The next day we ventured forth to Grasmere to visit Dove Cottage, Wordsworth's family home. We got up early, dressed, and went down to breakfast. Fortunately, Rockside had a few more options than the traditional full breakfast, so I decided on a plate of pancakes and waffles instead of the usual. The owners made their own banana-walnut bread, marmalade, jams, and yogurt, so I tried all of that as well.  It was such an excellent departure from the fat-and-protein-packed breakfasts we had elsewhere, and I enjoyed it so much! I'd like to try making my own yogurt as well now that we are back stateside.

After breakfast we loafed around Windermere for a while, stopping in the charity shops and other places. I love the charity shops, mostly because all the little items there seem to have a real history behind them. For example, we saw a mug that commemorated the Queen's coronation for only five pounds! For one pound you could get a mug that commemorated Andrew and Fergie's wedding as well!

Afterward we grabbed a bus to Grasmere. The bus stop was located right near the train station. The  bus was a little late, but the drive was only about 20 minutes so it was really no inconvenience for us.  The bus stopped right outside of Dove Cottage, which is just a few minutes walk from the center of Grasmere and the lake itself.

We got our tickets, then spent a few minutes in the museum admiring Wordsworth's manuscripts and Dorothy's journals before entering the cottage itself. The cottage was small, with whitewashed stucco walls. The garden outside was small but neat, and it was evident that the Trust had done a lot to maintain the space to Dorothy's standards. There were little placards all around that displayed snippets of Dororthy's garden journals, and of course daffodils were planted all around and were in full bloom!

We started inside in a little receiving room on the first floor. They told us that the cottage had once been used as an inn, which explained some of the finer finishings like the slate floor. On the same floor was the kitchen, with a separate buttery which served as a sort of refrigerator, because it was built on top of a small stream which kept the room cool.  Wordsworth wrote that he always avoided this area of the house because he was always dragged into domestic chores every time he entered it.  On the way up the stairs, we saw Wordsworth's favorite domestic item, the cuckoo clock, and a place where Thomas De Quincey's wife had dropped a bucket of coals and nearly burned down the whole house.

We went upstairs and into the bedrooms.  All of the rooms were furnished with items from the Wordsworth's homes, either at Dove Cottage or at their larger estate at Rydal Mount, including each family members' bed, seat-cushions and afghans made by Wordsorth's children, and a chaise lounge that was Wordsworth's favorite place to dictate his poetry for Dorothy to transcribe. We saw the Wordsworth's bedroom– including a bed that was entirely too small for the poet because, at 5'9", he was unusually tall. We also saw his luggage set (where he had written his name but run out of room for the H and had to write it in above the rest), passport, wedding certificate, and the certificate which declared him Poet Laureate of Britain by Queen Victoria (a post which rewarded him a modest salary and a case of wine yearly).

We saw tons of personal items; I have forgotten so many already! Of his personal effects I recall seeing his ice skates, shaving set, many sets of spectacles, locks of hair, and a suit both he and Tennyson had worn when they were named Poet Laureate– complete with socks and shoe buckles. We saw Dorothy and Mary's jewelry, as well as tea sets and dishes.  We saw his wedding ring, which he and his sister had purchased in Germany and which Dorothy had worn the entire way back from the trip. (She said for safekeeping but I wonder if she had an ulterior motive! She was quite jealous.) We also saw the opium scale that De Quincey and Coleridge had used when they visited the cottage. Most touching of all the items was the letter Dorothy wrote to Wordsworth to tell him that his young daughter had died; on the page were a few blotches where Dorothy's tears had landed as she wrote.

I must say I lost a little respect for Wordsworth and the Romantics in general after seeing their compound. It is not unusual to hear that the Romantics were self-conscious, selfish, and odd, but to see how they lived somehow drives the whole point home.  The poets who lived at Dove Cottage behaved in ways that were purposefully bizarre. Wordsworth was the original urban tree-hugger who decides to move to the country in some half-witted attempt to get "back to nature."  He wrote about the rural people in the area and tried to adhere to their lifestyle, but he was such an effete that he could hardly manage it; the well he dug in the garden was nothing more than mud pit.

The women who lived at Dove Cottage were treated with a an apparent disregard that was justified in the name of art. Being quite poor, Wordsworth was constantly working on his poetry and trying to make a little money for the family, so the women were obliged to bother William as seldom as possible, and all the domestic work fell to them.  How easy it must be to achieve the aesthetic ideal of a rural life when you can offload all the work onto your sister and wife! And yet it is common knowledge that the women supplied Wordsworth with some of the themes for his poetry, even some of the individual lines themselves.  In particular, William would mine Dorothy's journals for inspiration. She is an almost perfect example of Woolf's idea of Judith Shakespeare, except that in Woolf's dreamscape Shakespeare never cribbed Judith's work.

