With magic in my eyes,
All marked with mute surmise
My radiance rare and fathomless,
When I came back from Lyonnesse
With magic in my eyes!
Thomas Hardy wrote those lines in 1870, not long after his first visit to
Cornwall, where he had met and fallen in love with the woman who would become
his first wife, Emma Gifford. But if it was she who was mainly responsible for
the poet’s ‘radiance rare and fathomless’, I like to believe that at least some
of the magic derived from the glorious countryside where they had come to know
each other: the ‘stream and leafed alley’ of the Vallency valley, the ‘chasmal
beauty’ of Beeny Cliff and ‘the opal and the sapphire of that wandering western
sea’. This was, and is, a landscape which, as Emma wrote, has the ‘power to
awaken heart and soul’.
As in Hardy's life, so in his writing. The Poems of 1912-13, in which he
recalls his courtship of Emma, are some of the most emotional and powerful he
ever wrote, not merely because of the re-discovered love for his, by now, dead
wife of which they speak, but for the dramatic setting of that love, which was
clearly so much part of his memories of her. There is a magic about the poems
which could never have been there had he, for example, set them in Bath, where
he and Emma spent an early holiday together, still less Paddington, where they
lived when they were first married.
When it comes to visiting the landscapes that have inspired great literature
there is, of course, always a danger that reality will break the spell. All I
can say is that this has not been my experience. From the days when I read Henry
Williamson’s Tarka at school, and could picture the otter visiting places
on Dartmoor that I knew well, like Belstone Cleave and Cranmere Pool, it seemed
to me that nothing brings a place to life like reading about it in someone
else’s words, and nothing brings a book or a poem set in the countryside to life
like visiting the places which inspired it. The magic works both ways.