The Journals of Dorothy WordsworthReview by Guy Gauthier
What makes this journal so special? Why do I love it so much? Because it contains some of the finest descriptions of nature in the English language. Dorothy Wordsworth began her journal at Alfoxden in 1798. These are the first words she wrote into it: January 20th 1798.—The green paths down the hill-sides are channels for streams. The young wheat is streaked by silver lines of water running between the ridges, the sheep are gathered together on the slopes. This strikes a new note in English literature. Poets had written about nature before, but it hadn’t occurred to them to take the time to observe nature, and to describe it accurately. And she continues in the same vein: The purple-starred hepatica spreads itself in the sun, and the clustering snow-drops put forth their white heads, at first upright, ribbed with green, and like a rosebud when completely opened, hanging their heads downwards, but slowly lengthening their slender stems. It’s hard for us to appreciate how new this language was in 1798. In those days, women were not interested in nature. Nature, to them, was just mud and mosquitoes. These passages may seem natural to us, but nothing like them had been seen in English literature before. William Wordsworth, her brother, revolutionized the language of poetry, and some of his blank verse, which was written two hundred years ago, reads as if it was written yesterday. The same can be said of Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal. Her descriptive prose foreshadows the direction which the English language would take after her. She was a pathway through which the language developed. Ms. Wordsworth mentions certain people by name: William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and many others. But she mentions them only in passing. This is not a “people” journal. It’s the journal of a nature lover. [January] 23rd—Bright sunshine, went out at 3 o’clock. The sea perfectly calm blue, streaked with deeper colour by the clouds, and tongues or points of sand; on our return of a gloomy red. The sun gone down. [...] The villages marked out by beautiful beds of smoke. The turf fading into the mountain road. The scarlet flowers of the moss. “The sun gone down” is added as an afterthought, to explain the redness of the sea. Someone writing more carefully would have put the sunset earlier in the passage, where it could lead up to the gloomy red of the sea. But Dorothy isn’t writing carefully, and that’s part of the charm, the magic of her journal. Her descriptions of nature are not planned; they just happen. They grow like the flowers she loves to describe. There is a kind of pristine innocence to Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal. It doesn’t ever intend to be anything more than a journal. A lot of her entries begin with a brief impression of the weather. She does this with a superb economy of means, as these two examples will show: Sunday morning. A very fine, clear frost. Monday morning. A soft rain and mist. When she writes a page of her journal, she is cutting a swath through what is really a bewildering mass of remembered sensations. There is always too much, always more than you need, and you have to choose; you have to cut a swath through your own experiences, you have to pick your way through the dense underbrush. In the excerpt above, she starts by saying: “Bright sunshine, went out at 3 o’clock. The sea perfectly calm blue...”, and then, in the same sentence, adds, “on our return of a gloomy red. The sun gone down.” But what happened in between? What happened between the bright sunshine and the gloomy red sea after sundown? Dorothy has left it out of her journal. She has cut a swath through her experiences. Writing a journal means editing your own experiences. You become the editor of your own life. One question we have to ask about Dorothy Wordsworth is, would we be reading her journal if her brother wasn’t William Wordsworth, and his friend wasn’t Samuel Taylor Coleridge? It’s no use ducking the question. It’s relevant to an appreciation of her journal. I think the magic of her journal is not due to the presence of Wordsworth and Coleridge, but to the imagistic power of her style. Details like “Wm. and Coleridge walked to Mr. Bartholemew’s, and to Stowey. Wm. returned, and we walked through the wood into the Coombe to fetch some eggs” are not what makes the journal interesting. What makes it interesting is the passage that comes right after it: “A deep stillness in the thickest part of the wood, undisturbed except by the occasional dropping of the snow from the holly boughs.” Dorothy wrote her journal for her brother William Wordsworth. In the first entry of her Grasmere Journal, dated May 14th, 1800, she starts by saying: “Wm. and John set off into Yorkshire after dinner at ½ past 2 o’clock, cold pork in their pockets.” William and John would be gone for a few days, and for Dorothy, it was a very emotional parting. “My heart was so full that I could hardly speak to W. when I gave him a farewell kiss. I sate a long time upon a stone at the margin of the lake, and after a flood of tears my heart was easier.” Then, a few sentences later, she writes: “I resolved to write a journal of the time till W. and J. return, and set about keeping my resolve, because I will not quarrel with myself, and because I shall give Wm. pleasure by it when he comes home again.” This is our only clue as to why she kept a journal: to give her brother William pleasure. And there can be no doubt that William Wordsworth read her journal. He