"Fresh" Forest of Dean.

[Carol]

Geoff wrote:
> One of the best known spots is Symonds Yat which is high above the Wye Valley, on the north-west edge of the Forest of Dean and a few miles north of Tintern Abbey.
> 
> I've only ever visited once when there was about 3" of snow on the ground and the views down the valley were stunningly beautiful.

Carol responds:

Aha! A chance for me to quote more English Romantic poetry for Steve.

Here's a bit of a poem by William Wordsworth (1770-1850), actually called "Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting The Banks Of The Wye During A Tour. July 13, 1798" but familiarly known as "Tintern Abbey."

Five years have past; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a soft inland murmur. -- Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
That on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect
The landscape with the quiet of the sky.
<snip>             These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind,
With tranquil restoration: -- feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,
As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man's life,
His little, nameless, unremembered, acts
Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust,
To them I may have owed another gift,
Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened: -- that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on, --
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.

            If this
Be but a vain belief, yet, oh! how oft --
In darkness and amid the many shapes
Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir
Unprofitable, and the fever of the world,
Have hung upon the beatings of my heart --
How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee,
O sylvan Wye! thou wanderer thro' the woods,
How often has my spirit turned to thee!
<snip> And so I dare to hope,
Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first
I came among these hills; when like a roe
I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides
Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams,
Wherever nature led: more like a man
Flying from something that he dreads, than one
Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then
(The coarser pleasures of my boyish days,
And their glad animal movements all gone by)
To me was all in all. -- I cannot paint
What then I was. The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colours and their forms, were then to me
An appetite; a feeling and a love,
That had no need of a remoter charm,
By thought supplied, nor any interest
Unborrowed from the eye. -- That time is past,
And all its aching joys are now no more,
And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this
Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur, other gifts
Have followed; for such loss, I would believe,
Abundant recompence. For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and of all that we behold
>From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye, and ear, -- both what they half create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognise
In nature and the language of the sense,
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being. <snip>

Sorry to quote such a long extract, but the poem contains some great and memorable lines that I couldn't bring myself to snip. (Steve should like it because it's blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter)--no rhymes or end-stopped lines to distract him from the imagery and ideas.

Wordsworth was influential in spreading the idea that people should live in harmony with nature, which is not the same thing, of course, as giving up houses and gardens and picturesque architecture like Tintern Abbey altogether.

Here's a link to the whole poem if anyone wants to read it:

http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Poetry/WordsworthTinternAbbey.htm

The last few lines are addressed to his younger sister, Dorothy, who (according to his theory of human development) is at an earlier stage in her relationship with nature than he is and still not wholly separated from it.

And here's a link to the Tintern Abbey website. (The webcam doesn't seem to be working, but there are lots of other photos. The abbey was already a ruin in Wordsworth's time thanks to Henry VIII's dissolution of the abbeys in 1536. The fact that it was a ruin made it "picturesque" and attractive to people like Jane Austen's fictional Marianne Dashwood in "Sense and Sensibility."

Carol, having trouble getting the old English teacher impulse out of her blood