A Different Sort of Provocation

This January I moved from a flat in central Exeter to a wooden house in the Loire Valley. I’ve replaced the urban sprawl with a neat patchwork of farmlands and woods but there is one constancy of a now not-so-peculiarly-English persuasion occupying me, the weather. As I write this, Storm Imogen is dancing across the sky, whipping her outer skirts of rain against my study window. The storm has battered southern Britain, with waves as high as Gormley’s Angel of the North recorded off of St Ives. Back in Devon my former colleagues at the Met Office will be fielding questions as to whether the succession of storms in Britain this autumn and winter, nine so far, is within our understanding of how the planet naturally works, or if these storms have been super-powered by climate change. I know as this is the exact question two British poetry friends asked me over breakfast this morning. As they finished their croissants and donned raincoats I explained what we know. That, in short, it’s too early to tell, but basic physics suggests that this type of behaviour is consistent with what we should expect in our warming world.

My visitors tightened their boots and struck out for the nearest deer-laden wood, talking of how to poetically engage with climate change. To address this issue it’s natural to examine how poets have engaged with climate and nature, starting with the Romantics. So today I stayed home, not because I’m adverse to a soaking (such an attitude is impossible when you’ve grown up in the North West of England) but part of my time here is much needed rest after a prolonged period of ill-health. I watched the outlines of my friends blur and assimilate with the rain and, thinking about my state and their discussion, found my companionship in Coleridge’s poem ‘This Lime Tree Bower My Prison’. Coleridge injured himself on the morning of the arrival of his friends Charles Lamb and Dorothy and William Wordsworth. Unable to walk, he sat and composed this poem to them while