with old hangings and ‘covered with the round-faced family portraits of the age of George I and II’, not unlike and actually larger than Racedown, with hints of Lonsdale grandeur. The way in which Dorothy described it to her friend feels nearly like an heiress coming into her own. Her language is virtually without the stock Romantic or even pre-Romantic phrases that would have displayed the fashionable attitudes to place. The only hint in these letters that she is not a straightforward member of the landowning classes is her love of the ‘wild simplicity’ of the hill tops. Otherwise it is a land surveyor’s account, allied to a calm and proprietorial description of an elegant landscape seen as the declaration of a well-ordered life and a contented household. The much-admired, sparkle-eyed observer of the slivers and specks of the natural world, the empathiser with the poor and troubled, the poet of the unnoticed and the everyday, seems to have slipped away here under the manners and modes of the gentleman and the squire.
Perhaps one can see in this the Dorothy who was the source of strength and connection in their lives, who sustained her broken brother, the irrigating woman-brook, ‘seen, heard, felt, and caught at every turn’. Audible in that account is ‘the voice of sudden admonition’ with which she recalled Wordsworth to his ‘office upon earth’, his destiny as a poet. Its authority is unmistakable. None of this was coming from Wordsworth himself, and in the months that followed, that ownership of settled beauty was the very opposite of what Wordsworth himself would find here.
Alfoxden – called by Coleridge ‘All the Foxes Den’ and by most people, dully, Alfoxton – remains a beautiful and haunting place. The house is now decrepit, and the park broken and ragged. It is scarcely visited. Unlike Coleridge’s spruced-up cottage in Nether Stowey, no National Trust care is applied to the flaking and rotting surfaces of these buildings. Little wrens play on the cornices and pied wagtails pick through the gravel where the moss roses used to flower. The roof in places is breaking through, and the paint on the doors looks as if it has been peppered with gunshot. The walled garden is abandoned, and the trees lie collapsed and broken where they have fallen, vast twisted and spiralled chestnuts lying riven on the hillside, as if a war had been fought through them.
Broken Park
That very condition, on a thick summer evening, with the leaves darkening in the dusk, the bats flicking and scouting overhead, and the deer rustling their anxious, hidden bodies somewhere up in the bracken, has over the centuries absorbed, ironically enough, a Wordsworthian atmosphere. Now Alfoxden seems more than ever like his place, with an ancient grandeur, poised and beautifully placed between hill and sea, with its own apron of hedge and field spread out in front of it towards the grey waters of the Bristol Channel to the north. Everywhere the atmosphere is of decay and breakage, as if forgotten, a fraying cloth, a place shut up and shuttered, ragwort on the lawns and marsh thistles in ranks in front of the house like ushers at its death. On the upper edges of the park the rim of beech trees stands waiting for the old beast to lie down.
Allow night to fall here, and memory and hauntedness come easing out of the ground, a dusk in which Alfoxden’s half-ruin summons the sense of marginal understanding, of something growing in significance because only half-seen, which is one of Wordsworth’s lasting gifts to the world. It is easy to imagine that he was like this himself in these years, a man glimpsed but never quite grasped, always a suggestion of a resolution in him, making half-gestures, a raised eyebrow, an almost-smile, so that his whole being appeared more latent than present.
His repeated habit in poetry, and perhaps in speech, was to use the double negative. Pleasures were not unwelcome, sounds not unheard, understandings not ungrasped. Even when he feels, for instance, the ‘mild creative breeze’ lifting within him, the very centre of his being as a poet, he calls it ‘a power/that does not come unrecognised’.
Everything hangs there as a suggestion. The wind of poetry is no more than a breath of stirring air, and Wordsworth only half-knows it for what it is. That half-state, a not-unreality, is the condition of his inner life, his duskiness, and now, through neglect, is the very state that Alfoxden has come to. There are no mathematics here; the two negatives do not cancel each other out, or at least in their mutual cancelling leave the ghost of a third term, something which might have been or might yet be. The mild creative breeze is itself an aspect of the tentative, a half-feeling, a stirring of the inner atmosphere that might or might not be the making of poetry. There is no certainty that it is; nor any that it is not. That very hanging in a qualified neutrality, which smells of something and suggests something but isn’t quite the thing itself, is the revelatory thing. It is the simmering of a presence, not the memory of a presence but the promise of a presence which bears the same relationship to the future as a memory does to the past.
Over the smooth, curved carriage drive leading back to the village, buzzards turn in the wind off the sea. A dog barks in Holford Glen, and in response the buzzards catcall over the dying ashwoods. Looking down from the footbridge, the rocks and all the ferns beside them are invisible under the roof of summer leaves. As Alfoxden drops into its felt-lined dark, I stay up and walk along the easy way through the edge of the park. Miles off to the north, the surge of a westerly swell breaks and draws on the stones at East Quantoxhead.
There is the slightest undulation in the surface of the carriageway, an easy coming and going beneath the trunks of the ancient chestnuts. There is no need for light here. This was the way loved by Wordsworth for its continuousness, a zero space whose fluency of form allowed the steady, uninterrupted and murmured composition of his verses as he walked, a place in which his music could hold sway, the body-rhythm of a man who, in one half of his own self-conception, belonged in the park of a fine house, suited to a naturally Miltonic and magisterial frame of mind. Wordsworth had a powerful sense of his own promise, and, in 1797, of his failure to fulfil it. Alfoxden now is a picture of Wordsworth then. What could be more fitted to this great man in trouble than a house in ruins and a park in greater ruins, along whose lightless paths he must make his way to find the greatness he knows is in him?
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