The Making of Poetry: Coleridge, the Wordsworths and Their Year of Marvels. Adam Nicolson

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      June 1797

      Coleridge stayed at Racedown for the next three weeks, and the talk began. For months Wordsworth’s poetry had been fragmentary, fierce and strange, moving between the worlds of doubt and guilt, finding significance on the borders of madness. He read his poems to Coleridge. A set of sketches and revisions of one of them has survived on the reverse side of the same large folio sheet as his lines on the baker’s cart, with further thoughts and rethoughts of it on a neighbouring sheet, both now in the Wordsworth archive at Dove Cottage.

      Looking at these repetitive, hesitant drafts of something Wordsworth would come to call ‘Incipient Madness’ is like observing a man feeling for poetry with his fingertips in the dark.

      There were at least twelve uncertain and twitchy stages. From the first moment are three words:

      You see the

      It is a tiny eruptive nodule of poetic substance focused on a ruined building, a small cottage or shed.

      He pulls back a foot or two and starts again:

Though open to the sky yet stained with smoke

      You see the swallows nest has dropp’d away

      A wretched covert ’tis for man or beast

      And when the poor mans horse that shelters there

      Turns from the beating wind and open sky

      The iron links with which his feet are clogg’d

      Mix their dull clanking with the heavy sound

      Of falling rain a melancholy

      That has come easily, without correction, on this otherwise heavily corrected sheet, so materially realised that it seems likely to have been something seen by Wordsworth on his walks in Dorset. This poetry is already autobiographical, and its atmosphere describes the man Wordsworth was in his darkest hours. ‘You’ is ‘you’ the reader or the passer-by; it is also Wordsworth himself, and the ‘you’ also seems identified with the horse and his hobbling chains, both man and animal a prisoner, dulled by the conditions life has imposed, sheltering in a wreck of a building for which all hope is gone and which even the swallows have deserted. Coleridge accused Wordsworth of being a ‘spectator ab extra’ – an observer from outside whatever conditions or predicament he was describing – but here the ‘covert’, the hiding place, is wretched for man or beast, no matter which, and all these creatures – Wordsworth, the horse, the poor man, the swallow, you – are inhabiting the same desolate landscape.

      But the setting is not entirely true. There is a whiff of cliché in the air. The magazines of the 1790s were full of tragic scenes of rural poverty, and the word ‘melancholy’ seems to bring the movement to a halt. So Wordsworth stops and tries again:

      And when the poor mans horse that hither comes

      For shelter turns ab

That too, for whatever reason, is a dead end. And he takes another run:

      And open sky the passenger may hear

      The iron links with which his feet are were clogged

      Mix their dull clanking with the heavy sound

      Of falling rain, a melancholy thing

      To any man who has a heart to feel. –

      Those final words at last ring with an air of Wordsworth’s own truth. That is his subject: the grandeur in the beatings of the heart.

      But whatever this poem is, it won’t come clean. He introduces his own recent visit to the cottage:

      But two nights gone

      I chanced to I passed this cottage and within I heard

      The poor man’s lonely horse who that hither comes

      For shelter, turning from the beating rain

      And open sky, and as he turned, I heard

      At one level the horse was a ‘who’, but Wordsworth revises that to the more conventionally impersonal ‘that’. The various elements and players need to be organised: himself, the horse, the place, the stormy night, the connections between them. The revisions now turn scratchy and directionless:

      I heard him turning from the beating wind –

      And open sky and as he turn’d I heard

But he cannot decide what the horse is doing there: ‘to weather the night storm’ or ‘to weather out the tempests’? ‘Within these walls’, ‘within these roofless walls’, or ‘these fractur’d walls’? Then, at draft twelve of these few recalcitrant lines, another set of ingredients appears which suddenly mobilises this dark fragment of experience:

      But two nights gone, I cross’d this dreary moor

      In the still clear moonlight, when reached the hut

      I looked within but all was still and dark

      Only within the ruin, I beheld

      At a small distance on the dusky ground

      A broken pain which glitter’d to the moon

      And seemed akin to life. – Another time

      The winds of autumn drove me oer the heath

      Heath in a dark night by the storm compelled

      the hardships of that season

      I crossed the dreary moor

      Those lines are still in thrall to an earlier way of doing poetry – ‘dusky’ is dead jargon; ‘glitter’d to’ is patently false language – but that broken pain/pane of glass on the dark floor of the ruined shed, a lifeless thing that seems to be full of life, grips and obsesses him:

      I found my sickly heart had tied itself

      Even to this speck of glass – It could produce

      a feeling as of absence

      on the moment when my sight

      Should feed on it again. For many a long month

      I felt Confirm’d this strange incontinence; my eye

      Did every evening measure the moon’s height

      And forth I went before her yellow beams

      Could overtop the elm-trees oer the heath

      I sought the r and I found

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