Wanderlust: A History of Walking (17 page)

Somewhere on these roads, among these people and these questions, Wordsworth met up with his style. His earliest poetry is lofty, vague, and studded with conventional images, in the mode of Thomson's
Seasons,
but it seems to be his revolutionary ardor and sympathetic identification with the poor that saved him from being a minor landscape poet (during the same decade of the 1790s, Dorothy's writing undergoes a similar transformation, from the aphoristic abstruseness of a Dr. Johnson or Jane Austen to something vividly descriptive and down-to-earth). It changed both subject matter and style. In his retroactive preface to the
Lyrical Ballads,
the epochal book of poems by Wordsworth and Coleridge published in 1798, he wrote, “The principal object, then, proposed in these poems, was to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them throughout, as far as was possible, in a selection of language really used by men, and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain coloring of imagination. . . . Humble and rustic life was generally chosen, because in that condition the essential passions of the heart find a better soil . . . and speak a plainer and more emphatic language.” He wrote about the poor as people rather than as figures in fables of virtue or pity, as he wrote about landscapes in their specific details rather than in high-flown generalizations and classical allusions. Choosing plainer language was a political act, with spectacular artistic results.

What is marvelous about Wordsworth's early poetry is its union of the radical walk for the sake of encounters with the scenic stroll of aesthetic connoisseurs. Looking back, it seems there should have been some tensions between scenery and poverty as subjects, but for the young Wordsworth in that exuberant moment there were none. The landscapes are the more incandescent for being populated by vagrants rather than nymphs, and that incandescence is the more necessary as the birthright and backdrop of the desperate. The recurrent structure of these early poems is a walk interrupted by an encounter with those displaced by the economic turbulence of the time into fellow wanderers. Earlier poets and artists had looked at the cottages and bodies of the poor and found
them picturesque or pitiful, but no one with such a voice had found it worthwhile to talk to them before. “When we walk, we naturally go to the fields and woods,” remarked Thoreau, but Wordsworth headed as eagerly to the public roads as to mountains and lakes. People walk streets for the sake of encounters and paths for solitude and scenery; on the road Wordsworth seems to have found an ideal intermediary, a space providing long quiet spells broken by the occasional meeting. He affirmed:

I love a public road: few sights there are

That please me more—such object has had power

O'er my imagination since the dawn

Of childhood, when its disappearing line

Seen daily afar off, on one bare steep

Beyond the limits which my feet had trod,

Was like a guide into eternity,

At least to things unknown and without bound.

Which is to say that the road had a kind of perspectival magic, an allure of the unknown. But it also had a populace:

When I began to enquire,

To watch and question those I met, and held

Familiar talk with them, the lonely roads

Were schools to me in which I daily read

With most delight the passions of mankind,

There saw into the depth of human souls

Souls that appear to have no depth at all

To vulgar eyes. . . .

This education had begun during his schooldays, when he boarded with a retired carpenter and his wife and met peddlers, shepherds, and similar characters. These early experiences seem to have set him at ease with people of another class and at least partially relieved him of that mental barrier that separates the English classes from each other. He once remarked, “Had I been born in a class which would have deprived me of what is called a liberal education, it is not unlikely
that, being strong in body, I should have taken to a way of life such as that in which my Pedlar passed the greater part of his days.” The terrible uncertainty of his own early life, with parents dead and relatives shuttling the children around, seems to have generated a sympathy for the displaced, while his passion for traveling made these mobile characters, in a word, romantic to him. The times themselves were uncertain; the old order had been shaken by the revolutions and insurrections in France, America, and Ireland, and the poor were being displaced by the changing rural scene and dawning industrial revolution. The modern world of people cast adrift, unanchored by the securities of place, work, family, had dawned.

