Any rate he was copying stuff about a violet down in the Guide and he was reciting that poem and then all of a sudden he says to me, you do know, Dixon, precisely what a constitutes a violet’s form?
I think I could scratch a decent likeness of one, Sir, I says, if that’s what you mean. For I had done a few violets on the Pace eggs. But he knew that.
So I wondered why he was asking me this and then he goes on and he says remember it has a low petal, that hangs down below the rest?
And I says aye, I remember that. This was nearly November now, but I had seen enough violets in enough springtimes so as to well recall exactly what one looks like.
And he says that low petal, that’s my sister, Dorothy. It’s really the highest!
Sir, how can low be high?
William got on with riddles like this once in a while. He seemed to like it and I didn’t really mind. I forgot most of them but I remember this one now because I was surprised by it.
Because, he says, you know how it’s the odd one—a violet bears two pairs of petals, and then that odd one, a fifth, hangs down—
Aye, Sir, I says.
Well, he says, that low one is really the uppermost! Only by virtue of the violet’s stalk bending near its summit does it look to us as if that highest petal is really the lowest. I fancy, he says, the two petal pairs being two married couples: myself and my wife Mary, and then Sam Coleridge and his wife. Or De Quincey and his wife Margaret, or any one of us and our wives forming the couplets surrounding that lone petal at one time or another. All alone is the lowest petal, all our lives—that one being Dorothy all by herself bearing the rest of us up.
And that is my sister, he proclaimed. She climbs Scawfell Pike, the utmost summit in England, without even knowing she is in the highest place. To Dorothy it’s all just another day’s adventure.
He sounded crestfallen about it. I decided not to argue that Rotha climbed Scawfell Pike with her friend Mary Barker and not alone at all. She hadn’t been alone. But William seemed to think she had been.
And his pen scratched and scratched ’til I had to recut it a few more times and he filled in the old Guide with many new lines from his sister’s life, but nothing at all from the life he himself was living.
Scratch scratch scratch no matter his headache, getting ready to post her living days to London and hammer them into gold he could spend.
As if he could hear me thinking, he says it’s all right, you know, Dixon, that I am inserting my sister’s observations into my own book. One famous writer in the family is nearly one too many and we have all suffered enough from the glare that falls upon myself as it is. You see heads bobbing outside the garden now, as we speak? Here to see the poet. Imagine our dear Dorothy if she had to endure the exposure of literary fame. Have you noticed especially lately how easily she is brought out of equilibrium into some passionate spiral of thought? And then her bowels start their torment until the strength leaves her legs and she becomes unable to see anyone and cannot even get out of bed.
This did not yet happen often and it had not happened at all since her scaling the high peak. I wondered if William felt at all to blame. I know I felt slightly sheepish as he spoke about the visitors, for I had that very afternoon sold another three of his signatures to tourists outside the gate. I cut them off copies of letters he had dictated but not sent. Myself and John Carter had a little side enterprise going. John was afraid to go and hawk the goods but he did not mind saving the signatures for me in exchange for a percentage on the quiet. But me, I have hawking and selling in my blood, and as far as I am concerned if something was destined for the fire to begin with then it is not stealing to rescue it from there. For instance, whenever I cut William’s hair for him what do you think I did with the sweepings?
So when William mentioned the hardships of fame I knew only too well that there were quite a few benefits in it for him and for me. Who sails through life not having done a single thing they feel guilty about? Show me the person who claims that honour and I’ll show you a real swindler.
When he read me the final version—his tale of Scawfell Pike that made it seem as if he was the one who reached that summit all by himself—you would think since he used her script that it would sound like hers, but there was something missing. His version was all tied up and had a bow on it like, and he left wild bits out. Any bits that made no sense to him or were a bit unfinished he didn’t bother with. And he asked me, What do you think, Dixon? And of course I said I thought it sounded pretty good but that he shouldn’t rely on me, he should send it out to people who were used to criticizing. His writer friends. Robert Southey or De Quincey.
But you are a servant and a gardener, he says to me, and if it works for you then I think it might work for the ordinary public.
And I says well, Sir, it sounds all right to me. It sounds like you got all the details about the heights and the plants and particular views from various parts like Esk Vale and Black Combe and Wasdale and Great Gable—
I did not mention things he had left out, for I couldn’t quite recall if they were parts Rotha had written, or things she’d only said to me. I did not want to offend William by pointing out gaps but I was curious about one thing so I says to him, Sir, did you happen to forget the part about a ship?
What’s that? he says. What ship?
And I knew I had made a mistake.
He wouldn’t let it rest, now I’d let it slip.
So I told him best as I could remember, how when they were looking over Eskdale as far as the sea, Rotha saw a ship and she told the other two, Miss Barker and auld Tom the shepherd. Only Tom says then, Is it a ship? And Miss Barker assures him that yes, she sees it too and she has seen enough ships to be certain when something is a ship or not!
And of course auld Tom doesn’t argue with her. The likes of shepherds or servants never argue. We might not get hoyed off the mountain but we don’t want to risk our living. Only in two minutes auld Tom says real quiet like, he says look at your ship now, it’s a horse! He couldn’t help it.
