By the time he was sixteen, De Quincey had ‘carried’ himself, as he put it, ‘over the whole ground of the Rowley controversy; and that controversy, by a necessary consequence, had so familiarised me with the “Black Letter”, that I had begun to find an unaffected pleasure in the ancient English metrical romances’. Through Chatterton, De Quincey discovered Chaucer, and through Chaucer he developed his ‘enthusiastic knowledge of the elder poets’. It was through Chatterton that he also found his way to the younger poets. De Quincey described his feelings for Chatterton as love, ‘if it be possible to feel love for one who was in his unhonoured grave before I was born’, but the story of the half-educated prodigy who escaped from the real world by inventing his own poetic tradition resonated with all the Romantics. Keats dedicated Endymion to ‘the Most English of Poets Except Shakespeare: Thomas Chatterton’; Shelley and Byron offered their tributes to Chatterton; Chatterton was Coleridge’s ‘heart-sick wanderer’, a poet out of place, both geographically and historically, and Wordsworth’s lines, ‘we poets in our youth begin in gladness;/ But thereof comes in the end despondency and madness’ was written in Chatterton’s memory. Southey had edited the first edition of Chatterton’s collected works, donating the profits to the boy’s impoverished mother and sister. ‘Poor Chatterton!’ Southey wrote, ‘oft do I think upon him and sometimes indulge in the thought that had he been living he might have been my friend.’
The city was steeped in poetry. Wordsworth and Coleridge had first crossed paths in the late summer of 1795 at a political society in Bristol. Coleridge was living in rooms in College Street and making a name for himself as a radical lecturer; Wordsworth was a guest of John Pinney, the West Indian sugar merchant, in his newly built mansion on Great George Street. During his stay in Bristol, in the weeks before he and Dorothy set up home together in another of Pinney’s houses in Racedown, Dorset, Wordsworth composed the first lines of The Prelude. That year, Coleridge had walked down the aisle of St Mary Redcliffe with a local girl called Sarah Fricker, while Southey married her sister Edith in the same church; the Fricker sisters were raised on Redcliffe Hill. Robert Southey had a point when he said, in response to Chatterton’s derision, that the city ‘deserves panegyric instead of satire. I know of no other mercantile place so literary.’
De Quincey could not have arrived in the West Country at a more auspicious moment. The Bristol that he encountered was not an uncultivated marketplace, but the cradle of English Romanticism.
During the summer of 1799, when he was home from Winkfield for the school holidays, De Quincey had a reading experience which was to prove what he called ‘the greatest event in the unfolding of my own mind’. The manuscript of a poem called ‘We Are Seven’ was being ‘handed about’ in Bristol and Bath and found its way to him. It originated from the home of the book’s Bristol-based publisher, Joseph Cottle, and came to De Quincey by way of Cottle’s friend, Hannah More.
‘We Are Seven’ describes an exchange in a country graveyard in which a man asks an eight-year-old ‘maid’ how many there are in her family, and she answers ‘seven’: two are in Conwy, a town in Wales, two are at sea, and two are buried here, while she lives at home with her mother. The man protests that if two of her seven siblings are dead and buried, then she must surely be one of five. Ignoring his logic, the child persists:
‘The first that died was sister Jane;
In bed she moaning lay,
Till God released her of her pain;
And then she went away.
So in the churchyard she was laid;
And, when the grass was dry,
Together round her grave we played,
My brother John and I.
And when the ground was white with snow
And I could run and slide,
My brother John was forced to go,
And he lies by her side.’
‘How many are you, then,’ said I,
‘If they two are in heaven?’
Quick was the little maid’s reply,
‘O master! we are seven.’
‘But they are dead; those two are dead!
Their spirits are in heaven!’
’Twas throwing words away; for still
The little maid would have her will,
And said, ‘Nay, we are seven!’
