Than was the moon in heaven
Here now at last are the elements for a strange and lonely poem of experience on the edges of despair, an act of empathy. It is driven by an obsessive and disordered frame of mind, dissociated from the normalities of human love and community, in a world where, in its final form, a looming morbidity infects and pollutes all living things. It is a poem written by the desperate man Coleridge had come to cure.
Incipient Madness
I crossed the dreary I crossed the dreary moor
In the clear moonlight when I reached the hut
I enter’d in, but all was still and dark
Only within the ruin I beheld
At a small distance, on the dusky ground
A broken pane which glitter’d to in the moon
And seemed akin to life. There is a mood
A settled temper of the heart, when grief,
Becomes an instinct, fastening on the all things
That promise food, doth like a sucking babe
Create it where it is not. From this hour time
I found my sickly heart had tied itself
Even to this speck of glass – It could produce
a feeling as of absence
on the moment when my sight
Should feed on it again. For many a long month
I felt Confirm’d this strange incontinence; my eye
Did every evening measure the moon’s height
And forth I went soon as her yellow beams
Could overtop the elm-trees. Oer the heath
I went, I reached the cottage, and I found
Still undisturbed and glittering in its place
That speck of glass more precious to my soul
Than was the moon in heaven. Another time
The winds of Autumn drove me o’er the heath
One gloomy evening: By the storm compell’d
The poor man’s horse that feeds along the lanes
Had hither come within among these fractur’d walls
To weather out the night; and as I pass’d
While restlessly he turn’d from the fierce wind
And from the open sky, I heard, within,
The iron links with which his feet were clogg’d
Mix their dull clanking with the heavy sound noise
Of falling rain. I started from the spot
And heard the sound still following in the wind
These lines, firmly in a gothic tradition, nevertheless stand as a challenge to everything the eighteenth-century inheritance of elegant rural landscapes might have suggested or proposed. The heart of what Wordsworth sees is not the well-framed picture but the broken pane of glass, and the haunted sound of chains blown towards him on the vast and homeless winds of heaven. There is no connection yet to any larger significance – any movement beyond the gothic – that connection would have to wait until Coleridge had changed his relationship to the world.
There was one more poem, his most recent, that Wordsworth was keen to have Coleridge hear, and it marked an emergence from this darkness. He read him this first version of ‘The Ruined Cottage’, not giving it to him to read but making sure he heard it from his own lips. It is a descendant of the dark poetry which had poured out of him over the previous six or nine months, but this is different. In ‘The Ruined Cottage’, suffering and the disordered world are seen in tranquillity. The gothic furniture has been dispensed with, much of it hived off into ‘Incipient Madness’. Instead, a calm and beneficent air emerges from a sad and simple story of suffering and failure, nothing over-heightened, no melodramatic lighting, but a rich simplicity in language and setting by which the place itself of the ruined cottage and its surroundings comes to portray the people whose lives it describes. His previous rhetorical habits have dropped away. Abstractions and pat responses are banished in favour of the tender, corporeal realities in the life of a poor woman and her family.
In Wordsworth’s poem, the poet comes across a ruin and meets an old man, a pedlar, who had known the place many years before, when happiness had glowed from its windows. ‘I see around me here,’ the Pedlar says,
Things which you cannot see. We die, my Friend,
Nor we alone, but that which each man loved
And prized in his peculiar nook of earth
Dies with him, or is changed, and very soon
Even of the good is no memorial left.
In the garden is a neglected spring, and the poet goes to drink there:
A spider’s web hung to the water’s edge
And on the wet and slimy foot-stone lay
The useless fragment of a wooden bowl.
It moved my very heart.
A young woman, Margaret, had lived in the remote cottage, and always welcomed passers-by. Her husband Robert had worked in the garden, often late,
till the day-light
Was gone, and every leaf and flower were lost
In the dark hedges.
One or two other poets – Southey, Cowper – had managed to write of simplicity and suffering in this low, gentle, absorbent, un-self-proclaiming way, in which the reality underlying the poetry matters more than the surface of the poetry itself, but ‘The Ruined Cottage’ is something new in Wordsworth’s life. Its facts, like those leaves and flowers sinking back into the darkness of the evening hedge, have become the modest elements of an unquiet landscape. The whole poem exists in a border state, ‘without the application of gross and violent stimulus’, as he would describe the qualities of valuable poetry the following year, but attentive to the sorrows of the story it tells.
It is tempting to think, given the permeability of the boundary in Wordsworth’s mind between the remembered and the imagined, between some other reality and his own experience, that there is autobiography underlying this tale of distress. Margaret is one of the many women in Wordsworth’s poetry who are left with their children to fend for themselves, and suffer as a result. He said himself that in ‘several passages describing the employment & demeanour of Margaret during her affliction, I was indebted to observations made in Dorsetshire’, but there was a more powerful stimulus