wrote some of his poems down in her journal, and copied passages from it into his own notebooks. Dorothy’s journal was an inspiration to him. In his preface to the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth says that poetry is “emotion recollected in tranquillity”, and many of his poems were written long after the event they describe. This is a difference between him and Dorothy. Her journal is a spontaneous response to something she has just seen, whereas his poems are written in retrospect. When Wordsworth wrote The Daffodils, two years after seeing the golden flowers along the lake, he consulted her journal to refresh his memory. But the fact that he read her journal means that she was strictly limited as to what she could say in it. As a result, Dorothy doesn’t confide her secrets to her journal. She seldom expresses her feelings openly, because she knows that William is going to read it. She doesn’t write down anything which might offend him. On April 12 1802, Dorothy mentions a letter she has just received. [April] 12th, Monday. The ground covered with snow. Walked to T. Wilkinson’s and sent for letters. The woman brought me one from William and Mary. It was in this letter that her brother William finally told her the truth: he was going to wed Mary Hutchinson. Though this could hardly have been a surprise to Dorothy, she must have felt a great sense of loss. She was very attached to her brother. He was the only man she ever loved. Yet her journal gives very few hints of how disturbed she was. Here is what she wrote after reading his letter: It was a sharp, windy night. Thomas Wilkinson came with me to Barton, and questioned me like a catechizer all the way. Every question was like the snapping of a little thread about my heart—I was so full of thought of my half-read letter and other things. I was glad when he left me. Then I had time to look at the moon while I was thinking over my own thoughts. The moon travelled through the clouds, tinging them yellow as she passed along, with two stars near her, one larger than the other. These stars grew or diminished as they passed from, or went into, the clouds. And that’s all we learn about the emotional upheaval caused by William’s letter. “Every question was like the snapping of a little thread about my heart,” she writes, hinting at her emotional distress. But then she takes refuge in an impersonal description of the effect of the moon on the clouds, as if relieved to momentarily forget her emotions. Then, a few months later, Dorothy wrote in her journal: “On Monday, 4th October 1802, my brother William was married to Mary Hutchinson.” With this marriage, the happiest period of Dorothy Wordsworth’s life was coming to an end. And yet the journal only hints at the depth of her feelings. I slept a good deal of the night, and rose fresh and well in the morning. At a little after 8 o’clock I saw them go down the avenue toward the church. Dorothy was so disturbed that she didn’t even attend the wedding! She stayed behind at Dove Cottage. I kept myself as quiet as I could, but when I saw the two men running up the walk, coming to tell us it was over, I could stand it no longer, and threw myself on the bed, where I lay in stillness, neither hearing or seeing anything till Sara came upstairs to me, and said, ‘They are coming’. This forced me from the bed where I lay, and I moved, I knew not how, straight forward, faster than my strength could carry me, till I met my beloved William, and fell upon his bosom. This is the emotional high point of Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal. The great restraint with which she expresses her emotions makes them more poignant, more deeply moving than they otherwise would have been. The bond between brother and sister had been broken. Dorothy had written her journal “to give William pleasure,” as she said. But now that he was married, the impetus for writing the journal was gone. Dorothy tried to continue writing it, but before long, the entries started to dwindle, and they lost their sense of wonder at nature’s beauty. Finally, the Grasmere Journal breaks off altogether. The spell has been broken. The inspiration behind her journal, her brother William, now belonged to another woman. A year later, Dorothy Wordsworth tried her hand at travel writing. Her Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland makes her one of the pioneers of the genre. Her account of the trip is written in the form of a journal. Why a journal? Because she was once again alone with her beloved William. “William and I parted from Mary on Sunday afternoon, August 14th 1803”. Mary’s absence has revived her inspiration. Once again she can write a journal “to give William pleasure”. It is significant that Dorothy continued to live with William and Mary Wordsworth, and was still living with them at the time of William’s death in 1850. He couldn’t bring himself to part with Dorothy. He loved her as much as she loved him. And all of his greatest poetry was written during the years when he was living alone with Dorothy. She was his inspiration, as he was hers. Anyone who loves nature will love the Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth. They are as natural as the world they describe. ReferencesThe Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, edited by William Knight, McMillan & Co., London, 1925. Home at Grasmere: Extracts from the Journal of Dorothy Wordsworth and from the Poems of William Wordsworth, edited by Colette Clark, Penguin Classics, London, 1986.
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