A new exhibition traces the influence of the great Romantic’s childhood on his verse. Rereading it can give us inspiration in these testing times
The mysterious intensity of childhood has fascinated generations of poets, particularly those with an affinity to the Romantics. William Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy, were perhaps the most famous English explorers of the theme, seeking and celebrating in their work a past “state of simplicity” and vivid insight. Recollected, early experience seemed to them to offer clues to truths which had faded in adulthood. Wordsworth’s famous poem My Heart Leaps Up, written when he was 32, describes the child as “father of the man” and expresses the hope that the wonder present in the childlike gaze can somehow be preserved through to old age.
Taking that line as its title, a thought-provoking exhibition has just opened at Wordsworth House in Cumbria, exploring the childhood of the poet and his sister. To mark the 250th anniversary of his birth, the National Trust has placed miscellaneous objects from Wordsworth’s life on display, including a pair of ice skates and tinted spectacles, reflecting his fear of going blind. But pride of place goes to a baby bonnet knitted for Dorothy, hand sewn and almost certainly made by Ann, the children’s mother. The bonnet is the only item to be preserved from the siblings’ early childhood and it serves as a poignant reminder of the family tragedy that was to come. When William and Dorothy were eight and seven years old respectively, Ann died of an illness, possibly pneumonia. The children were orphaned and subsequently separated. As they reunited in adulthood, living together at Dove Cottage in Grasmere, the powerful memory of those early, brutally interrupted years must have played a significant part in their romantic evocations of a prelapsarian past.
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