Brandon C. Yen: 'Wordsworth on the Holyhead Road' (2020)

Description

Lede
On Saturday the 29th August 1829, at 9pm, William Wordsworth wrote home from Holyhead. He was waiting to embark at 11pm and to sail at 1am.

Story
‘What dreadful weather!’ Dorothy Wordsworth exclaimed on 28 August 1829. She had ‘a hundred fears’ because her brother William was going to cross the Irish Sea from Holyhead the following night.

As they would soon find out, ‘three vessels had been wrecked on the Coast of Anglesey’ on the 26th and 27th, with many lives lost. The Alert (from Liverpool to Dublin) had met her end off Holyhead, the Davies Hall (from Liverpool to Beaumaris on Anglesey) near the Great Orme, and the Myrtle (of Hull) in Cemaes Bay.

On Saturday the 29th, at 9pm, William Wordsworth wrote home from Holyhead. He was waiting to embark at 11pm and to sail at 1am. It was estimated that their steam-packet would arrive in Dublin at 7 on Sunday morning – ‘God willing’, he added.

In the event, it turned out to be a ‘quiet passage’. They disembarked at Howth at 8 am, beginning a five-week journey during which they would visit many celebrated places: the Wicklow Mountains, Glendalough, Glengarriff, Killarney, Edgeworthstown, Lough Erne and the Giant’s Causeway, as well as Dublin, Cork, Limerick, Derry/Londonderry and Belfast.

That was Wordsworth’s first and only Irish tour, but in September 1824, with his wife Mary and their daughter Dora, he had already trodden parts of the ‘Irish Road’ in Wales: Thomas Telford’s Holyhead Road. There they drank tea with the Ladies of Llangollen, Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby from Kilkenny, who had settled into Plas Newydd in 1780. Wordsworth renamed their valley the ‘GLYN CAFAILLGAROCH’ (‘Vale of Friendship’).

In 1824 the Wordsworths had taken the steam-packet from Liverpool to Bangor, near where they ‘admired the stupendous preparations for the bridge over the Menai’. The poet would cross the Menai Suspension Bridge (completed in 1826) on his way to Holyhead in 1829. Designed by Telford, the bridge seemed to be guiding him to eternity: the ‘dazzling sun’ turned ‘the Bridge and its chains etc. into brilliance’, and ‘the metal gave to it an aerial or celestial appearance that was quite enchanting’.

The poet Felicia Hemans crossed the same bridge in 1830 after befriending the Wordsworths in the Lake District that summer. She described it in a similar way: ‘its chain work is so airy in appearance, that to drive along it seems almost like passing through the trellis of a bower’. The whole was like ‘a native feature of the scene’, its ‘magnificence’ blending in with the ‘glorious’ mountains of Caernarfonshire.

Anglesey – or Mona – was known for its Druidic past. Wordsworth’s nephew Christopher wrote a poem called ‘The Druids’, imagining Mona’s Druid King using a ‘knife of gold’ to cut ‘quivering mistletoe’ from an oak. Describing Anglesey as a ‘land of prose’, however, Hemans strove ‘in vain to conjure up the ghost of a Druid, or even of a tree, on its wide, monotonous plains’.

Wordsworth too thought that nothing could be ‘more dreary than the Interior of Anglesea’. Holyhead, though, seemed to hold visionary possibilities: a mysterious entrance to an unknown world beyond the Irish Sea. Darkness had fallen. All he saw there were ‘20 Lamps or more at equal distances’, which ‘made a bright semicircle half enclosing a segment of the sea’.

Wordsworth would remember the Holyhead Road in his objections to the Kendal-and-Windermere railway, published in the Morning Post in 1844. Tourists, he thought, could benefit little from railways and new roads if they had not ‘an eye to perceive, and a heart to feel’. He caricatured those ‘pilgrims of fashion’ who were ‘hurried along in their carriages, not a few of them perhaps discussing the merits of “the last new Novel,” or poring over their Guide-books, or fast asleep’. The same applied to the Holyhead Road, which had penetrated the ‘mountainous country of Wales’, though he acknowledged that ‘the plea of utility, especially as expediting the communication between England and Ireland, more than justifies the labours of the Engineer’.

For Wordsworth, Telford’s Holyhead Road had a political significance in the era following the Act of Union, 1800. Throughout his life, he was deeply concerned about Ireland’s relationship with Britain. In 1794, whilst planning a radical journal, he thought of appointing an agent in Dublin to ‘disseminate’ it. As the years went by, his radicalism waned, and he became strongly opposed to Catholic Emancipation, speaking dismissively of Ireland’s Catholic ‘superstitions’.

Yet, just as the Menai Bridge resembled a threshold to a visionary world, so Wordsworth alluded to Milton’s paradise in referring to the Irish coast as the ‘bright confines of another world’. The only poetic image he gleaned from his 1829 tour was equally evocative: a pair of eagles in County Antrim that ‘Flew high above Atlantic waves, to draw | Light from the fountain of the setting sun’.

Holyhead was a portal to a world suffused with light, unfathomably rich and strange.

Factoid
Wordsworth’s Cumbria had many Irish immigrants and traditions. He could also have travelled to Dublin from Whitehaven, a major port on the west coast of Cumbria.

• https://perma.cc/Q8FD-CZDF (link opens in new window)