views distract from what’s at hand.
But here’s the tarn, spangled with quick refractions
of sunlight, to remind me where I stand.
There’s no way on or back except by walking
and whichever route I choose involves a climb.
On, then, no question: if I find myself
lacking in energy, at least I’ve time.
It will be cooler when I’m facing north –
frost often lingers there – and I’ll take heart
from gazing down again on Rydal Water.
The point of no return was at the start.
The Spirit of the Place
Mist like evaporating stone
smudges the bracken. Not much further now.
Below on the other side of the village
Windermere tilts its pewter face
over towards me as I move downhill.
I’ve walked my boots clean in gravelly streams;
picking twigs of glittering holly
to take home I’ve lacerated my fingers
(it serves me right: holly belongs on trees).
Now as the early dusk descends behind me
dogs in the kennels above Nook Lane
are barking, growling, hysterical at something;
and from the housing estate below
a deep mad voice bellows ‘Wordsworth! Wordsworth!’
The Vale of Grasmere
These coloured slopes ought to inspire,
as much as anything, discretion:
think of the egotisms laid bare,
the shy campaigns of self-projection
tricked out as visits to Dove Cottage
tellingly rendered. Every year
some poet comes on pilgrimage
along these valleys. Read his verses:
each bud of delicate perception
sprouts from a blossoming neurosis
too well watered by Grasmere –
in which he sees his own reflection.
He sits beside a tarn or ghyll
sensitively eating chocolate
and eyes Helm Crag or Rydal Fell
plotting some novel way to use it.
Most of the rocks are wreathed by now
with faded rags of fluttering soul.
But the body finds another function
for crags and fells, as Wordsworth knew
himself: they offer hands and feet
their own creative work to do.
‘I climb because I can’t write,’
one honest man said. Better so.
Letter to Alistair Campbell
Those thorn trees in your poems, Alistair,
we have them here. Also the white cauldron,
the basin of your waterfall. I stare
at Stock Ghyll Force and can’t escape your words.
You’d love this place: it’s your Central Otago
in English dress – the bony land’s the same;
and if the Cromwell Gorge is doomed to go
under a lake, submerging its brave orchards
for cheap electric power, this is where
you’d find a subtly altered image of it,
its cousin in another hemisphere:
the rivers gentler, hills more widely splayed
but craggy enough. Well. Some year you’ll manage
to travel north, as I two years ago
went south. Meanwhile our sons are of an age
to do it for us: Andrew’s been with you
in Wellington. Now I’m about to welcome
our firstborn Gregory to England. Soon,
if Andrew will surrender him, he’ll come
from grimy fetid London – still my base,
I grant you, still my centre, but with air
that chokes me now each time I enter it –
to this pure valley where no haze but weather
obscures the peaks from time to time, clean rain
or tender mist (forgive my lyrical
effusiveness: Wordsworthian locutions
are carried on the winds in what I call
my this year’s home. You’ve had such fits yourself.)
So: Gregory will come to Ambleside
and see the lakes, the Rothay, all these waters.
Two years ago he sat with me beside
the Clutha, on those rocks where you and I
did our first timid courting. Symmetry
pleases me; correspondences and chimes
are not just ornament. And if I try
too hard to emphasise the visual echoes
between a place of mine and one of yours
it’s not only for art’s sake but for friendship:
five years of marriage, twenty of divorce
are our foundation. It occurred to me
in August, round about the twenty-third,
that we’d deprived ourselves of cake, champagne,
a silver tea-service, the family gathered –
I almost felt I ought to send a card.
Well, that can wait: it won’t be long before
you have my
But here’s the tarn, spangled with quick refractions
of sunlight, to remind me where I stand.
There’s no way on or back except by walking
and whichever route I choose involves a climb.
On, then, no question: if I find myself
lacking in energy, at least I’ve time.
It will be cooler when I’m facing north –
frost often lingers there – and I’ll take heart
from gazing down again on Rydal Water.
The point of no return was at the start.
The Spirit of the Place
Mist like evaporating stone
smudges the bracken. Not much further now.
Below on the other side of the village
Windermere tilts its pewter face
over towards me as I move downhill.
I’ve walked my boots clean in gravelly streams;
picking twigs of glittering holly
to take home I’ve lacerated my fingers
(it serves me right: holly belongs on trees).
Now as the early dusk descends behind me
dogs in the kennels above Nook Lane
are barking, growling, hysterical at something;
and from the housing estate below
a deep mad voice bellows ‘Wordsworth! Wordsworth!’
The Vale of Grasmere
These coloured slopes ought to inspire,
as much as anything, discretion:
think of the egotisms laid bare,
the shy campaigns of self-projection
tricked out as visits to Dove Cottage
tellingly rendered. Every year
some poet comes on pilgrimage
along these valleys. Read his verses:
each bud of delicate perception
sprouts from a blossoming neurosis
too well watered by Grasmere –
in which he sees his own reflection.
He sits beside a tarn or ghyll
sensitively eating chocolate
and eyes Helm Crag or Rydal Fell
plotting some novel way to use it.
Most of the rocks are wreathed by now
with faded rags of fluttering soul.
But the body finds another function
for crags and fells, as Wordsworth knew
himself: they offer hands and feet
their own creative work to do.
‘I climb because I can’t write,’
one honest man said. Better so.
Letter to Alistair Campbell
Those thorn trees in your poems, Alistair,
we have them here. Also the white cauldron,
the basin of your waterfall. I stare
at Stock Ghyll Force and can’t escape your words.
You’d love this place: it’s your Central Otago
in English dress – the bony land’s the same;
and if the Cromwell Gorge is doomed to go
under a lake, submerging its brave orchards
for cheap electric power, this is where
you’d find a subtly altered image of it,
its cousin in another hemisphere:
the rivers gentler, hills more widely splayed
but craggy enough. Well. Some year you’ll manage
to travel north, as I two years ago
went south. Meanwhile our sons are of an age
to do it for us: Andrew’s been with you
in Wellington. Now I’m about to welcome
our firstborn Gregory to England. Soon,
if Andrew will surrender him, he’ll come
from grimy fetid London – still my base,
I grant you, still my centre, but with air
that chokes me now each time I enter it –
to this pure valley where no haze but weather
obscures the peaks from time to time, clean rain
or tender mist (forgive my lyrical
effusiveness: Wordsworthian locutions
are carried on the winds in what I call
my this year’s home. You’ve had such fits yourself.)
So: Gregory will come to Ambleside
and see the lakes, the Rothay, all these waters.
Two years ago he sat with me beside
the Clutha, on those rocks where you and I
did our first timid courting. Symmetry
pleases me; correspondences and chimes
are not just ornament. And if I try
too hard to emphasise the visual echoes
between a place of mine and one of yours
it’s not only for art’s sake but for friendship:
five years of marriage, twenty of divorce
are our foundation. It occurred to me
in August, round about the twenty-third,
that we’d deprived ourselves of cake, champagne,
a silver tea-service, the family gathered –
I almost felt I ought to send a card.
Well, that can wait: it won’t be long before
you have my
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