The other Wordsworth
Sister Dorothy’s walks were a rich sourch of inspiration for William.
INEVER SAW SUCH a union of earth, sky and sea,’ wrote Dorothy Wordsworth in 1798. She was enthralled by her new home: the Quantocks. It’s not the place you might associate with the name Wordsworth. You may not have heard of the Quantocks at all. It sounds like a place scribed on a parchment map beside drawings of magical beasts and enchanted forests. Dorothy immediately understood how special the Quantocks were, and she recorded observations from her walks in simple, beautiful prose in her diary. These understated entries are the most powerful evocation of this landscape we have, and were likely plundered by her more famous, male companions for use in their lyric poetry.
Like most charmed places, the Quantocks are rather difficult to find. The area ripples out of a patchwork of Somerset fields like an inland island, emerging a few miles north of Taunton and extending in a long arrowhead northwest towards the coast. Designated an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, the rolling heaths are carved by deep wooded combes where bewitching streams run and moss-furred oaks huddle.
It was within this network of combes and downs that Dorothy Wordsworth would be found walking, attentive and thoughtful, from July 1797 until June 1798. She would walk in sunshine, hail and gales, and also in the long darkness of winter evenings – often by herself. She once wrote indignantly to an aunt who had criticised her for ‘rambling about the country on foot’: ‘I rather thought it would have given my friends pleasure to hear that I had courage to make use of the strength which nature has endowed me’. She did have a couple of walking companions she could call on in Quantocks if she wanted – namely her brother William Wordsworth and their friend, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Dorothy and William moved into the large country house, Alfoxden Hall, near the village of Holford in order to be close to Coleridge, who lived just down the road in Nether Stowey. It was in the Quantocks that Coleridge penned The Ancient Mariner, Cristabel and The Nightingale while William’s poetic output included A Night-Piece and The Discharged Soldier. But it’s misleading to see their names alone next to these poems. Their ideas, feelings and poetic images stemmed from a shared experience of the landscape. If you listened in closely on their Quantock ramblings, you’d probably catch them
swapping phrases about wooded dells, the shifting moonlight and the sound of the ocean. And one of the clearest voices would have been Dorothy’s.
From Alfoxden, she could vault up onto the downs via Longstone Hill and look down on the sea and valleys as the weather played across the landscape. ‘Sat a considerable time upon the heath,’ she wrote in February. ‘Its surface restless and glittering with the motion of the scattered piles of withered grass, and the waving of the spiders’ threads.’ Down in the combe she spies ‘one strawberry flower under a hedge’ and observes how the trees on the outer edge of the combe are rustled by the wind, while deeper inside everything is still and silent. ‘Moss cups more proper than acorns for fairy goblets,’ she writes, mysteriously. While night walking, it’s the crescent moon that rivets her: ‘a silvery line and thread bow, attended by Jupiter and Venus in their palest hues.’
William later wrote of his sister: ‘She gave me eyes, she gave me ears’, and no wonder. The siblings seem to have shared words like sweets. Dorothy’s description of the moon ‘in the centre of a black-blue vault’ sailing along ‘followed by multitudes of stars, small, and bright, and sharp’ is echoed almost word for word in William’s poem A Night-Piece. Her remarkable observation about a red stain on a fence, left by a sheep rubbing its marking against the wood, also appears in William’s poem, Ruined Cottage. Even the world-famous ‘ host, of golden daffodils’ in Cumbria, ‘tossing their heads in sprightly dance’ first ‘tossed and reeled and danced’ in Dorothy’s Grasmere Journal. And it wasn’t just William who Dorothy shared words with. Coleridge’s solitary leaf that ‘dances as often as dance it can’ in Cristabel is also found in Dorothy’s diary, where she pens the image of a ‘sole remaining leaf’ that ‘danced round and round like a rag blown by the wind.’
Dorothy could have written about many things at Alfoxden. William and Coleridge were both emerging from a period of political radicalism, and they were joined in the Quantocks by a man considered so dangerous in his views the government had him under surveillance. John Thelwall, a radical orator who had been arrested for treason three years earlier, stayed with Coleridge at Nether Stowey for 10 days in 1797. The four of them formed what Thelwall described as ‘a most philosophical party’, walking and talking their way through the Quantock combes. That is until the government dispatched a spy from London to keep an eye on them. By the time the spy arrived, Thelwall had vanished.
There is no trace of these events in Dorothy’s journal. Espionage and radical politics were mere tittle tattle compared to the drama of the ocean and moonlit woods. One day she writes the view from above Alfoxden is ‘so extensive that the mind is afraid to calculate its bounds’. Perhaps it was also that her imagination couldn’t be contained – her fascination with the natural world meant her eye was never still, always full of wonder.
Much later, in 1818, she wrote so evocatively of scaling Scafell Pike that her brother printed the account in his Lake District guidebook and passed it off as his own. It is possibly the clearest case of the brother pinching his sister’s words. We will never know for sure who first uttered the famous lines that appear in both Dorothy’s journals and the poets’ verses, but what’s certain is that Dorothy was an integral part of the Romantic movement that first got us ‘wandering’ through the English landscape. If we listen carefully her voice can still be heard in the rolling folds of the Quantock hills – guiding our steps, uncovering the mossy detail, and inspiring us to see with a poet’s eye.