MERRY XMASTIDE/YULE 2024.

Book review. Poets, critics and countryside.

The books today are; Coleridge & Wordsworth in Somerset by Berta Lawrence 1970.

The Essays of William Hazlitt.

The first book above tells the true story of the most amazing productive time in the intertwined lives of these two posts “besties” at the time,in just one year July 1797 - July 1798. The two poets rented homes in (still) beautiful West Somerset and just couldn't stop writing poetry. Never again in their lives did they have such a richly productive time.

Coleridge was already friends with Tom Poole,the big fish in the tiny pond of Quantock village Nether Stowey,the owner of the tanning yard. Despite being a businessman he was drawn to radicalism and social justice,thus he and the poet had met. Tom Poole offered a tiny cottage in the village (now the Coleridge museum),to fairly newly married Coleridge. He and Robert Southey,another poet and friend,had married sisters in Bristol. Sara and Edith Fricker of Redcliffe district. Southey was a good husband,Coleridge was not. He wasn't mean and cruel or unfaithful (then),but like many a man he could not cope with the responsibility,the suffocating domesticity,the steamy air as the washing dried in front of the fire,the crying babies,the sick,the feeling of being buried alive (we've all been there,lol). All the accounts of Sara Coleridge say she was charming,pleasant kind and caring. She treated guests and callers well and took care they were fed,had drinks,were comfortable and content. She was nice. As the girl the poet had married she had been very pretty but of course the babies,the constant laundering and the battle for hygiene in an early 19th century world had stoutened her but her face always stayed pleasant and amiable.

Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy rented a big house some miles away called Alfoxton House but don't be misled. I think the house was empty with just one or two sparsely furnished rooms. One hot summer day I did the cross Quantock walk from Alfoxton to Nether Stowey and it took me all day. They regularly did that walk to each others houses to spend the evening then walked back by moonlight. The idyll broke up when they all left to go up North which suited Wordsworth and Dorothy,not so much Coleridge who by then was descending into drug addiction and in love in a creepy,stalker way with a young woman who thought him a

weirdo.

Dorothy Wordsworth kept a journal in which she describes a lot of the scenes she + William observed that he later made into poems. Her description of the daffodils at the lakeside is as lovely as the poem. She describes meeting beggars,many ex-military (times don't change) on the road,seeing the little birds pecking in the road,setting pea sticks,cooking along with their help Molly Ashburner and going to the woods and mountainside to dig up wild plants for the garden. Coleridge described her enchanting eyes.

I am going to write up Hazlitt in an additional post to follow this. Now,I have to do some chores - as I'm not a poet!