Short measures (iii): Wordsworth’s Rainbow

Short measures is a very occasional series in which I discuss a short poem (no more than twelve lines - shorter than a sonnet, therefore). Alas, for copyright reasons I can rarely publish a complete 20th. century poem or one by a living author. Suggestions for future poems to include in the series are always welcome.

My heart leapt up on Friday last week when I beheld a rainbow over Norwich Castle. At eight minutes past five I came out of M&S and saw the great arch of a perfect rainbow landing on top of the Norman Keep. It was a fine sight over what advertisers used to call ‘A fine city, Norwich’ - and unexpected, too: the pavements were dry and wherever else it had been raining, it wasn’t raining just then in Norwich.

     My heart leaps up when I behold

     A rainbow in the sky.

     So was it when I first began,

     So is it now I am a man,

     So be it when I shall grow old

       - Or let me die.

     The child is father to the man,

     And I could wish my days to be

     Bound each to each by natural piety.

I suppose ‘The child is father to the man’ is one of Wordsworth’s best-known lines - along with, say, ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’, ‘Earth has not anything to show more fair’ and perhaps ‘Surprised by joy, impatient as the wind’. But each of these three comes from the opening of a poem. Wordsworth himself, however, would later reproduce the last three lines of ‘The Rainbow’ as the epigraph to his great meditation on childhood, ‘Intimations of Immortality'.

As for ‘My heart leaps us’, these opening words were to echo in the title of one of Wordsworth’s poems of 1800, ‘Hart-Leap Well’. This is a longish poem that begins as a chivalrous ballad celebrating both the heroism of the huntsman and the endurance of the hunted stag. Oddly, the poem’s second half becomes a kind of anti-hunting polemic: no matter that the huntsman had admired the courage of the stag whom he had pursued to the death, the place where the animal had died becomes an accursed spot, a warning to future generations of would-be sportsmen: ‘the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable’, in Oscar Wilde’s neat apothegm.

But unlike the conventions of medieval and renaissance poetry, there is no play on heart/hart in ‘The Rainbow’ itself. The poem, at least its first six lines, seems almost naïve: di-dum di-dum di-dum di-dum, as schoolchildren would once have chanted it. Beware, though, of trivializing this miniature poem: ‘Wow! A rainbow! How exciting is that!’  No, this is more than just another ‘Surprised by joy’ moment.

Any good poem warns against the temptation to take words for granted. I think that ‘behold’ in the first line means much more than simply ‘see’. The word itself more often acts as a command – ‘Ecce homo’– ‘Behold the man!’ – or as an exclamation: ‘Lo and behold!’ Here, though, Wordsworth’s line implies that he simultaneously sees the rainbow and is awe-struck by it – a physical as well as emotional response already foreshadowed by ‘My heart leaps up’. He both beholds the rainbow and is beholden to it: the fact that he responds to it is, as he sees it, proof of his continuing humanity.

The rainbow is not described. By contrast with my trite phrases about the ‘perfect rainbow’ that was such a ‘fine sight’ over Norwich, Wordsworth’s rainbow simply is. Its power to move him is not just a memory from the past (‘when my life began’) that has stayed with him ‘now I am a man’; more importantly, it is a commitment to the future: ‘So be it when I shall grow old’. And if/when he fails to respond,  then it’ll be time to quit: the triple anaphora, ‘So was it - so is it - so be it’, is startlingly undercut by the immediate reversal, ‘ - Or let me die’.  There’s a confident assurance here, as elsewhere in Wordsworth, that nature will not let him down. Nor, for his part, must he fail Nature.

Some I suppose might call this moral earnestness priggish, for the rainbow is about more than pleasure, it is about a moment of passionate recognition, of spiritual illumination. It is a shock and a lesson to last a lifetime. Wordsworth argues repeatedly that Nature, what Coleridge calls (in Frost at Midnight) the ‘Great Universal Teacher’ is the source of mankind’s moral understanding. And like prayer for George Herbert, this is ‘something understood’ instinctively, not something readily put into words, taught in school or learned from books:

One impulse from a vernal wood

   Will teach you more of man,

Of moral evil and of good,

   Than all the sages can.

‘Or let me die’ is both a reversal and a bridge from the naive exhilaration of the opening lines to the mature meditation of the closing. For Wordsworth, that the child is father to the man is so self-evident it needs no explanation. Like the rainbow itself, this just is so: as adults we learn from, and build on, the experiences of childhood. I have always resented the condescension of those who tell children the ‘real world’ is what comes after school – but perhaps that’s because of the implication that teachers don’t live in the real world either.  Did Shakespeare, in As You Like It, coin the phrase ‘second childhood’? Very aptly, if so. During the past twelve months I have spent more time involved with the very elderly than at any other period of my life. Children can literally become parents to their parents. Wordsworth was right.

Finally, ‘natural piety’. Piety used to mean the duty of loyalty and love children owe their parents. Virgil’s Aeneas wasn’t pious because he was always on his knees: he acknowledged the duty due to his father Anchises. For Wordsworth, that piety is both a natural impulse and an impulse of loyalty to nature itself. So, in ‘The Rainbow’ he simply says that this dual impulse is what - all being well (‘I could wish’) - will keep us going for a lifetime. It’s a grown-up idea, carefully planted in a childlike, but not childish, poem.

