Vital Stream

Lucy Newlyn

• Publisher: Carcanet Poetry
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781784108076
• eBook ISBN: 9781784108083
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Poetry
• Index: Literature

A work of historical fiction, an experiment in life writing and a verse drama designed to be read aloud. Vital Stream takes the form of a long sonnet sequence, revisiting six extraordinary months in 1802 - a threshold year for William and Dorothy Wordsworth. Parted when they were very young, the siblings had eventually set up home together in the Lake District, where they were to remain for the rest of their lives. After two years in Grasmere, William became engaged to Mary Hutchinson. There followed an intense period of re-adjustment for all three, and for his former lover Annette Vallon, who had borne him a daughter he had never met. During 1802 the Wordsworth siblings wrote some of their most beautiful work; these were their last months of living alone, and their writing has an elegiac quality. Their journey to see Annette Vallon and meet William's daughter for the first time took them through London to Calais during the brief Peace of Amiens, involving a careful dissociation from his past. Other complications coloured their lives, to do with Coleridge and his failing marriage. Lucy Newlyn draws all this material into the vital stream of her sequence. PUBLISHED IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE WORDSWORTH TRUST

PART ONE

A nest we build together

DOROTHY OBSERVES, 15 APRIL 1802

It was a threatening cold misty day
As we set off from Eusemere, the lake rough
And the wind furious, seizing our breath.
We saw a plough working, a boat at play
And a thick belt of daffodils stirring
Like a busy highway along the shore –
Then more and more of them, and yet more.
Some reeled and danced in the wind’s whirring,
Some rested their heads for weariness.
Across the lake and within each stormy bay
The tossing waves sounded like the sea.
All was alive in the wind’s restlessness
As we continued our homeward journey,
And throughout this day of celebration
There was universal animation.
I the one thing anxious, stunned, solitary.

WILLIAM FRETS

Have I not reason for trepidation
On this stormy wind-thrashed ominous day,
Of all things the most vexed and lonely
’Mid Nature’s general agitation?
My birthday passed (and with it half my life),
I am already ‘husband’, father, brother –
Soon to see my daughter and my lover,
For ever bonded to my future wife.
All is fixed: our wedding date decided.
Relieved of course by England’s peace with France
I am in turmoil, with a troubled sense
Of loyalties unequally divided.
Firm and forthright, my sister strides ahead,
Her eyes turned from the dark and louring hills
To rest her gaze on the dancing daffodils,
The golden dancing daffodils, instead.

THE LAST LEG OF THE JOURNEY, 16 APRIL

The becks among the rocks were all alive.
Wm showed me a mossy streamlet,
Remembering how when we first arrived
He liked its green track in the snow. We sat
For a while looking at the restful vale
Where crows flew in the sun white as silver,
Like thin shapes of water passing over
The smooth fields. By the time we climbed the wall
Rydal was in its own evening brightness,
We on the last leg of our journey home.
Bit by bit, shimmering at dusk under the moon,
Its small round isle a mound of darkness,
Grasmere came in view. We found our garden
Almost other-worldly in the twilight,
Our cottage waiting quietly for night,
Our own dear parlour hidden safe within.

WILLIAM, ON DOMESTIC ANXIETIES

If I could find, if I could only find
A tranquil spot in which to settle here
So I might think without my sister near
To sense the swaying of my restless mind…
I must be loyal and I would be kind
To all three women, but begin to fear
My work and way of life will cost them dear.
How selfish I have been, how blind.
The home I offer cannot be the home
My father would have wanted me to make.
We dwell in our aloneness and we roam
These hills and valleys for each other’s sake,
Our spirits scattering like flecks of foam
Tossed to and fro on an unruly lake.

DOROTHY, ON DWELLING

‘Then darkness came,
Composing darkness, with its quiet load
Of full contentment…’

All our homecomings bring back the day
We first arrived here, that bleak December
Two years ago in Grasmere. Remember
The house at nightfall in the gloom, the way
We walked uncertainly from room to room
In semi-darkness; how the chimney smoked,
How rough and rocky the back garden looked,
Our plans for a climbing pathway? Soon
This rented cottage came to seem like home.
We had prematurely parted and moved
So often, lived in houses we both loved,
But this place we could truly call our own.
Already now it has answered our longing
For the life together we freely chose –
Not a property (we have none of those)
But a dwelling-place, a way of belonging.

WILLIAM REMEMBERS

I pace the pathway searching for a rhyme
But find my brain distracted, overcast.
There is no spot, no present point in time
That is not saturated with the past.
I owe my fealty to boyhood years
And she to years in which I did not feature;
We are as sundered in our hopes and fears
As any living solitary creature.
And yet our home now teems with memories
W...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Preface by Richard Holmes
• Introduction
• Part One: A nest we build together
• Part Three: An altercation
• Part Four: Bidding goodbye
• Part Five: A turbulent month
• Part Six: In city pent
• Part Seven: The ring
• Part Eight: Home at Grasmere
• Notes to the poems
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author