THE STONE FACE OF EMILY DICKINSON
by Amy Clampitt
Page 10
Another poem about the life of a woman; this is Dorothy Wordsworth. She was a very gifted writer; much too shy about the public to think about getting anything published, but she did keep journals, which she gave to her brother William and which he used in his poetry--they really were collaborators. I don't think she minded that at all, in fact, she kept the journal which she gave to him to read.
The story about William and Dorothy Wordsworth is they were two people who had much in common. They were separated at the ages of eight and nine, I believe, when their mother died (their father had died a couple of years before). And they were sent to different relatives and didn't see much of each other until they were in their teens. And when they were reunited, they found so much in common that I think one could say in a certain sense they fell in love. In any event, Dorothy soon resolved to keep house for her brother; especially after William went off to France, got involved with a French woman, and produced an illegitimate child. She was the one who broke the news to the family, and so she became, I think, indispensable to him in many ways. They did settle, eventually, in the town of Grasmere that is the famous place where they lived--they lived in some other houses too--in a place that is now known as Dove Cottage. The day came when William decided that he would get married to...it was a joint decision; I think that Dorothy had part of it...but he decided to marry Mary Hutchinson, who was Dorothy's old friend, and I saw when I read the journals of Dorothy Wordsworth that the week when these decisions were made was a very traumatic one for both of them. And out of that and a visit I paid to Grasmere a couple of years ago comes this poem called "Grasmere."
Rain storms that blacken like a headache
where mosses thicken, and the mornings
smell of jonquils, the stillness
of hung fells thronged with the primaveral
noise of waterfalls--contentment
pours in spate from every slope; the lake fills,
the kingcups drown, and still it rains,
the sheep graze, their black lambs bounce
and skitter in the wet: such weather
one cannot say, here, why
one is still so happy.
Cannot say, except it's both so wild
and so tea-cozy cozy, so snugly
lush, so English.
A run-into-the-ground complacency nonetheless
is given pause here. At Dove Cottage
dark rooms bloom with coal fires; the backstairs
escape hatch into a precipitous small orchard
still opens; bedded cowslips, primroses,
fritillaries' checkered, upside-down
brown tulips still flourish where
the great man fled the neighbors:
a crank ("Ye torrents, with
your strong and constant voice, protest
the wrong," he cried--i.e., against the Kendal-
to-Windermere railway). By middle age a Tory,
a somewhat tedious egotist even (his wild
oats sown abroad) when young: "He cannot," his sister
had conceded, "be so pleasing as my
fondness makes him"--a coda
to the epistolary cry, "Oh Jane
the last time we were together he
won my affection . . . " What gives one
pause here--otherwise one might not
care, as somehow one does,
for William Wordsworth--
is Dorothy.
"Wednesday . . . He read me his poem. After dinner
he made a pillow of my shoulder--I read to him
and my Beloved slept."
The upstairs bedroom where the roof leaked
and the chimney smoked, the cool buttery
where water runs, still voluble, under the flagstones;
the room she settled into after his marriage
to Mary Hutchinson, and shared with, as
the family grew, first one, then
two of the children; the newsprint
she papered it with for warmth (the circle
of domestic tranquility cannot
guard her who sleeps single
from the Cumbrian cold) still legible:
such was the dreamed-of place, so long
too much to hope for. "It was in winter
(at Christmas) when he was last at Forncett,
and every day as soon as we rose from dinner
we used to pace the gravel in the Garden
till six o'clock." And this,
transcribed for Jane alone from
one of William's letters: "Oh my dear, dear Sister
with what transport shall I again
meet you, with what rapture . . ." The orphan
dream they'd entertained, that she had named
The Day of My Felicity: to live
together under the same roof,
in the same house. Here,
at Dove Cottage.
"A quiet night. The fire flutters, and
the watch ticks. I hear nothing else
save the breathing of my Beloved . . ."
Spring, when it arrived again, would bring
birch foliage filmy as the bridal veil
she'd never wear; birds singing; the sacred stain
of bluebells on the hillsides; fiddleheads
uncoiling in the brakes, inside each coil
a spine of bronze, pristinely hoary;
male clean-limbed ash trees whiskered
with a foam of pollen; bridelike
above White Moss Common, a lone wild cherry
candle-mirrored in the pewter of the lake.
On March 22nd--a rainy day, with William
very poorly--resolves were made
to settle matters with Annette, in France,
and that he should go to Mary. On the 27th,
after a day fraught with anxiety, a morning
of divine excitement: At breakfast
William wrote part of an ode. It was
the Intimations.
The day after, they took the excitement to Coleridge
at Keswick, arriving soaked to the skin. There, after dinner,
she had one of her headaches.
A bad one's ghastly worst, the packed ganglion's
black blood clot: The Day of My Felicity
curled up inside a single sac with its
perfidious twin, the neurasthenic
nineteenth-century housemate
and counterpart of William's incorrigibly
nervous stomach: "I do not know from what
cause it is," he wrote, "but during
the last three years I have never
had a pen in my hand five minutes
before my whole frame becomes a bundle
of uneasiness." To ail, here in this place,
this hollow formed as though to be the vessel
of contentment--of sweet mornings
smelling of jonquils, of tranquillity
at nightfall, of habitual strolls
along the lakeshore, among the bracken
the old, coiled-up agitation
glistening: birds singing, the greening
birches in their wedding veils,
the purple stain of bluebells:
attachment's uncut knot--so rich, so dark,
so dense a node the ache still bleeds,
still binds, but cannot speak.
