The Making of Poetry. Adam Nicolson

Чтение книги онлайн.

Читать онлайн книгу The Making of Poetry - Adam Nicolson страница 14

The Making of Poetry - Adam  Nicolson

Скачать книгу

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 before her yellow beams

      Could overtop the elm-trees oer the heath

      I sought the r and I found

      That speck more precious to my soul

      Than was the moon in heaven

      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

      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.

      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.

Скачать книгу