November 11th, Sunday

November 11^th, Sunday. A relaxed morning. Read in bed to Constance from Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal. After a breakfast of fried bacon, marrow and mushrooms C went to church and I worked in the wood. A beautiful day, calm, good light from a broken sky. Autumn colours the finest I have seen. Even the sycamores have shades of yellow and red, the maples big golden blooms and cotoneaster like crimson fireworks. Underfoot the coloured leaves exceeding beautiful. I felled several trees and sawed a large pile of seasoned wood for the stoves. In the evening we dined on a thick broth of peas and ham. I wrote to TM about an Osmunda fern he’d shown me long ago. I moved one last year from the wild. It took well and was now a good yellow. Curious to read that its flower used in amorous Slavonic rites. In the evening I struggled with Wallace Steven’s essay, ‘Imagination as Value’ and turning instead to his poems found, ‘The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain'. I think it exceeding good and seemed to speak of Dorothy and William’s poetic struggles.

There it was, word for word,
The poem that took the place of a mountain.

He breathed its oxygen,
Even when the book lay turned in the dust of his table.

It reminded him how he had needed
A place to go to in his own direction,

How he had recomposed the pines,
Shifted the rocks and picked his way among clouds,

For the outlook that would be right,
Where he would be complete in an unexplained completion:

The exact rock where his inexactness
Would discover, at last, the view toward which they had edged,

Where he could lie and, gazing down at the sea,
Recognize his unique and solitary home.