Essay
This is What Wordsworth Saw When He Got Up in the Morning
Gazing on Grasmere lake
Every few years we rent a house in the Lake District in the village of Grasmere, just behind Dove Cottage where William and Dorothy Wordsworth used to live. The house is set in a woodland garden and overlooks Grasmere lake.
There’s a sweet familiarity on returning after a lapse of time, to the house, the garden, the village, the lake and the hills, and to the blue hydrangeas that grow beyond the windows.
The house has a sitting room with a fireplace, bookshelves of Wordsworth’s poetry and old Dickens hardbacks, an enormous window overlooking the lake and two stuffed coral armchairs. The blue hydrangeas knock and bob against the window and frame the view of the lake.
The garden is wild, overgrown and packed with rhododendrons, oak trees, laurels, cherry trees, purple-grey slate paths and small silver waterfalls. Protected by the grey stone of the house, the hydrangeas bloom in shades of pomander lilac and butterfly-blue, violet, raspberry, lavender and pearl. Near the door they are pale lime white with only their centres brushed cornflower blue.
Heaps of marmalade orange crocosmia grow between the blue, and the pink blossom of blackberries tangles amid heaps of acid green…
