The Art of Travel - Alain De Botton [38]
The cloud had floated over that part of the city only a few minutes before and, given the strong westerly wind, was not destined to remain above it long. The lights of surrounding offices lent to its edges an almost decadent fluorescent orange glow, making it look like a grave old man bedecked with party decorations, and yet its granite-grey centre testified to its origins in the slow interplay of air and sea. Soon it would be over the fields of Essex, then the marshes and oil refineries, before heading out over the mutinous North Sea waves.
Keeping my eyes fixed on the apparition while walking towards the bus stop, I felt my anxieties abate, and I turned over in my mind some lines the cadeish poet once composed in honour of a Welsh valley:
… [Nature] can so inform
The mind that is within us, so impress
With quietness and beauty, and so feed
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all
The dreary intercourse of daily life,
Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb
Our chearful faith that all which we behold
Is full of blessings.
Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey
5.
In the summer of 1798, Wordsworth and his sister went on a walking holiday along the Wye Valley in Wales, where William had a moment of revelation about the power of nature that was to resonate through his poetry for the rest of his life. It was his second visit to the valley; he had walked along it five years before. In the intervening period he had endured a succession of unhappy experiences: he had spent time in London, a city he feared; altered his political views by reading Godwin; transformed his sense of a poet's mission through his friendship with Coleridge and travelled across a revolutionary France wrecked by Robespierre's Great Terror.
Back in Wye, Wordsworth found an elevated spot where he sat down under a sycamore tree, looked out across the valley and its river, cliffs, hedgerows and forests and was inspired to write perhaps his greatest poem. At least, ‘no poem of mine was composed under circumstances more pleasant for me to remember than this', he would later explain of ‘Lines Written a Few Miles above Tin-tern Abbey', which he subtitled ‘On revisiting the banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798', an ode to the restorative powers of nature.
Though absent long,
These forms of beauty have not been to me,
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet …
With tranquil restoration.
Philip James de Loutherbourg, The River Wye at Tintern Abbey, 1805
The dichotomy of town and country forms the backbone of the poem, with the latter repeatedly being invoked as a counter to the pernicious influence of the former:
how oft,
In darkness, and amid the many shapes
Of joyless day-light; when the fretful stir
Unprofitable, and the fever of the world,
Have hung upon the beatings of my heart,
How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee
O sylvan Wye! Thou wanderer through the woods,
How often has my spirit turned to thee!
This expression of gratitude was to recur in The Prelude, where the poet once more acknowledged his debt to nature for enabling him to dwell in the cities without succumbing to the base emotions that, he held, they habitually fostered:
If, mingling with the world, I am content
With my own modest pleasures, and have lived …
removed
From little enmities and low desires,
The gift is yours …
Ye winds and sounding cataracts! 'tis yours,
Ye mountains! thine, O Nature!
6.
Why? Why would proximity to a cataract, a mountain or any other form of nature render one any less likely to experience ‘enmities and low desires' than proximity to crowded streets?
The Lake District offered suggestions. M. and I rose early on our first morning and went down to the Mortal