This was to be De Quincey’s first encounter with Wordsworth, although he did not then know the identity of the poet. Elemental and spare in comparison with the artifices of high eighteenth-century verse and the verbal curlicues of Thomas Rowley, the macabre exchange did not seem like poetry at all. Wordsworth’s aim was to strip away ornament and expose a skeletal form which would take us straight to the centre of the subject. ‘Nothing,’ he later explained, ‘was more difficult for me in childhood than to admit the notion of death as a state applicable to my own being.’ The maid stands resolutely by the belief that her love for her deceased siblings makes them present, while the flat-footed adult stands resolutely by his belief that death means absence. It was a disturbing exchange for those, like Coleridge, with a belief in the afterlife. Most abhorrent to Coleridge was Wordsworth’s ‘frightful notion’ of a boy ‘lying awake in his grave’ instead of being transported to heaven. The poem’s whole meaning, Coleridge said in the Biographia Literaria, was ‘reducible to the assertion that a child, who by the bye at six years would have been better instructed in most Christian families, has no other notion of death than of lying in a dark, cold place.’ Wordsworth’s friend, James Tobin, entreated him to ‘cancel’ the poem, ‘for, if published, it will make you everlastingly ridiculous’.
To De Quincey, ‘We Are Seven’ was neither frightful nor ridiculous, but ‘the height of the moral sublime’: ‘How deep must a man have gone below the thoughts of the generality, before he could have written such a ballad!’ De Quincey’s reaction to the death of his own first sister, also called Jane, was that ‘summer and winter came again . . . Why not little Jane?’ For the four-year-old boy, Jane, like Wordsworth’s Lucy, was rolled around with rocks, and stones, and trees. When he reached the age of six, De Quincey imagined Elizabeth transported to heaven through vaults of light, but he had also seen her coffin ‘dropped into darkness’. Were his sisters rolling around in the earth or singing in the sky? The stubborn refusal of resolution at the heart of ‘We Are Seven’ was, for De Quincey, part of its power. He found, as he later told Wordsworth, ‘guidance’ in the poem, and he found in the poet the tutor no school was able to provide. When Coleridge described admirers of Wordsworth as ‘distinguished’ by a ‘religious fervour’, he was thinking principally of Thomas De Quincey.
The reading he had done so far in his life directed De Quincey towards the person he would later become, but ‘We Are Seven’ described an experience he had lived through already, and addressed the person he already was. The poem knew him; in its deceptive naivety it understood the loss of Jane and Elizabeth, but also of William, whose own sudden death coincided with De Quincey’s chance discovery of the unknown poet’s manuscript.
‘William Wordsworth in the Lake District, at Cross-Purposes’, by Max Beerbohm, 1904.
‘O Master! We are seven.’
3
Schooltime (continued)
. . . the giddy top
And Whispering Gallery of St Paul’s; the Tombs
Of Westminster; the Giants of Guildhall;
Bedlam, and the two figures at its gates,
Streets without end, and churches numberless. . .
Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book Seventh
‘We Are Seven’, composed during the same summer as Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’, appeared in the anonymously published 1798 edition of Lyrical Ballads. The volume opened with the mariner’s tale: ‘There was a ship – quoth he,’ begins the old man, stopping an unsuspecting guest at a wedding. Setting sail from a harbour like the one beneath St Mary Redcliffe, ‘Below the kirk, below the Hill’, the ship blows along like chaff until the mariner does ‘an hellish
thing’, and shoots the bird that brings the breeze. It is as though he had murdered a man, and the poem elides the difference. The mariner’s expression as he reveals his crime is awful to behold. ‘God save thee, ancient Mariner,’ the horrified wedding guest exclaims, ‘why looks’t thou so?’ The mariner, horrified by himself, can give no reason for his action. His punishment is severe; with his soul stripped bare he crosses into a world never entered before: ‘We were the first that ever burst/ Into that silent sea.’