And Rotha was over the moon laughing at herself—a gallant horse it was, she says, galloping over the sea. And Rotha tells Mary Barker: Mary, she says, you might know all about ships but our old Wise Man of the Mountains knows even more about clouds!
And Rotha says to me, Never again, Dixon, will I be satisfied with how certainly I know any single fact. For anything could indeed be completely different to what I might suppose. If you see me huff and puff all certain about anything, James, she says, remind me of our ship that turned into a horse! Away with all conclusiveness!
…But William doesn’t write down a word of this story. He dismisses it.
Me mam used to say each one of us has a secret stone. She said it’s between our neck and shoulders at the back, inside. Some people make no headway with it. But other people notice it has a little door. And then that door can open. And inside is what looks at first like a jewel. It’s behind a little grate, very protected, deep in the stone inside us all. But if you look closely, if you pay attention to it, the jewel is wrapped in a membrane—it’s like wasp’s nest paper, it’s that thin, and it breaks. It breaks open and you see what you’d thought was a jewel glimmering inside is really an all-seeing eye.
Aye, that’s what Mam told me. But again—all-seeing, second sight, extra sight—to me it’s, that’s not what it feels like. To me it feels like, not have you got a magical, special eye, haha, not—are you going around with it wrapped or open—but are ye sighted or blind?
And either that very day or soon after it a strange fella comes to the door. Someone I had never seen yet he had a familiar look, like someone out of a fairy tale.
William spied his head bobbing beyond the hedges with very wild hair and great orbs of eyes about to pop out of his head like exploding lanterns, a man broad like a keg around but not very tall—That’s the poet William Blake, says o
ur William. Quick, tell him I am away and can’t be found here for the next fortnight at least, for he’s a raving lunatic and I don’t want him in my house.
My William doesn’t know it but one look at the face of this Blake fellow and I know I can’t lie to him for those eyes’ll burn through any fib like fire through that wasp’s nest paper I was talking about, in fact they have already burned through any cloak I tried to wrap round my thoughts before I say a word to him.
He bursts in the door, this Blake, before I can keep him out. But he surprises me in not caring to visit William at all. It isn’t William he wants to see, but the woman who saw the ship that wasn’t a ship.
He has heard about it somehow.
How?
I think it was a cloud, I says to him, wanting to be helpful. From up high on a mountain it only appeared to them like a ship at first.
He looks at me pityingly.
I see my William has fled the yard and run down the bank. He has done this before when he does not have it in him to host a difficult visitor and just the thought of this William Blake had given him a blinding headache. I wondered at it, but before I could answer for it Rotha appeared at the top of the stairs looking down at Blake with an expression I had never seen on her before.
The only way I can describe the scene is that when the two glanced one upstairs and one down at the other, a beam lit from Rotha Wordsworth to William Blake like the flash you get if a lamp flame meets a cat’s eye. I remembered the eye in us all that my mam described, and I knew Rotha and the Blake fellow both had that all-seeing eye sprung wide open, and our William, William Wordsworth, fled from it. But these two burned and I saw the flash before they turned back into an ordinary pair of writers such as the ones I was used to seeing at Rydal all the time.
I could not hear what they said to each other that day, though believe me I cocked my ears. What they said was muffled and I don’t remember much else about their encounter, or truth be told even if it happened on the exact day when William copied down all about his sister’s climb or on another day around that time, which is the time like I said when everything changed in the gleam of an eye. I feel as if it was the selfsame day. I know Rotha had her pale green gown on. And I know that the same evening or the one after or no later than two or three days after at the most, I crept in Rotha’s bedroom and spied the red diary at her hand, she asleep on the bed with her pen rolled away and ink staining her bedding, and I should not have looked but I did glance at what she wrote about the talk she had with William Blake.
Blake says, she wrote, that the ship was not merely a cloud but a Vision—
I remember Rotha and that Blake fellow all fired up in some kind of cahoots none of the rest of the household knew about or understood. I remember her telling me of that cloud, or was it a cloud? On Scawfell Pike. The ship that turned into a horse. And my not understanding.
I remember our William, William Wordsworth, thought Blake should not have been alone with Rotha. It is all bad enough with her own imaginings, he said when he returned after having fled, but—Dixon—you failed to shield my sister and now she will not come out of her room.
It was one of very few times when William was angry with me and he couldn’t stay angry for long—we both knew it—for hadn’t he himself run away and left his sister behind the minute he saw Blake’s head bobbing over the gooseberries? Fled, though he somehow believed his sister to be in trouble.
Aye, he said after he found her upstairs unwilling to come down for prayers or even to eat a bit of pudding, that man would be better locked up at Whitmore or Warburton’s than free to roam around our paradise here, troubling our peace to match his own madness.