The mobile figure recurs in the work of Wordsworth's contemporaries too, and walking seems to have provided literal common ground between those traveling to seek adventure and pleasure and those on the road to seek survival. Even now English people tell me that walking plays so profound a role in English culture in part because it is one of the rare classless arenas in which everyone is roughly equal and welcome. The young Wordsworth wrote about discharged soldiers, tinkers, peddlers, shepherds, stray children, abandoned wives, “The Female Vagrant,” “The Leech Gatherer,” “The Old Cumberland Beggar,” and others who tended to be nomadic or displaced; even the Wandering Jew made an appearance in his poetry and that of many other Romantics. Or as Hazlitt put it in describing the revolutionary transformation of English poetry at the hands of Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Robert Southey, “They were surrounded, in company with Muses, by a mixed rabble of idle apprentices and Botany Bay convicts, female vagrants, gipsies, meek daughters in the family of Christ, of ideot boys and mad mothers, and after them ‘owls and night-ravens flew.' ”

The peddler Wordsworth might have been is the principal narrator of his first long narrative poem, “The Ruined Cottage.” It is typical of his early poetry in that in it a fortunate young man encounters, while walking, someone who tells him the tale that makes up the body of the poem, so that the young man and his saunters make a kind of frame around the sad picture, serving as frames do both to underscore the value and to isolate the work within. This time around, the Wordsworth figure arrives at a ruined cottage where the Pedlar tells him the pathos-drenched tale of the last residents of the place: a family torn apart into wanderers and lingerers by economic hardship. Everyone in the story is in some
kind of pedestrian motion: the strolling narrator, the nomadic Pedlar, the husband enlisted and gone to a distant land, the heartbroken wife wearing a path into the grass by pacing back and forth, watching the road for his return.

The walkers in the garden had been anxious to distinguish their walking for pleasure from that of those who walked for necessity, which is why it was important to stay within the garden's bounds and not to walk as travel—but Wordsworth sought out meetings with those who represented this other kind of walking (or, frequently, borrowed those characters as met and vividly described by Dorothy in her journals, from which he gathered much). For all its meaty radical politics,
The Prelude
is a thirteen-book sandwich whose bread is landscape. The poem ends with a visionary experience atop Mount Snowdon in Wales that leads into another long soliloquy—but no further geographical details. A shepherd—shepherds were among the first mountain guides in Europe—leads him and an unnamed friend up during the night so they can see the sunrise from the peak. Because the young men are so fit, they arrive early at their destination. The narrative leaves Wordsworth atop the mountain in a sudden flood of moonlight, scenery, and revelation. Climbing a mountain has become a way to understand self, world, and art. It is no longer a sortie from but an act of culture.

But walking wasn't only a subject for Wordsworth. It was his means of composition. Most of his poems seem to have been composed while he walked and spoke aloud, to a companion or to himself. The results were often comic; the Grasmere locals found him spooky, and one remarked, “He won't a man as said a deal to common fwoak, but he talked a deal to hiseen. I oftenn seead his lips a ganin,” while another recalled, “He would set his head a bit forrad, and put his hands behint his back. And then he would start a bumming, and it was bum, bum, bum, stop; then bum, bum bum, reet down till t'other end; and then he'd set down and git a bit o'paper and write a bit.” In
The Prelude
he describes a dog he used to walk with who would, when a stranger drew near, cue him to shut up and avoid being taken for a lunatic. He possessed a remarkable memory that allowed him to recollect with visual detail and emotional vividness scenes long past, to quote long passages of the poets he admired, and to compose afoot and write the result down later. Most modern writers are deskbound, indoor creatures when they write, and nothing more than outline and ideas can be achieved elsewhere; Wordsworth's method seemed a throwback to oral traditions and explains why
the best of his work has the musicality of songs and the casualness of conversation. His steps seem to have beat out a steady rhythm for the poetry, like the metronome of a composer.

One of his best-known poems—“Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour,” to give it its full title—was composed on foot during a walking tour in Wales with Dorothy in 1798. Upon arriving back in Bristol, he jotted the whole thing down and tacked it unrevised onto the
Lyrical Ballads,
where it appears as the last and one of the best poems in his book, his work, and perhaps the English language. Very much a walking poem, “Tintern Abbey” captures that state of musing, of shifting about in time from recollection to experience to hope while exploring a place. And like much of his blank verse, it is written in language so close to actual speech that it reads with conversational ease, but speaking it aloud revives the strong rhythms of those walks two hundred years ago.

