wordsworth’s garden.

Had she any idea
How it pleased me? Only a tourist
At Dove Cottage had she ever heard
Of William and Dorothy

Who may well have trodden the soil
This seed sprang from ….

Sowing the scarlet beans; or when Dorothy
Set herbs by moonlight. When she worked alone,
Grieving for William – who had taken joy
Of their life together into his stern hold
And gone for Mary.

Intense and ardent hearts! The seed sent up
A thin stalk, has managed a few flowers
Of a sharp magenta. She who stole me this
Finds it not worth the snatch,
Having no clue
How eloquent to me – yes, as a friend’s dress
Seen against time and light,
Its colour is.

The first thing to note here is that the specific reference back is not to the poems of William but to his sister Dorothy’s Grasmere Journal. The entry for 1 May 1802 begins: Rose not till ½ past 8 – a heavenly morning – as soon as breakfast was over we went into the garden & sowed the scarlet beans about the house”. This was less than six months before William’s marriage to Mary Hutchinson to which the poem also alludes. Dorothy makes several references to the progress of the beans throughout the summer, including “The scarlet beans want sticking. The garden is overrun with weeds”, which immediately follows the recording of letters sent to Annette Vallon and Mary Hutchinson. Arrangements for the wedding and the settling of William’s affairs with Annette dominate the Journal from this point on, as do images of domestic dislocation.

Already, then, it is apparent that there are rich layers of meaning in Jean Earle’s poem. Its apparently artless narrative form, shifting suddenly from the original subject to the Wordsworths and then abruptly to “sowing the scarlet beans” begins a process of metonymic transfer that grows in quiet intensity as the poem develops. There are a number of specific tensions between the brother and sister who shared Dove Cottage which become apparent at this time which I have discussed elsewhere (*) But Dorothy was re-assured by William’s poem ‘Farewell’ which she describes as his “going for Mary” poem. Seen in that light Jean Earle’s “gone for Mary” loses some of its potential force. The life they shared in what is now known as Dove Cottage is not jettisoned by his “Farewell thou little nook of mountain ground” but is left in suspension until both brother and sister will return with “one to whom ye will be dear”. Dorothy records writing out the poem for William on 29 May and then writing to Mary. Her entry concludes: “A sweet day. We nailed up the honeysuckle and hoed the scarlet beans.”

Jean Earle’s poem, then, is rooted in Dorothy’s Journal and the “dreams of flowers” evoked by William in the seclusion of Grasmere are imaginatively linked with the flower she has grown from a seed of honesty. The words of the brother and sister in 1802 resonate in the words of the modern poem which moves subtly backwards and forwards through time. The final change of direction occurs with the phrase “Intense and ardent hearts”, a reference back to the trio of William, Mary and Dorothy and the life they spent together. Jean Earle's own ‘honest’ response to the stolen seed and the “sharp magenta” flowers it produced brings the poem to a close. It is “eloquent” in expressing to her the colour of “a friend’s dress” and therefore familiar and suggestive of intimacy. The fact that it is “seen against time and light” must also affect our response here, particularly if we read it in the context of other poems by Jean Earle for whom light often suggests vision. Time adds depth to illumination. The seed provides a metonymic connection in the colour of its flower with the dress worn by Dorothy envisaged by Jean Earle as her friend.

The likelihood that the seed is a modern descendant of a plant growing there when the Wordsworths inhabited the cottage is remote. Jean Earle only says that they “may well have trodden the soil / The seed sprang from”. So what sort of honesty is attempted here by the poet who finds the magenta flowers “eloquent”? This takes us deeper into the poem’s ‘truth’. We can say that the flower represents the “intense and ardent hearts” of the Wordsworths, enabling the poet to engage with personal feelings of affiliation that the flower triggers. But, as suggestive as the idea of ‘re-presenting’ is, it doesn’t quite capture the organic link that the poet makes between herself and Dorothy. The colour the flower carries in embryo from its Dove Cottage source is “like a friend’s dress” because it brings the light of Dorothy’s life through time to the present. This is more than simile but less than metaphor which would, I suggest, lack honesty in this context. Metonymy here functions in linking the person who grew the flower with the person who wore the dress in a deeply ‘honest’ way in spite of the fact that the “eloquence” with which it does so may, like the way the seed was obtained, and – some might want to argue – the way the experience is constructed – be seen as ironically invoking dishonest practices. But there is no doubting the honesty of the poet in wishing to honour her friend in a poem the integrity of which is beyond question.

(*) 'Rich Layers of Meaning' in New Welsh Review No.33 Summer 1996 from which parts of this blog are adapted.