· By Tam McDonald
It’s not often that one of our tweets is a celebration of the contemplative life. Such was the thrust – or let’s say the drift – of a Guardian editorial commenting on an English Heritage promotion of the virtues of silence. “There’s a lot to be said,” it said, “for . . . a peaceful hour at the end of the day, surrounded by the ravaged splendour of Rievaulx Abbey in North Yorkshire.”
Sometimes lucky timing and serendipity lend a hand in joining up dots. So it was with reading The Guardian’s editorial in the week that Cradle of English was considering how best to welcome the Glasgow Climate Summit. What do the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals have to inspire us in terms of the sustainability of our urban spaces and the preservation of our legacies for future generations? And how might those inspirations play out in Fleet Street?
In this same week of much research and a little contemplation, I came across some of the better-known lines of William Wordsworth, who might have provided a keynote quatrain for COP26, with:
“The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! . . . “
Useful in the context of its message, and a lot of red meat there for the bare bones of those SDGs.
But while the consequences of all that getting and spending are clear enough given the depredations of the Anthropocene age, a question remains. What is the mood, the mindspace within which we address the challenges arising from all this busy doing at the expense of being, and the consequent laying waste of powers? Surely England’s greatest Nature Poet had something to say in a more contemplative vein?
A line from Simon & Garfunkel drifted by as the Wordsworthian wisdoms flowed: “Slow down, you move too fast, You got to make the morning last . . .” There was certainly a sense of the morning lasting in one of Wordsworth’s more famous poems:
“ . . . Never did sun more beautifully steep In his first splendour valley, rock, or hill; Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep! The river glideth at his own sweet will: Dear God! the very houses seem asleep; And all that mighty heart is lying still!”
If only Westminster Bridge had been at Blackfriars, and this dawn savouring could just glide into a Cradle of English blog. And then came the blissful serendipity in the discovery of a Wordsworth poem I had not read. It is right up our street and echoes the collective wisdom of several poets: of Pope’s “innocence, which most does please, with meditation,” and Blake’s “world in a grain of sand . . . and eternity in an hour.” Take Dr Johnson’s walk down Fleet Street, and end here:
“ . . . beyond And high above this winding length of street, This moveless and unpeopled avenue, Pure, silent, solemn, beautiful, was seen The huge majestic Temple of St Paul In awful sequestration, through a veil, Through its own sacred veil of falling snow.”