PRACTISING CLOSE READING IN CLASS
Giving pupils the reading skills to succeed!
Paddy Salmon MA PGCE
Head of English SIS (Sèvres)
1993-2012
paddysalmon.wix.com/english-courses
21 WE ARE SEVEN
I
The Mystery of Wordsworth's “We Are Seven”
In about 1962 I "hiked" the (only!) 8 miles from Colwyn Bay to Conway, in order to gain my Hiking Badge for the Scouts. Why I joined the Rydal Prep School Scouts Troop had a lot to do with the fact that once a month sausages were barbecued, and we often made a barbaric compound, burnt on the outside and gooey on the inside, made of dough, called ‘Twist’. This had a high rating on the school black market and in the days of near-starvation at school, sausages were a sufficient incentive. But all of that, including my smart-aleck answer to Lady Baden-Powell's question, when she visited the troop, also in about 1962: “How do you tie a reef-knot?” – “Left over right and under; Right over left and under!”, which drew the patronising rebuke, “Ah, yes, IN THEORY…!” (of course! I could have said, “Right over left and under; Left over right and under”!) – all of that, is a separate story.
Two of us “hiked” together (“No hitch-hiking now, boys …!”) to Conway along the old A55, as full then of traffic as the new double-carriage throughway is still, only much slower. We had an extra mission, though, for our hike. We were to make for a church.
St Mary's and All Saints Church in Conway is a handsome church, and I now learn with interest that it was founded in the twelfth century as the abbey church of the Cistercian Abbey of Aberconwy. The church was the burial place of many of the Princes of Gwynedd, including Gruffydd ap Cynan, Llewelyn ap Maelgwyn, Llywelyn the Great (Llywelyn Fawr), and his sons Dafydd and Gruffydd. After King Edward I's conquest of Wales in 1283, Edward chose to build Conway Castle and its fortified town on the site and forced the Abbey to move to Maenan in the Conway valley. Llywelyn the Great's body, buried in 1240 AD, was removed to Maenan and then, on the dissolution of the monasteries, to Llanrwst Church, where the coffin can still be seen. St Mary's became the Parish church for the new English town of Conway, now Conwy.
In the picturesque graveyard that I entered, a rather tired and hungry twelve-year old scout, was a grave with ‘We Are Seven’ inscribed on the headstone. What was this all about?
It was all to do with Wordsworth's poem, We Are Seven. As I remember it, there was a gravestone with the title, ‘We Are Seven’, and the names of seven children sadly commemorated there. I remember scantily noting down in my “jotter” that this provided Wordsworth with the idea for the poem. He had passed by Conway on a walking tour, and the gravestone gave him the idea of a little girl innocently musing on the deaths of her siblings. In my eagerness to get my hands on the badge, I didn't have the time nor interest to explore the pathos of the poem, where the worldly-wise adult speaker engages with, but cannot comprehend, the sweet little girl's naïve insistence that “we are seven”, even though some have passed away.
Here is the poem (on the right) with its strangely truncated opening line (which is explained later):
We Are Seven
BY WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
———A simple Child,
That lightly draws its breath,
And feels its life in every limb,
What should it know of death?
I met a little cottage Girl:
She was eight years old, she said;
Her hair was thick with many a curl
That clustered round her head.
She had a rustic, woodland air,
And she was wildly clad:
Her eyes were fair, and very fair;
—Her beauty made me glad.
“Sisters and brothers, little Maid,
How many may you be?”
“How many? Seven in all,” she said,
And wondering looked at me.
“And where are they? I pray you tell.”
She answered, “Seven are we;
And two of us at Conway dwell,
And two are gone to sea.
“Two of us in the church-yard lie,
My sister and my brother;
And, in the church-yard cottage, I
Dwell near them with my mother.”
“You say that two at Conway dwell,
And two are gone to sea,
Yet ye are seven! I pray you tell,
Sweet Maid, how this may be.”
Then did the little Maid reply,
“Seven boys and girls are we;
Two of us in the church-yard lie,
Beneath the church-yard tree.”
“You run about, my little Maid,
Your limbs they are alive;
If two are in the church-yard laid,
Then ye are only five.”
“Their graves are green, they may be seen,”
The little Maid replied,
“Twelve steps or more from my mother’s door,
And they are side by side.
“My stockings there I often knit,
My kerchief there I hem;
And there upon the ground I sit,
And sing a song to them.
“And often after sun-set, Sir,
When it is light and fair,
I take my little porringer,
And eat my supper there.
“The first that died was sister Jane;
In bed she moaning lay,
Till God released her of her pain;
And then she went away.
“So in the church-yard she was laid;
And, when the grass was dry,
Together round her grave we played,
My brother John and I.