Like the wedding guest, De Quincey was held spellbound by this hypnotic confession, which set the tone for the rest of the volume. He found in these poems what he called the ‘absolute revelation of untrodden worlds, teeming with power and beauty, as yet unsuspected amongst men’. Here was a landscape on the edge of society, peopled by figures reduced to the naked expression of suffering. Not all of the twenty-two verses are ballads, but many are expressly lyrical. While a traditional ballad rehearses an action, a ‘lyrical’ ballad investigates the telling of that action and each of these poems was an exercise in expression: ‘the feeling therein developed,’ Wordsworth later explained, ‘gives importance to the action and situation and not the action and situation to the feeling’. ‘The Ancient Mariner’ contained a message that De Quincey understood: consciousness is a guilt-ridden voyage and wisdom comes at the cost of misery, solitude and sympathy with life in all its modes.
Lyrical Ballads was both a revolt against current definitions of literature and a vision of a deeper, wiser, better life. The initial plan, De Quincey later learned, had been for Wordsworth to write about the natural world and Coleridge to bring in the supernatural, but an air of mysticism pervades the whole. The language is stripped down, the plainness at times resulting in estranging literalism such as Wordsworth’s description of the pond in ‘The Thorn’: ‘I’ve measured it from side to side/ ’Tis three feet long and two feet wide’. The traditional heroes of grand narratives are replaced with idiot boys, convicts and vagrants. There are stark images of blasted trees, ruined cottages and devoted mothers. Children are brought forward as the spokesmen of truth and innocence; authority resides not in God or government but in the resilience of nature: ‘One impulse from a vernal wood/ May teach you more of man,/ Of moral evil and of good,/ Than all the sages can,’ De Quincey now read in ‘The Tables Turned’. Here was the confirmation he needed that school was a waste of time.
In these pages De Quincey found a home for his subjectivity and his own yearning for an out-of-body experience. Lyrical Ballads was the book of his life, but the literary style he had yet to develop would be the opposite of the one employed here. Where Wordsworth was spartan, De Quincey would be lush; where Wordsworth was bare, De Quincey would be baroque.
‘Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey’, subtitled ‘on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour’ and dated ‘July 13, 1798’, is the single rhapsodic poem in the volume and one of only four spoken in the poet’s own voice. Wordsworth describes returning, after ‘five summers, with the length/ Of five long winters’, to the River Wye on the borders of Wales and England, where he reflects on the distance between ‘what [he] was then’ and who he is now. Time is measured according to emotional impact rather than sequential event, and the poet moves back and forth between the present, sitting ‘under the dark sycamore’ with his ‘dear, dear sister’, and the recent past, spent ‘in lonely rooms, and mid the din/ Of towns and cities’. In his youthful enthusiasm for nature he was ‘more like a man/ Flying from something that he dreads, than one/ Who sought the thing he loved.’ Now, as a result of intense inner reflection, he is filled with:
a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man,
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.
The diction rises like music, culminating in a crescendo in which the narrator wishes for his sister a future in which her mind, like his, ‘Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms’ and her ‘memory be as a dwelling-place/ For all sweet sounds and harmonies.’
The title itself told De Quincey a story: Tintern Abbey is a Gothic ruin on the other side of the Bristol Channel, over the border to Wales. The poem had a local habitation and a name: De Quincey could visit the view above the former monastery and feel what the poet felt. Added to which, the poet also had a sister who reminded him of his former self, who also belonged to an earlier part of his existence.
The two poems framing the first edition of Lyrical Ballads were locked in dialogue. The book opened with a tale of homelessness and closed with the celebration of a building; it began with the cadences of a sea shanty and ended on an aria. Architecture not only stimulates the mind, but the mind can aspire to the magnificence of a mansion. Preceding ‘The Ancient Mariner’ was an ‘Advertisement’ explaining that the poems contained here were ‘experiments’ whose meaning would be lost on those looking for the perfume of eighteenth-century verse. Their purpose was to lean into the ‘language of conversation in the middle and lower classes’, and those readers used to ‘the gaudiness and inane phraseology’ of contemporary literature will ‘struggle with feelings of strangeness and awkwardness’.
