DAY ONE: WALKING, WONDERING, GOING A BIT MAD…
or how walking and mental health were significant to the Romantic movement…
There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes…
from “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” by Byron Canto IV (1818)
A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear,
A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief,
Which finds no natural outlet, no relief
In word, or sigh, or tear –
from “Stanzas Written in Dejection, near Naples” by Shelley (1818)
Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept the mystery.
Keats
I’d like to begin by laying the ground and taking a brief look at some contemporaries of Byron, Shelley and Keats. This just for context…
John Clare has been described as “the quintessential Romantic poet,” Clare grew up in the village of Helpston, in Northamptonshire, surrounded by common land – fields, woods, and footpaths that he could roam freely. This open landscape shaped his early life and poetry: he was deeply connected to the natural world, both spiritually and physically.
But when the Enclosure Acts reached his region in the early 19th century, much of that land was fenced off, privatised, and turned over to wealthy landowners. What had been communal land was now restricted, and rural, working-class people like Clare were displaced both practically and emotionally.
He writes about this in a poem called “The Mores”, where he laments:
Fence now meets fence in owner’s little bounds,
Of field and meadow, large as garden grounds,
Inclosure came, and trampled on the grave
Of labour’s rights, and left the poor a slave…
Clare felt this loss not just economically but existentially. He could no longer wander the landscapes that had nurtured his imagination and spirit. It was like being exiled from his own soul’s terrain. Many scholars see this alienation and displacement as contributing factors—alongside poverty, fame’s pressures, and personal struggles—to his eventual mental breakdown.
I am (Lines Written in Northampton County Asylum)
I am! yet what I am who cares, or knows?
My friends forsake me like a memory lost.
I am the self-consumer of my woes,
They rise and vanish, an oblivious host,
Shadows of life, whose very soul is lost.
And yet I am – I live – though I am toss’d
Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dream,
Where there is neither sense of life, nor joys,
But the huge shipwreck of my own esteem
And all that’s dear. Even those I loved the best
Are strange – nay, they are stranger than the rest.
I long for scenes where man has never trod,
For scenes where woman never smiled or wept;
There to abide with my Creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept
Full of high thoughts, unborn. So let me lie,
The grass below; above the vaulted sky.
John Clare
In her Journal July 31, 1802, Dorothy Wordsworth describes the scene as she and her brother leave London early in the morning, for a month-long visit to Calais:
It was a beautiful morning. The city, St. Paul’s, with the river, and a multitude of little boats, made a most beautiful sight as we crossed Westminster Bridge. The houses were not overhung by their cloud of smoke, and they were spread out endlessly, yet the sun shone so brightly, with such a fierce light; that there was something like the purity of one of nature’s own grand spectacles.
Let’s compare that to her brother William’s famous sonnet some months later…
Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802
Earth has not any thing to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;
Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!
William Wordsworth
Coleridge, one of the ‘Lakers’ (poets who moved to the Lake District) had his own struggles with addiction but often composed poetry while walking. This, an extract from a poem addressed to his young son, celebrates a connection to nature that was a key theme for the Romantics…
From “Frost at Midnight”
For I was reared
In the great city, pent ‘mid cloisters dim,
And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars.
But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze
By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags
Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,
Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores
And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear
The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
Of that eternal language, which thy God
Utters, who from eternity doth teach
Himself in all, and all things in himself.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
JAN NOBLE 