The Making of Poetry. Adam Nicolson

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The Making of Poetry - Adam  Nicolson

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      my life became

      A floating island, an amphibious thing

      Unsound, of spungy texture.

      But the scent of liberty was coming across the Channel. A decade earlier, the Americans had cast themselves free. Now an ancient European monarchy was heading for a rational, liberated future. Richard Price, a suddenly famous dissenting minister-turned-lecturer, was drawing vast crowds to his London talks. ‘A general amendment’, he told his excited audience, was beginning in human affairs:

      the dominion of kings [is] changed for the dominion of laws, and the dominion of priests giving way to the dominion of reason and conscience. Be encouraged, all ye friends of freedom, and writers in its defence!

      Injuries

      Made him more gracious, and his nature then

      Did breathe its sweetness out most sensibly,

      As aromatic flowers on Alpine turf,

      When foot hath crushed them.

      By birth he ranked

      With the most noble, but unto the poor

      Among mankind he was in service bound,

      As by some tie invisible, oaths professed

      To a religious order. Man he loved

      As man, and, to the mean and the obscure,

      And all the homely in their homely works,

      Transferred a courtesy which had no air

      Of condescension; but did rather seem

      A passion and a gallantry, like that

      Which he, a soldier, in his idler day

      Had paid to woman: somewhat vain he was,

      Or seemed so – yet it was not vanity,

      But fondness, and a kind of radiant joy

      That covered him about when he was intent

      On works of love or freedom.

      Beaupuy looked like an oasis in a bitter world, a source of hope and goodness in a violent time, a demonstration that human nature was capable of fineness and grace. With him, walking along the road in Touraine, Wordsworth had a sudden, formative encounter, one of those spots of time that make us what we are, remembered for the rest of his life:

      One day to meet a hunger-bitten girl,

      Who crept along fitting her languid self

      Unto a heifer’s motion – by a cord

      Tied to her arm, and picking thus from the lane

      Its sustenance, while the girl with her two hands

      Was busy knitting in a heartless mood

      Of solitude – and at the sight my friend

      In agitation said, ‘’Tis against that

      That we are fighting,’ I with him believed

      Devoutly that a spirit was abroad

      Which could not be withstood, that poverty,

      At least like this, would in a little time

      Be found no more, that we should see the earth

      Unthwarted in her wish to recompense

      The industrious, and the lowly child of toil,

      All institutes for ever blotted out

      That legalized exclusion, empty pomp

      Abolished, sensual state and cruel power

      Whether by edict of the one or few –

      And finally, as sum and crown of all,

      Should see the people having a strong hand

      In making their own laws; whence better days

      To all mankind.

      At the same time, Wordsworth fell in love with a young French woman. Annette Vallon was four years older than him. Their story, which was only ever known within the family circle in Wordsworth’s lifetime, is exceptionally opaque. She was the daughter of a surgeon in Blois. Nearly nothing is known about her, except that during the years of the Revolutionary wars, in which her Catholic and Royalist family suffered at the hands of the Republic, she and her sisters behaved with extraordinary and resourceful courage, running messages for the Royalists, concealing enemies of the state, smuggling them to safety, evading the secret police, in turn, of the Terror, the Directoire and Napoleon, risking all. Wordsworth had fallen in love with a woman of mettle and fire. She had first encountered him late in 1791, at the house in Orléans of André-Augustin Dufour, a magistrate’s clerk, and may have begun by teaching him French, but soon they moved together to Blois. In the spring of 1792 she became pregnant with their child.

      Wordsworth scarcely communicated with anyone at home, only asking his brother Richard for some money, but saying nothing of Annette. In December 1792 their daughter, Anne-Caroline Vallon, was born and baptised in Orléans, the French clerk carefully recording the impossible name ‘Anne Caroline Wordswodsth, daughter of Williams Wordswodsth, Anglois, and of Marie Anne Vallon’. Wordsworth had made arrangements for Dufour to represent him at the baptism, by which time he himself had gone, leaving Annette unmarried and unsupported. Astonishingly, he did not return immediately to England, but spent six weeks in Paris

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