The Inspiration of the Outdoors in the Lake District

Dove Cottage
Source: http://www.bridgehousegrasmere.co.uk/
grasmere.htm

Taking a tour of Dove Cottage, it's not hard to imagine how crowded the house would have been as people came to visit for extended periods of time, Wordsworth got married, and he and his wife started having children. With many children, friends, and family demanding attention, Wordsworth would have had a hard time finding a solitary place to think and write. The rooms that he could have sat in by himself when he and Dorothy first moved to the cottage would have quickly filled, leaving Wordsworth without his indoor thinking space. For that reason, he moved outdoors.

In our walks around two of Wordsworth's houses, Dove Cottage and Rydal Mount, we saw that Wordsworth had wooden lean-tos built in both of the gardens and would spend large amounts of time there composing his poetry and reading it aloud, to the extent that neighbors thought he was mad. Letters and extracts from Dorothy's diary attested to the fact that Wordsworth would compose entire poems during four and five hours walks through the walking paths of the Lake District. Walking on some of those paths myself, I was firstly impressed by the physical condition Wordsworth would have needed to be in to climb up rocky paths without becoming so exhausted that he could actually focus and compose a poem. But once I could breathe normally again, I was struck by how beautiful the landscape was. After being dwarfed by buildings for so long in London, it was an incredible experience to be dwarfed by mountains and trees. Surrounded by giant trees, looking out onto lakes framed by mountains, I had never felt so small before. After feeling suffocated in a small flat every since returning from Scotland, it felt wonderful to breathe freely again, to actually hear my thoughts amid the wind rustling through the trees and the calls of birds. I suddenly recognized how Wordsworth could have found so much inspiration in these hills.

Source: http://www.lakesfarmholidays.co.uk/photos.htm

Walking around these difficult paths, I also began to understand Dorothy's attachment to her brother that seems so strange when read in her journal. This women, who would have spent all of her time with her brother, would have had to rely on Wordsworth for help as she moved along the paths. Her heavy wool skirts, possibly weighed down even more by rain water, would have made walking up the rocky paths exceedingly difficult. Unlike other women we've learned about this semester who would have had to move throughout difficult terrain without assistance, like Mary Anning or Elizabeth Philpot, Dorothy could use her brother's help to move about the Lake District. Her presence on Wordsworth's walks would have provided him with a sounding post. She also noticed things about nature that Wordsworth might not have noticed, such as the patches of daffodils that she wrote about in her Grasmere Journals. These aspects of nature that she noticed found their way into her writings and her brother's poems. Thus, while Wordsworth needed the solitude of working in nature for some of his works, the communion he could have with Dorothy in nature also greatly influenced his works, allowing him to write some of the greatest poems of his career while he lived in the Lake District.