This was not an apologia but a manifesto: reading, done properly, is dangerous, and the reader of Lyrical Ballads should emerge from the strange and awkward encounter a different person. De Quincey followed these instructions to the letter, and immersed himself in the rhythm of the whole. Reading the Lyrical Ballads, his overriding preoccupation was that he had now grown up: there was nothing school could teach him, and nothing more to be learned from his mother. He was ready for a voyage of his own.
Writing to his eldest daughter towards the end of his life, De Quincey described the scene of his ‘natal morning’. On one side of the bed was his good fairy, on the other side his bad fairy. The gift bestowed by his good fairy was that ‘procrastination shall never dare to come near you’, and the gift of the bad fairy was that while he would not procrastinate, he would ‘reap the two grand penalties of procrastination. . . In the midst of too-soonness he shall suffer the killing anxieties of too-lateness.’
His too-lateness would indeed be the controlling feature of De Quincey’s life. As a guest he would arrive not hours, but weeks, months and sometimes years after he was expected and as a writer for the journals he would consistently hold his long-suffering editors to ransom; but in his discovery of Wordsworth he prided himself on having been for once early, and by a ‘full thirty years’. No other man ‘in Europe’ had encountered the Lyrical Ballads as he had, or foreseen, as he did, the effect they would have on poetic tradition. It was fundamental to De Quincey’s self-mythology that he was the first to burst into this silent sea; his ‘discovery’ of Lyrical Ballads is repeatedly presented by him as a mark of his advanced sensibility. For fear of being laughed at, he was forced to keep his transgressive taste hidden from the world and thus he became, in honour of Wordsworth and Coleridge – although he did not then know the identity of the poets – a recluse. On one disastrous occasion he shared his passion with Lady Carbery, a family friend whose judgement he trusted. With ‘a beating heart’ he recited ‘The Ancient Mariner’, and she began to giggle. The sailor was, she said, ‘an old quiz’; her reaction had De Quincey read her ‘We Are Seven’ would have been more wounding still. It was a lesson learned: Lady Carbery’s response confirmed De Quincey’s conviction that if the poet was a solitary genius, then so too was the sympathetic reader.
Wordsworth exaggerated the originality of the Lyrical Ballads, and De Quincey exaggerated its universal rejection. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, De Quincey insisted, ‘The name of Wordsworth was trampled under foot’ and ‘the finger of scorn pointed at it’; the ‘language’ of critics ‘was exhausted�
� by the effort of finding ‘images and expressions vile enough, insolent enough, to convey [their] unutterable contempt’. Except that the primitive was in fashion; Blake’s Songs of Innocence had appeared twenty years earlier and Wordsworth’s experiments with ‘native language’ had been anticipated by Robert Burns in 1786, with his Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect. Individual poems in Lyrical Ballads such as ‘The Idiot Boy’, in which a mother’s simple son goes missing, were mocked by readers, but the reviewers in general expressed interest in the experiment, and those writing for the Analytical, the Monthly and The British Critic largely praised the result. The Anti-Jacobin described Lyrical Ballads as showing ‘genius, taste, elegance, wit and imagery of the most beautiful kind’. The only negative review, and the first to appear, was in the Critical, and this was by the poet’s friend, Robert Southey. ‘The Idiot Boy’, Southey scoffed, ‘resembles a Flemish picture in the worthlessness of its design and the excellence of its execution’, while ‘The Ancient Mariner’ was a ‘Dutch attempt at German sublimity’. Despite Southey’s equivocation, sales were good enough for Lyrical Ballads to require reprinting in 1800 and again in 1802. As evidence of the popularity of their ‘low’ style, individual poems from the first edition appeared in twenty-three separate papers and journals, including Lady’s Magazine, the Star, and the Albion and Evening Advertiser. In April 1799, ‘We Are Seven’ was reprinted in the Derby Mercury, the Courier, the Morning Chronicle and the Whitehall Evening Post. It is easy, however, to imagine De Quincey nursing his discovery, dreading the possibility that other, less sensitive, souls might intrude upon what, for him, had such potent significance.
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