“And when the ground was white with snow,
And I could run and slide,
My brother John was forced to go,
And he lies by her side.”
“How many are you, then,” said I,
“If they two are in heaven?”
Quick was the little Maid’s reply,
“O Master! we are seven.”
“But they are dead; those two are dead!
Their spirits are in heaven!”
’Twas throwing words away; for still
The little Maid would have her will,
And said, “Nay, we are seven!”
On the 1st October 2015, I visited the church, thinking to find the grave again and refresh my memory of the occasion.
First problem. A sign is there, along with a strongly fortified cage, marked ‘We Are Seven’, but the grave has gone. I was told that it had been taken away because so many tourists had chipped away at it. No one seemed to know where it was now, but the protective cage, designed by the Arts & Crafts architect Herbert Luck North, was constructed in the early 20th century to protect what was left. (Hmm! I hadn't registered the cage at the time.)
Wordsworth in 1793 had just returned from France. He was aged 23 and was considering taking holy orders in the Church of England. His mind, however, was still churning with radical ideas, inspired by what he had discovered in France, but horrified by the execution of the king in January.
In a letter to a friend of his at this time, he wrote,
“Hereditary distinctions and privileged orders of every species, I think, must necessarily counteract the progress of human improvement. Hence it follows that I am not among the admirers of the British constitution. I conceive that a more excellent system of civil policy might be established among us; yet, in my ardour to attain the goal, I do not forget the nature of the ground where the race is to be run. ….. I recoil from the very idea of a revolution. I am a determined enemy to every species of violence…. I know that the multitude walk in darkness. I would put into each man's hand a lantern to guide him, and not have him set out upon his journey depending for illumination on abortive flashes of lightning, or the coruscation of transitory meteors.”
In the summer of 1793, Wordsworth set off on a walking tour, across Salisbury Plain, crossing the Severn and following the River Wye past Tintern Abbey, finally ending up in North Wales, where he climbed Snowdon and had his epiphany on the summit, of which he later wrote in his autobiographical poem ‘The Prelude’,
Ascending at loose distance each from each,
And I, as chanced, the foremost of the band—
When at my feet the ground appeared to brighten,
And with a step or two seemed brighter still;
Nor had I time to ask the cause of this,
For instantly a light upon the turf
Fell like a flash. I looked about, and lo,
The moon stood naked in the heavens at height
Immense above my head, and on the shore
I found myself of a huge sea of mist,
Which meek and silent rested at my Feet.
A hundred hills their dusky backs upheaved
All over this still ocean, and beyond,
Far, far beyond, the vapours shot themselves
In headlands, tongues, and promontory shapes,
Into the sea, the real sea, that seemed
To dwindle and give up its majesty,
Usurped upon as far as sight could reach.
Meanwhile, the moon looked down upon this shew
In single glory, and we stood, the mist
Touching our very feet; and from the shore
At distance not the third part of a mile
Was a blue chasm, a fracture in the vapor,
A deep and gloomy breathing-place, through which
Mounted the roar of waters, torrents, streams
Innumerable, roaring with one voice.
The universal spectacle throughout
Was shaped for admiration and delight,
Grand in itself alone, but in that breach
Through which the homeless voice of waters rose,
That dark deep thoroughfare, had nature lodged
The soul, the imagination of the whole.
Clearly this, then, was an intensely formative and creative period for Wordsworth, where he was preparing to become not a clergyman, after all, but a poet, albeit one with a strong moral conscience. It would lead him and his collaborator, Coleridge, to produce Lyrical Ballads, their attempt to shift poetry to become a more responsive, down-to-earth medium in which to explore issues of poverty, sympathy and the education of our feelings.
Of ‘We Are Seven’, Wordsworth himself said that it was written at Alfoxden in the spring of 1798. But he goes on to say that,“The little girl who is the heroine I met within the area of Goderich Castle in the year 1793.”
The interesting question is really this: did Wordsworth, as he claimed, really meet a girl at Goodrich Castle, who told him this story, totally ingenuously, just happening to mention that two of the siblings lived at Conway, in which case the chances are that the gravestone I came across was constructed post hoc, as a result of the "romantic" associations with Wordsworth's poem, which mentions Conway? Or else, could it have been that Wordsworth came upon a real gravestone, the one I had tracked down, with the sad inscription, ‘We Are Seven’ and, using a bit of artistic license, dreamed up a little girl at Goodrich Castle as a framing device to reconstruct the pathetic story?
