Essay

Grasmere Journal

With apologies to Dorothy Wordsworth

Summer house discovered and photographed by author

I have found a summer house with a stable door and red-tiled floor and windows with black curlicue handles. There is a wood table and five stout chairs. No view of the lake, just the tops of the rhododendrons and Helm Crag. Helm Crag is green and where the green is threadbare it is pink, the bottom half lush with evergreens. The trees sparkle with birdsong.

Yesterday we visited Dove Cottage. Our guide was a tall, thin young man with a monk haircut like a shelf jutting over his forehead. He had a nice chin and must have spent the morning in a kitchen where they sweated sacks of onions.

The cottage was sweet, especially the wood panelled kitchen with the bubbling flagstones, footstep-polished to a soft silver. In the scullery, the steep garden filled the window with ferns and rose campion and the purple loosestrife that grows around the lake. The garden by the front door was a tangle of apple trees and wild roses.

Upstairs in the drawing room, a small table set with blue cups and saucers and a quill and ink. Wordsworth’s bookcase in the corner. The room was dark and yet here Wordsworth ‘Changed the face of English literature.’

Sitting on a moss-clothed log behind Dove cottage. Here is where Dorothy and William planted…