I knew he couldn’t mean this, for Whitmore was a bad place to which no one should be sent for we all knew their friend Mary Lamb had been there and what she had seen, if she was telling the truth, and she always, it was said, told the truth no matter that she had murdered her own mother and no matter what else she did. In fact they all said, William and Rotha and everybody, that whenever she was not locked up Mary Lamb was the most sane person any of them ever knew. And according to Miss Lamb they force-fed you at Whitmore ’til the spoon tore the last teeth from your gums and they beat you with brooms, and that was only the start. So for him to say Blake should be in Whitmore I knew our William was far from happy.
And what about Rotha?
A cloud but not a cloud, she wrote, and Blake bade me wait and watch. Wait and watch and when you find yourself on a ship as foretold by this cloud, know it is the ship of your transformation!
What did Blake mean by that?
I sat on her bed and read what he’d said and I did not understand what it meant, not then.
—& he said Dorothy, the ship will take you from one life to another—the ship will first falter & run aground—beware that you do not rely on anyone to save you, least of all family. Very least of all the one on whom you most rely for your heart’s ease, for that ship is already long wrecked—but lo, from this new shipwreck is born a horse you have rightly called gallant of neck & head, & aboard that horse—if you leap in time—soars your freedom!
That is all Rotha wrote of William Blake’s words the day he visited after she climbed Scawfell Pike.
At that time I had no notion what any of it meant. It was not until more than a year later, after we had all been away and she came back from Europe with her brother and their wife Mary, it all came clear.
Aye, the wink of an eye.
Did ye ever notice—ye must’ve—how you can dwell in one place and things are going pretty well and everything seems to be one way, with sweet accord and a fair amount of knowing what’s what—everything has its own place and there is a kind of peace over things, or if not peace then at least there is a comfort or a routine. The house at Rydal was full of a kind of comfort or even I might call it love. Compared with the rest of England I mean, where there was no comfort and things were not full of love.
All I have told ye so far was before 1820 and like I said over the next few seasons I had to go away off and on and so did the little family. We briefly went our own ways. And it seems, have ye lot noticed this? That the minute ye turn your back for even a moment, well it’s like what happens in a garden if you leave it. I’ll wager this happens to ye with your flowers and fields. Everything goes all topsy-turvy!
Ye head for the clover fields one year and then ye turn your sweet little backs for what seems like no time at all. Maybe ye try a cowslip field for a day or an elder grove or a place where all your honey comes from yet another sort of bloom ye’ve been meaning to try for some time and suddenly you get the chance!
That’s what happened to me, like, and from the way things turned out I am telling ye it must’ve happened to Rotha at the same time. We both turned our faces away from each other for that instant, and when we came back…I find it a bit upsetting how nothing stays the same though I know ye lot know how to keep yourselves safe through the biggest sorts of changes in weather or in society or whatever might befall ye. At least so far. But ye have me beat on that score. The difference in Rotha when the little family returned! You might as well have called a magician into Rydal to hoy a cloth over us all then whisk that cloth away only for us to find we could recognize nothing from before.
4
On the bat’s back I do fly
James, when you leave the presence of our garden, whether you go indoors to Rydal Mount or travel as Rotha and her brother and Mary did to behold cities, or strive to raise your sister Penny from the dead…once you leave off touching the land with your own feet and hands and senses…once you leave our influence…
Have you beseeched your pillow as to what you, or Penny, or Rotha, or I, Sycamore, can do against brutality, except withstand it?
What does it mean to withstand?
Brutality’s weapon is the lie that it is stronger than our withstanding. As if withstanding
has no power. No. In our presence brutality is pathetic, dwindling. Withstanding is our glory. Our conversation is eternal dignity. We are the realm of life.
Remember that, James, when you imagine yourself bereft.
eleven
it was christmas eve of 1820 that they were to return. Christmas Eve! I was working over in Ambleside the week before when Grace Threlkeld got a note over to me saying the Wordsworths wanted their house prepared for that day and everything ready for the following day, Christmas Day. And they’d like to have myself there to help with the preparations and to be there on the day itself and the days following as well as the months if I felt like staying on. My hut was even waiting for me and I was glad. For the hut was mine and mine only and I slept better in it than at Ambleside or anywhere. So I gave up my Ambleside lodgings and went back to my true home.
Leaving Rydal for that while had made me uneasy, as if my standing with the little family might go wobbly. I didn’t want it wobbly. I wanted to be in with them like a wren in its nest. And now I’d be back for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day and Saint Stephen’s Day an’ all, the very day of the little wren!
The wren, the wren,
The king of all birds—
Saint Stephen’s Day
He got lost in the furze—
The wren is a kingly bird yet a humble little bird. That’s somehow the way I like to think of what the little family has done for me. They made me a kingly bird in my own spot. Maybe not in an important kingdom but…I felt like a little wren with, you know, I’d fluff my feathers and I’d fly here and there and I felt as happy as if I’d been wearing a little crown.
And that’s how I felt on the Christmas Eve when I was getting the place ready for their return. Cutting the holly branches for the mantel and a few bits of moss an’ all, for I knew how Rotha loved moss. The green of it! I knew just what to do and what to gather and when to show up with it in my arms. That little wren in the song got lost in the furze but I was never lost as long as the Wordsworths gave me a home.
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