How Poetry Works II

In 1798, when William Wordsworth was twenty-eight, he wrote “Nutting,” a poem ostensibly about going into the countryside as a boy to gather hazelnuts. In the poem, the young Wordsworth sallies forth, “a huge wallet o’er my shoulder slung,” and “a nutting-crook in hand,” wearing a “disguise,” of “cast-off reeds” that make him appear “more ragged than need was.” He comes to a bower where “the hazels rose / Tall and erect, with tempting clusters hung,” which he describes as “A virgin scene!”

He sits beneath the trees, enjoying the beauty and tranquility of the place, like those who, “after long / and weary expectation, have been blest / with sudden happiness beyond all hope.” After a time, he gets up, takes his nutting-crook, and whacks the tree’s branches to make the nuts fall to the ground. It is a remarkable passage, filled with unexpected images of violence:

Then up I rose,

And dragged to earth both branch and bough, with crash

And merciless ravage; and the shady nook

Of hazels, and the green and mossy bower,

Deformed and sullied, patiently gave up

Their quiet being.

            The poem could almost be a fable of future environmental degradation; humans profess their love of Nature, but feel an irresistible urge to destroy it. It is a fable, but an odd one; as Carol Rumens notes in The Guardian, “the hero of this fable is also its monster.” When he has gathered all the hazelnuts, the boy looks back and feels “a sense of pain when I beheld / the silent trees.” Three lines later, Wordsworth ends the poem by invoking a “dearest Maiden” to move gently along these shades, “for there is a spirit in the woods.”

“These stanzas,” Wordsworth later wrote, “arose out of the remembrance of feelings I often had when a boy, and particularly in the extensive woods that still stretch from the side of Esthwaite Lake towards Graythwaite.” He included the poem in his first book, Lyrical Ballads, in 1798, and intended to make it part of his long autobiographical poem, “The Prelude.” In the event, however, he decided to leave it out, saying it was “no longer wanted there.”

Drawing by Wayne Grady

            “Nutting” is not one of Wordsworth’s better-known poems, possibly because of those inconclusive last lines. But it is more powerful than at first appears, because it seems to me that it arose from an experience Wordsworth had had much more recently than the one he describes in the poem. An experience that changed the way he viewed himself, and the world he inhabited.

            In 1791, Wordsworth travelled to France with the idea of learning enough French that he could hire himself out as a gentleman’s companion. It was two years after the French Revolution, and France was buzzing with patriotic fervour. The poet spent some time in Paris, where he may have become involved with a society called Friends of the Rights of Man, a group of anglophones who sympathized with the Jacobin cause and the ideals of the Revolution: democracy, human rights, equality. The society held a rally at the Hotel d’Angleterre in 1792, with more than a hundred delegates, including Lord Edward Fitzgerald, John Harford Stone, and the American Thomas Paine, and it is likely that Wordsworth was among them. In any case, Wordsworth left Paris and moved to Orléans, where the living was cheaper. And it was in Orléans that he met and fell in love with Annette Vallon. Two months later, Annette was pregnant with Wordsworth’s child.

            Annette was the daughter of a prominent Orléans upper middle-class family. Her father was a staunch Royalist, and France in 1792 was not a safe place for a wealthy bourgeoise with sympathies for the aristocracy. Guillotines were being set up in public squares; Robespierre’s Reign of Terror was about to begin. Penniless, Wordsworth returned to England before Annette’s daughter was born, to try to raise enough money to settle with Annette in France. But once he crossed the Channel, hostilities between England and France prevented him from returning to France. Caroline Wordsworth was born in September, but Wordsworth didn’t see her or her mother for the next ten years, after the Peace of Amiens, when he and his sister Dorothy were able to spend a month with Annette and Caroline in Calais. By Dorothy’s account it was a happy reunion, but I can’t help thinking that it must have been awkward for Wordsworth to account for those ten lost years.

            Or maybe it wasn’t. Maybe Wordsworth simply showed Annette his poem, “Nutting,” written four years earlier, and told her that the poem really arose from his feelings of guilt for having left her and her child alone in a country overrun by terror. I was young, he might have said: “Beautiful though the country was, being in France at that time was dangerous, especially for someone who looked English, spoke little French, and had not the calloused hands of a labourer. I could earn no money in France, and very quickly my belief in the greatness of the revolution turned to horror as head followed head under the guillotine’s blade. I was shamed by what I had done; it was as though I had taken a stick and deformed and sullied a beautiful, innocent child of Nature, and skipped away with the spoils. Dearest Maiden, can you forgive me?”

            Apparently, Annette Vallon did forgive Wordsworth. Her one surviving letter to him is loving and kind: she was a quiet being. When Caroline married in 1816, she gave her name as Caroline Wordsworth, and William Wordsworth settled thirty pounds a year upon her for life.

In her book Living by Fiction, Annie Dillard asks if there is meaning in the world outside of art: “Do the relationships among all parts which we find in a great short story or sonnet exist in nature?” she asks. “Or do we merely make them up…?”

If there is meaning in the world, perhaps it is in this, that a deep emotion experienced by a young boy who has defiled an object of beauty, can be so like the guilt a man feels who has abandoned his lover and their child, that the man can write a poem about the one and actually be writing about the other. And that a person reading that poem can understand that the child is father to the man.