Poets

Saturday 9 May 2009 Grasmere and Brantwood (from my journal)

We visited the poets’ houses. I liked the audio-recordings in the Wordsworth museum of his poems – Ian McKellan reading “The Prelude,” and a reading of Coleridge. “His flashing eyes, his floating hair.” I really like that poem, because I think it taps into primary processes that are recognizable to other human beings, even though it doesn’t make much sense on its own. And the image of the fountain/ river Alph is almost directly a description of dynamic processes (Freud), as well as being a beautiful word picture of the torrents in these hills after the rain. [see the UK blog Hellvelyn hike post for pix of Alph]

Wordsworth had to study upstairs because downstairs was too distracting with domestic matters. Same for me. Those dang domestic distractions!

Ruskin always seems sad to me. But some of that is just because we know his whole story – including the long, drawn-out finale into madness and death. Most casual stories, even “true” stories about real people, end with “they got married and lived happily ever after,” or “he achieved his goals and was a success,” or whatever. But we get old – a long process – and then we die, very often much diminished. How to make one’s death a dignified part of one’s life?