Adrian Barlow

[photo: Rainbow over Norwich Castle © the author

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Bedford: Betjeman: Bunyan

“Am in Bedford. Why?” This anguished telegram, apocryphally sent by G.K. Chesterton, came to my mind last Friday evening as I set out from Bedford station to walk across the town. The initial impression is discouraging: you don’t want to linger long in Midland Road. But once you have reached the old Bedford Modern School – its Blore façade now politely hiding the shopping centre behind it - things rapidly improve: St. Paul’s Square, the town bridge and Henry Holland’s Swan Hotel, which Pevsner describes as “the noblest hotel of the age, very severe and classical” all raise the spirits. Then the Embankment beckons.

“The best thing visually about Bedford is the way the town has treated its river. Few English towns can be compared” (Pevsner again). He’s right, and others before him have said much the same. In 1712 Lady Celia Fiennes described the scene:

The river runs twineing about and runs into several notches of ground which is sett full of willows, and many little boates chained to the sides belonging to the people of the town for their diversion.

Bedford, indeed, was one of the first places in England to discover boating for pleasure. Punts, canoes, skiffs – all these and other craft could be seen enjoying the river between Duck Mill Lane and Newnham; and even last Saturday I saw a neat little Edwardian electric launch putt-putting past the Embankment Hotel. Nowadays, though, most of the activity is strictly athletic, as the Schools’ and Bedford Town Boathouses attest. The Ouse at Bedford is ideal for serious rowing, but an eight raising its stroke-rate while practising for the next regatta allows small margin for messing about on the river: pleasure boats of a sort are confined to Longholme Lake, an unregarded pond squeezed between the upper and lower river. In the days when we had serious winters, this lake used to freeze over, and then everyone turned out to go skating. The scene was Brueghelesque.

After a week of overcoats and raw

Red hands, the ice at last set thick enough

And out the skaters came: the adepts, sure

Of admiration from the young; the tough

Guys, humbled after showing off and then

Upending painfully; the novice boys,

Their ankles splayed about to fall again;

Sledges, and dogs excited by the noise.

These rites of winter need to be observed

To prove the season’s authenticity;

In images like these there is preserved

Our sense of what ‘real winter’ ought to be

                  But rarely is.  Faced with this falling short

                  It’s good to see those scenes that Bruegel caught. 

I wrote that in 1976, after living in Bedford for three years. (Looking at the sestet now, I think I must have been going through an early Philip Larkin phase: I was teaching The Whitsun Weddings at the time.) But I have known the town almost all my life, and it was good to be here again on Saturday. I was on my way to run a day school on ‘John Betjeman: poetry and architecture’* at the admirable Bedford Retirement Education Centre, where I have taught on and off for many years and have many friends. First, though, I wanted not just to enjoy a walk in the early sun along the towpath, but to photograph the town’s war memorial.  It’s a remarkable and unusual memorial, which I shall be discussing in a lecture, ‘Memory, remembrance and memorials’, in Oxford at the end of this month.

Bedford by the river would have appealed strongly to Betjeman with its flower-beds, bandstand, Suspension Bridge and sporty schoolgirls at full stretch on the water, sculling with confidence, blades on the feather. The nearby streets are discreet and chestnut-lined; the shaded late-Victorian villas stand back behind privet hedges. They were built for military and colonial families who settled in Bedford rather than Cheltenham because the local Harpur Trust schools were less expensive and prepared boys for army and civil service careers. The artist Dora Carrington lived in Rothsay Gardens as a child and railed against the suffocating respectability of it all. But at least she learned to be an artist in Bedford, scandalizing the High School by cutting her hair short before going on to the Slade. (I’m looking forward to reading Pat Barker’s new novel, Toby’s Room, part of her new Great War sequence following on from Life-Class, about the Slade at the time Carrington, Gertler, Spencer, Nevinson, Nash et al were there under Professor Henry Tonks.)

One person who knew the river at Bedford all too well but would not recognize it now was the town’s most famous son, John Bunyan. He was imprisoned many times for preaching without a licence:  according to tradition, the town gaol, which he called his ‘den’, was by the town bridge, and it was there he wrote Pilgrim’s Progress. Bedford School sometimes claims Bunyan as  a former pupil –rather improbably, I used to think – but I once amused myself by imagining him transported forward three hundred years to 1978 and turning up for an Old Boys’ weekend:

The old boy by the Ouse, dismayed at blacks

   And skateboard boys, stood mute against the roar

Of juggernauts and wished he’d not come back:

   Bunyan, returning, hated what he saw.

Here where his den once was he now could see

   Little to urge the words “I knew this place”

Onto his lips: only above the trees

   A spire still occupied its proper space.

Well, that at least was something.  But there must

   Be someone there, some face he knew? Just then

He spotted Talkative, that pair Mistrust

   And Timorous (those too familiar men)

      And all the rest.

                                          So he was glad he came:

      Bunyan began to feel at home again.

Walking along the Bedford Embankment last Saturday, knowing I should soon be back among familiar faces and oId friends, I too began to feel almost at home again, though it’s now all but thirty years since I actually lived in Kingsley Road, a minute’s easy walk from the river.

Adrian Barlow

* Among the poems I discussed was ‘Potpourri from a Surrey Garden’, about which I wrote in a post earlier this year: John Betjeman and Windlesham.

[Illustrations:  (i) The River Ouse at Bedford, with the suspension bridge in the foreground; the Swan Hotel and St Paul’s Church spire in the distance (ii) the Bedford War Memorial, by Charles Sergeant Jagger (1921)

Photographs © Adrian Barlow 29.09.12