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With Commentary by Pat Steiner
Journals: The journal entries contain many of her literary characteristics. She minimizes herself and writes with a more community minded "we". She mentions her chores of "ironing" and community work. Dorothy also describes the displacement of people who are suffering because of economic conditions. Her love affair with nature was reflected in her journals entries. I especially found the Alfoxden Journalentries which described the flora and fauna of that area to be especially beautiful. Coleridge describes her and her writing accurately when he says, "Her eye watchful in minutest observation of nature; and her taste a perfect electrometer. It bends, protrudes, and draws in, at subtlest beauties..." She was a "poet in prose' whose entries were infused with imagination and sublime moments.
One of many entries in the Alfoxden Journal reveals her eye for detail and color, her ear for sound and her romantic sensibility.
January 23rd. Bright sunshine, went out at 3 o'clock. The sea perfectly calm blue, streaked with deeper colour by the clouds, and tongues or points of sand; on our return of a gloomy red. The sun gone down. The crescent moon, Jupiter, and Venus. The sound of the sea distinctly heard on the tops of the hills, which we could never hear in summer. We attribute this partly to the bareness of the trees, but chiefly t o the absence of the singing of birds, the hum of insects, that noiseless noise which lives in the summer air.
Words like "Bright", "blue", "streaked", "sand" and "gloomy red" conjure up for the reader the colors of the day. "[S]inging", "hum", and "noise" capture the sound of the place.
Besides recording observations of nature, her Grasmere journal entries often provided glimpses of displaced paupers who were passing through the Lake district, her household chores and the literary life of herself, William and others.
Beggars appear intermittently and their appearances and stories are described without embellishment. They serve as a kind of metonomy; brief representations of the social conditions of the lower class. Dorothy passes no moral judgements; nor does she reveal her political views. She allows the readers to draw their own conclusions. This technique is evident in the following entry.
We met near Skelleth a pretty little Boy with a wallet over his shoulder. He came from Hawkshead and was going to 'late a lock' of meal. He spoke gently and without complaint. When I asked him if he got enough to eat, he looked surprized, and said 'Nay'. He was 7 years old but seemed not more than 5 (GJ 39).
Dorothy makes no further comment, but, through this anecdote, the reader is made aware of the economic difficulties of the time and the cost to the children. It also, to me, reveals the callousness of a society that would allow its children to starve.
Another entry shows the plight of a soldier who had been crippled in service to his country and has now been left to fend for himself.
[Oct 9th] A man called in a soldier's dress---he was thirty years old, of Cockermouth, had lost a leg and thigh in battle, was going to his home. He could earn more money in travelling with his ass than at home (GJ 58).
Another time she describes a meeting with an elderly beggar. Through their conversation we recognize the man's decent past, bleak present and future, and his humanity. His situation reveals how chance and the system abandoned him to poverty.
[December] 22nd, Tuesday...As we came up the White Moss, we met an old man, who I saw was a beggar by his two bags hanging over his shoulder; but, from a half laziness, half indifference, and a wanting to try him, if he would speak, I let him pass. He said nothing, and my heart smote me. I turned back, and said, 'You are begging?' 'Ay' says he. I gave him a half penny. William, judging from his appearance joined in, 'I suppose you were a sailor?' 'Ay', he replied, 'I have been 57 years at sea, 12 of them on board a man-of-war under Sir Hugh Palmer.' 'Why have you got not a pension?' 'I have no pension, but I could have got into Greenwich hospital, but all my officers are dead.'He was 75 years of age,...He walked with a slender stick---decently stout, but his legs bowed outwards.
The effect of their sudden appearance, their words and their marginal, desperate existences contrasts starkly with the abundance, beauty and power of nature that she described before and after their appearances.
She reveals her sympathy with the passing of a pauper woman who had no family or place but was even dependent on the charity of others for a funeral. Her ambivalence toward home is revealed in the words "dark house" which described the house the pauper woman was waked in. Society's failure to provide is described in the plight of the leech gather. "He had been hurt in driving a cart: his leg broke, his body driven over, his skull fractured." He is becoming more and more destitute because leeches were not as plentiful as they had been because of the "dry season" and the fact that they were "much sought after". In a later entry she decribes nature's failure to give when she says the "deer in Gowbarrow Park like to skeletons." In these scenes we can see her refusal to generalize or to write metaphorically. She depicts the scenes of displacement or natural beauty and the reader is left to draw her own conclusions.
Sublime moments filled the journal entries too. "...the sun was shining and the prospect looked so divinely beautiful ...It seemed more sacred than I had ever seen it, and yet more allied to human life." Her description of daffodils, drawn on heavily in her brother's famous poem, blurs the line between nature and human experience when she says,...some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness, and the rest tossed and reeled and danced, and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the lake. They looked so gay --- ever-glancing, ever changing."
Poetry: In much of her poetry she also refuses to generalize, speculate or make connections. This is obvious in the poem "To my Niece Dorothy". When her brother tried to add two stanzas to it in order to give it wider implications, she scribbled them out. She rejected thinking and writing metaphorically and prefered to use metonomy and synecdoche. This allowed the readers to draw their own conclusions.
Her poem "A Cottage in Grasmere Vale" or "Peaceful Our Valley, Fair and Green" details the conflict or ambivalence of her chosen life. The beginning is harmonious with words like "peaceful", "sheltered", and "guarded". Her home and her life with her brother are primary in her life. Her voice is more assertive in this poem. She uses "I" as well as "Our". There are sublime moments when the house is "pierced" by nature. The ending reiterates her personal choice, but it is tinged with sadness for her secondary role.
The poem "Floating Island" is typical of Dorothy's style, content and mindset. It is a traditionally feminine way of looking at the world. The appropriating, assertive self was alien to Dorothy. In the poem "Floating Island" she minimizes her own subjectivity. The author and nature occupy an equivalent place in the poem. The author or mankind does not dominate. The poem begins harmoniously but then proceed to words connoting rupture --- "undermined", "Loosed", and "Dissevered". Nature has a power of her own outside of man's grasp. Nature is observable but not explicable. She "may cease to give". Dorothy's powers of observation, evident in the journals is also present here. Her refusal to generalize is evident in her use of metonymy. The floating island is a symbol of everchanging nature. She paints the picture; the reader can draw her own conclusions.
In "Thoughts on my Sickbed" she questions her worth and her contributions. She has enjoyed the beauty of nature, but her sublime moment on the coach comes when friends and family bring the flowers of spring into her. Nature, memory and the domestic connections of family and community have made her happy and have connected her to the cycle of life. She realizes that her life and contributions have not been wasted.