BLAKE, THE WORDSWORTHS, AND THE DUNG 37diamond drops; the hollies shining with broader patches of light. The road
to the village of Holford glittered like another stream. On our return, the
wind high—a violent storm of hail and rain at the Castle of Comfort. All
the heavens seemed in one perpetual motion when the rain ceased; the moon
appearing, now half veiled, and now retired behind heavy clouds, the stars
still moving, the roads very dirty.
1st February.... The sun shone clear, but all at once a heavy blackness
hung over the sea. The trees almost roared,and the ground seemed in motion
with the multitude of dancing leaves.The poems seem a division of labor, but not always the household.
March 17, 1802: Mr. O. met us and I went to their house—he offered me
manure for the garden. I went and sate with W. and walked backwards and
forwards in the orchard till dinner time. He read me his poem. I broiled
beefsteaks.
March 19: I went up into the lane to collect a few green mosses to make
the chimney gay against my darling’s return.
March 23: William worked at The Cuckow poem. I sewed beside him.
March 27: A divine morning. At Breakfast Wm. wrote part of an ode
[“Intimations of Immortality”]. Mr. Olliff sent the dung and Wm. went to
work in the garden. We sate all day in the orchard.Time passed with William at his desk, Dorothy at her chores, or brother reading
aloud and sister listening, then later copying. But it ’s good to know that when
the dung arrived, William made use of it. And good that Virginia Woolf and
Elizabeth Hardwick a century later would write gratefully about Dorothy.
In loving symbiosis, William remained the poet—if “Poetry is the breath
and finer spirit of all knowledge,” as he put it. If so much depends upon the
“shaping spirit of Imagination” (Coleridge), then however animated Dorothy’s
encounter with nature, sheer poetic genius matters too. Take this moment, Wil-
liam suddenly crossing the Alps and entering “a narrow chasm” with one spasm
of perception:
The immeasurable height
Of woods decaying, never to be decayed,
The stationary blasts of waterfalls,
And in the narrow rent at every turn
Winds thwarting winds, bewildered and forlorn,
The torrents shooting from the clear blue sky,
The rocks that muttered close upon our ears,
Black drizzling crags that spake by the way-side
As if a voice were in them, the sick sight
And giddy prospect of the raving stream,
The unfettered clouds, and region of the Heavens,
Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light—