Bizarre and disruptive houseguests were welcome with open arms.  Sir Walter Scott would take a room on the first floor so that he could leave out the window to go down to the neighborhood pub, and Coleridge stayed upstairs and had terrible opium-induced nightmares that would wake everyone in the house. (Good thing his room was located right opposite the nursery!)  The consummate houseguest-who-overstays-his-welcome, the married Coleridge made eyes at Wordsworth's sister-in-law, and, after being rejected, wrote "Dejection: An Ode" in response and sent it to her as a sort of Dear John letter.  Another frequent guest was Coleridge's son Hartley, whom Coleridge had refused to parent because he believed that children were better off without boundaries.  Naturally, Hartley ended up a drunk, the town oddity in Grasmere, and a terrible poet. Try reading "Frost at Midnight" after hearing that endearing tale!

Williams' notion of family was no less unhinged.  We toured the nursery, which was located directly above the buttery. It was so cold that Dorothy had covered the walls in newspaper to keep it warmer, and she often slept there to make sure the children were warm. And of course I would be remiss not to mention the string of French Wordsworths running about even to this day thanks to the poet's dalliances on the continent.  The whole Dove Cottage experiment sounded a lot like one of those hippie communes where everyone was experimenting with drugs and trying very hard to live "off the grid," singing about the summer of love. It made me very glad that Keats stayed in London with Fanny and missed all of this mess.

At the same time, I found myself sympathizing with Wordsworth as well.  Seeing his home and hearing of his childhood and odd adult lifestyle gave me  new insight into his poetry.  Sure, that may not be very good lit crit, but Wordsworth attempted to live a life that was in accordance with his aesthetics, and so I think it is relevant to think of them in tandem.

Much is made about Wordsworth's love of "Nature"; in any basic Romanticism class this is the only point that most students absorb. It seems to me that all this talk of Nature was just abstraction intended to obscure his real aim, which was getting back home. After all, Wordsworth didn't choose to settle in the Lakes just because it is a beautiful region; he did it because it was his home. He had been uprooted from the area after he was orphaned as a young boy, and was then separated from his sister.  He wanted to move back home to reclaim something that had been taken from him at a fragile age. Consider– after he spent years dallying with a French lover,  he comes back home and marries his childhood friend!

His poetry seems to be about nature, but in reality it is about people– how nature shapes them, and vice vera. The landscapes in his poems are cut with descriptions of domestic life, as a hedgerow cuts a field in twain:

He spends as much time talking about himself, the people in the Lakes, and the culture of the district, as he does speaking about nature in the abstract. He talks about ice skating with childhood pals, taking long rambles with family, foraging, farming.  And this doesn't even count the pastoral poems in which the lifestyles of the Lake district villagers is the sole focus. Additionally, his poems are often addressed to a listener (usually his sister I suppose), which implies that the work is meant as a communication, as a way of establishing a connection with someone, usually as a way of imparting a lesson. Even in "Tintern," nature acts as a sort of lens through which the speaker views the human experience; nature for nature's sake is not the point of the poem:

For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth, but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Not harsh or grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue.

While I find it somewhat amusing that Wordsworth made so much effort to live a life that was in accordance with his varied, often competing, aesthetic ideals, I also understand that struggle as well.  I am like Wordsworth in that I have an idea of home, but no experience of it. He was an orphan who lost his sister at a young age and grew up at a boarding school; I am the child of a divorced who has only half-siblings, born in a small town where I never lived. I understand the culture of rural life, but feel alienated from the actual experience.  When I visit home I feel pressure to "pass" as a local. Did Wordsworth feel the same way? Is that why he spent so much time trying to fit his life into an aesthetic he could never quite achieve? Was his enthusiasm for Big-N-Nature just a way of "passing" in a culture in which he felt alien?

After the tour we visited the museum. There were so many impressive manuscripts there it is hard to even recall them all: handwritten copies of Wordsworth's childhood home, handwritten copies of The Prelude, handwritten copies of Coleridge's "Rime," as well as the love letter upon which "Dejection" was based; literally roomfuls of them! It was overwhelming.

It was getting late at that point, so we decided to dash into Grasmere for the rest of the afternoon. We first stopped by a field where some newly-born lambs were grazing with their mother. Onward, we walked around town for a while and had lunch at a cafe. We both drank local ales. I had meatballs with creme fraiche, and CP had a delicious coronation chicken sandwich. Basically a curried chicken sandwich, I'd like to try making something similar at home.  Grasmere is a really adorable town; just like a little gingerbread village — oddly enough, the place is known for its gingerbread.  We saw the Wordsworth family graves, and attempted a little walk around the lake, but could find no entry point to the lake shore, so we took a bus back to Windermere.

After going back to Windermere we tarried for a minute in the room and got the directions to the lake shore. It was a quick walk from our hotel down a public footpath and through a small park. We arrived right at dusk and were able enjoy the most lovely sunset over Windermere– it was an absolutely perfect way to cap off our trip to the Lakes! By this time we were getting a little wistful, since we were enjoying our last full day of touring, so it was nice to finish the trip off in such a lovely way.

We walked back, then took a little nap before venturing out for our last meal in the Lakes. It was a little too late for dinner at a pub, so we ended up at a Chinese restaurant. The food was delicious! Very similar to our American-Chinese food. I had the Szechuan chicken, CP had beef and ginger. But sadly, no fortune cookie!

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