In 1804 Dorothy wrote to a friend, “At present he is walking and has been out of doors these two hours though it has rained heavily all the morning. In wet weather he takes out an umbrella; chuses the most sheltered spot, and there walks backwards and forwards and though the length of his walk be sometimes a quarter or half a mile, he is as fast bound within the chosen limits as if by prison walls. He generally composes his verses out of doors and while he is so engaged he seldom knows how the time slips by or hardly whether it is rain or fair.” There is a path at the top of the small garden at Dove Cottage, where he could see over the house to the lake and most of the ranges rising around it, and it was there he most often paced, composing. Many thousand of the “175 to 180,000 English miles” De Quincey estimated he had walked were walked here, on this terrace about twelve paces long, and on the similar terrace of the larger home he moved to in 1813. Seamus Heaney, writing about the “almost physiological relation of a poet composing and the music of the poem,” says of Wordsworth's pacing back and forth that it “does not forward a journey but habituates the body to a kind of dreamy rhythm.” It also makes composing poetry into physical labor, pacing back and forth like a ploughman turning his furrows up or wandering across the heights like a shepherd in search of a sheep. Perhaps because he was producing beauty out of arduous physical toil, he shamelessly identified himself with the working and walking poor. Though he was basically a rugged and athletic man, the stress of composing gave him headaches and a recurrent pain in the side, so
fiercely did he drive himself in this act of poetry as bodily labor. Heaney concludes, “Wordsworth at his best, no less than his worst, is a pedestrian poet.”

Had Wordsworth been a perfect Romantic poet, he would have died in his late thirties, still pacing back and forth at humble Dove Cottage, leaving us the first, best version of
The Prelude,
all his early ballads and narratives about the poor, his odes and lyrics of childhood, and his image as a radical intact. Unfortunately for his reputation, though happily enough for self and family, he lingered in Grasmere and then in the large house in neighboring Rydal to the age of eighty, becoming increasingly conservative and decreasingly inspired. One might say that he went from being a great Romantic to a great Victorian, and the transition required much renouncement. Though he did not keep faith with his early politics, he kept faith with his walking. And oddly, it is his legacy not as a writer but as a walker that carries on the joyful insurrection of his early years.

One of his own last twinges of democracy came in 1836, when he was sixty-six. He had taken Coleridge's nephew walking on a private estate when, as one biographer recounts it, “the lord who owned the ground came up and told them they were trespassing. Much to his companion's embarrassment, William argued that the public had always walked this way and that it was wrong of the lord to close it off.” The nephew recalled that “Wordsworth made his point with somewhat more warmth than I either liked or could well account for. He had evidently a pleasure in vindicating these rights, and seemed to think it a duty.” Another version situates the confrontation at Lowther Castle, where Wordsworth, Coleridge's nephew, and the lord in question were dining. The latter declared that his wall had been broken down and he would have horsewhipped the man who did it. “The grave old bard at the end of the table heard the words, the fire flashed into his face and rising to his feet, he answered: ‘I broke your wall down, Sir John, it was obstructing an ancient right of way, and I will do it again. I am a Tory, but scratch me on the back deep enough and you will find the Whig in me yet.' ”

Of all the other Romantics, only De Quincey seems to have had a lifelong passion for walking comparable to Wordsworth's, and though it is impossible to measure pleasure, it is possible to say something about effects: walking was neither a subject nor a compositional method for the younger writer in the way it had been for the older. His innovations were elsewhere—Morris Marples credits
him with being the first to go on a walking tour with a tent, which he slept in during an early sojourn in Wales to save money (the beginnings of the outdoor equipment industry show up here, in the special coats Wordsworth and Robert Jones had a tailor make them for their continental tour, in Coleridge's walking sticks, in De Quincey's tent, in Keats's odd travel outfit). De Quincey's best writing about walking was about prowling the streets of London as a destitute youth, a very different kind of walking—and writing. His fellow essayist William Hazlitt wrote the first essay on walking, but it began another genre of walking literature rather than extending the tradition Wordsworth took up, and it depicts walking as a pastime rather than an avocation. Shelley was too aristocratic an anarchist and Byron too lame an aristocrat to have much to do with walking; they sailed and rode instead.