Although some marketing body has come up with the superficial branding of the Lake District as Wordsworth Country, and hordes of tourists flock to Dove Cottage every year, please permit me to post an extract from William Wordsworth’s poem The Prelude (Book 1). 

As Sister Wendy Beckett writes in her collection of poetry Speaking to the Heart, this is Wordsworth at his most true and responsive to the numinous of his beloved Lake District. “Anyone who has stood alone and in silence, above all in the early morning or at night, knows the mysterious power of hills and water. Wordsworth stands alone in finding a voice for these almost indescribable feelings” writes Beckett in the introduction to the poem.

 

An extract from The Prelude (Book 1) by William Wordsworth

                        A rocky Steep uprose

Above the Cavern of the Willow tree,

And now, as suited one who proudly rowed

With his best skill, I fixed a steady view

Upon the top of that same craggy ridge,

The bound of the horizon – for behind

Was nothing but the stars and the grey sky.

She was an elfin Pinnace; lustily

I dipp’d my oars into the silent Lake,

And, as I rose upon the stroke, my Boat

Went heaving through the water, like a Swan –

 

When, from behind that craggy Steep (till then

The bound of the horizon) a huge Cliff,

As if with voluntary power instinct,

Uprear’d its head. I struck, and struck again

And, growing still in stature, the huge Cliff

Rose up between me and the stars, and still,

With measur’d motion, like a living thing,

Strode after me. With trembling hands I turn’d,

And through the silent water stole my way

Back to the Cavern of the Willow tree.

There, in her mooring-place, I left my Bark,

And, through the meadows homeward went, with grave

And serious thoughts; and after I had seen

That spectacle, for many days, my brain

Work’d with a dim and undetermined sense

Of unknown modes of being; in my thoughts

There was a darkness, call it solitude,

Or blank desertion, no familiar shapes

Of hourly objects, images of trees,

Of sea or sky, no colours of green fields;

But huge and mighty Forms that do not live

Like living men mov’d slowly through the mind

By day and were the trouble of my dreams.

 

You can read the entire poem here.

 

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