Would a church have allowed a fake gravestone to be placed in hallowed ground as a dubious sop to 19th century tourists? It seems to me unlikely. The gravestone with its unusual title “We Are Seven” is admittedly somewhat extraordinary, but wouldn't the gravestone, if the little girl's story is taken as true, have been somewhat improbable, if she had been living (and dying), at Goodrich – for Conway is referred to as being elsewhere – with at least two of the seven (for two were “at sea”?
Far more probable, surely, is the idea that Wordsworth was struck by a real grave of seven children, all from one family, and then constructed a beautifully "picturesque” frame for it.
Wordsworth toured the Wye Valley at a time when tourism had become all the rage in Britain for the moneyed and leisured middle classes. The Reverend William Gilpin had led the charge with a very influential series of essays, starting with the River Wye and what he termed “picturesque beauty”. In 1792 he brought out “Three Essays: on Picturesque Beauty, on Picturesque Travel and on Sketching Landscape”. Armed with "Gilpin”, the serious “picturesque traveller” would visit Tintern Abbey, Goodrich Castle, Symonds Yat and other picturesque “shrines”, coming away with an experience that was supposedly just as enlightening and culturally significant as the continental tours had been for the upper classes. “Had been”, because the Napoleonic Wars had put an end to all travel on the continent until 1815, with the exception of a brief window of opportunity provided by the Peace of Amiens in 1802. Wordsworth was conducting an almost classical “picturesque tour”, taking in Snowdon and Conway.
The choice of Goodrich is telling because it resonates so much with the “picturesque” sensibility. The picturesque ideal was all to do with the cultivation of and depiction of “feeling”. Nature in her raw state had to be re-imagined in a more aesthetic way.
Old peasants, small children could be included, with preferably an old ruin in the background to summon up a pleasurable sense of melancholy, a sense of “mutability” and mortality – the passage of time. Some of this was inspired by the ‘Claude’-ian ideal of classical scenes bathed in a golden light, revealing the glories as well as the doom of the past. Claude glasses at the time became as popular gadgets as modern I-Pads or phone/cameras are now. Artists like Turner and Francis Towne discovered there was a big market for the “views” to back up these picturesque experiences?
In the absence now of the grave, and in the absence of further evidence, all I can assume is that Wordsworth used some poetic license to compose a very mawkish and sentimentalised rendering of what would actually have been a very stark image of the reality of poverty, sickness and death amongst rural populations. In fact Wordsworth's own version of how it came to be composed is totally and unintentionally laughable:
“I composed it while walking in the grove at Alfoxden. My friends will not deem it too trifling to relate, that while walking to and fro I composed the last stanza first, having begun with the last line. When it was all but finished, I came in and recited it to Mr Coleridge and my sister, and said, ‘A prefatory stanza must be added, and I should sit down to our little tea-meal with greater pleasure if my task was finished.’ I mentioned in substance what I wished to be expressed and Coleridge immediately threw off the stanza, thus,
‘A little child, dear brother Jem,’
I objected to the rhyme ‘dear brother Jem’ as being ludicrous; but we all enjoyed the joke of hitching in our friend James Tobin's name, who was familiarly called Jem. He was the brother of the dramatist. The said Jem got a sight of The Lyrical Ballads as it was going through the press at Bristol, during which time I was residing in that city. One evening he came to me with a grave face and said, ‘Wordsworth, I have seen the volume that Coleridge and you are about to publish. There is one poem in it which I earnestly entreat you will cancel, for, if published, it will make you everlastingly ridiculous.’ I answered that I felt much obliged by the interest he took n my good name as a writer, and begged to know what was the piece he alluded to. He said, ‘It is called We Are Seven.’ ‘Nay,’ said I, ‘that shall take its chance, however,’ and he left me in despair.”
My take on all of this, therefore, is that the poem should be seen as an artifice, possibly linked with a real girl who might have been seen at Goodrich. However, I fully sympathise with Jem's “despair” and am glad for him at least that the offensive reference has since been dropped, at the expense of what was a poor rhyme anyway. Whatever moral purpose the poem is supposed to serve, the crass stupidity of the adult persona in persisting with his plodding point that they cannot BE seven, if two of them are dead, seems to me completely indefensible on any grounds.
And the gravestone is apparently no more. What more could it have told us?
St Mary's and All Saints Church, Conway
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Goodrich Castle
The Reverend William Gilpin, who almost singlehandedly master-minded the craze for the "Picturesque", which swept the middle-class "tourists" of England during the Napoleonic wars, when the continent and the "sublime" Alps were off-limits.
Conwy Castle, or as we knew it then, Conway Castle
William Wordsworth
The interesting "cage" by Herbert Luck North that houses no grave now, for avid "picturesque" or literary tourists to come and pick at! Where is the grave and was it ever authentic?