Go, turn behind the willows leaning down
And cross a broad, unmetalled, concrete bridge
Beside the throbbing relay station’s fence,
Behind the bold-brick houses, built, set, square
Upon the fertile valley’s bottom, where
A tiny talking brook provides the sea
For toddlers’ first wellie-splashes, and then
For boys from school to fall into and soak
And come home scolded, seek again to sneak
To tiny kingdoms of hedgeholes and mud,
And live in, in their dreaming, sleeping minds.
And if you find that stream, that bridge, those trees,
Begin to walk the track and to explore
A microcosm of all England’s lands
Expressed in half a mile, so few acres,
As shells express the whorl of hurricanes
Invisible in shape until an eye
Above the world can picture them all whole,
As rockpools mirror all the ocean’s depth
And as a garden mocks, with love, the wild
And wildernesses live behind a shed,
So know that this small span of well-loved land
Can teach entire the lessons of landscape –
Entire, at least, the principles on which
Every other sight, whether moor or mount
Or shore or fen or cliff or field or wood
Or lawn or park or scrub or shingle down
Or chalk-hill flank or tide-bared mud or sea –
The principles on which these worlds are seen
And loved, and held in balanced wonderment
With awe and joy each sharing parts of thought
That flicker from the buds of hawthorn hedge
To wave-tops, turning, crisping white, a-rush
To burst upon the land with such desire,
Enthusiasm to enact and give
And interact and change and be part of
The world that springs from those first wanderings, young
As a boy might be, so was I right there,
Turned from the street onto the brick-dust track,
The over-written history of space
And growing things that taught me how to grow –
Ah, go down beside the willows, then take
The slowly steeping walk up that hill,
Turn about, look around, see the world
That we have, this gift of childish heaven
That in it holds appreciation of
The living, growing land beyond the sky.
Wordsworth never finished the poem we call ‘The Prelude’, but it was meant to be his autobiography in verse, or, as he put it grandly, the story of the ‘creation of a poetic mind’. I actually think this is a fairly good subject for poetry – if only of interest to other poets – but possibly self-indulgent! Nonetheless, even without Wordsworth’s age or position, I found it really pleasurable to revisit my childhood places in verse like this. Does this mean I’ll expand it?