The Peat-Cart, and Other Poems

by William Wordsworth, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

Poems

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The Peat-Cart

Some forty years are gone, and still I hear
The iron of that wheel upon the stone
More plainly than the rain against this pane.
It was the latter end of June. The moss
Above the hamlet had been cut in May,
And spread, and turned, and stacked, and left to dry,
And on the longest days the carts went up.
Old Thomas Birkett, who had no one then,
Took me for company, for I was eight,
And light, and handy when a gate was shut.

We loaded through the afternoon. He forked
The dry peats up to me, and I received them
And laid them in their rows, as he had shown me,
The broad side outward, lest the load should slip.
They were as light as bread, and smelt of rain
Long fallen, and of something under rain
I had no name for then, and have none now.

The sun went off the moss; the western fells
Went flat and dark as slate against the light;
And Birkett took the mare's head, and we came
Down by the sled-gate, that steep grassy way
The old men of the valley wore with sleds
Before there was a wheel in all the dale.
I rode on top of all, and saw the beck
Go silver under me, and the far roofs,
And smoke from one of them, which was our own.

Midway, where the track doubles on itself
Above a gill whose bottom is not seen
From any part of it, the near wheel struck
A stone set edgeways in the turf, and rose,
And hung; I felt the whole load lean with it,
And felt the peats beneath me start to move
Like something waking; and the mare stood still,
And trembled; and the cart stood on one wheel.

I did not cry. I think I did not breathe.
And Birkett did not run to me, nor pull,
Nor lay a hand on anything. He stood
Before the mare, and spoke to her. No more.
I could not tell you what the words were. Some
Were words, and some were sounds a man will make
To a beast that he has known since it was foaled,
Low, and all one, like water under ice;
And the mare listened, and she did not move;
And by degrees, by inches, the wheel came down
Upon the turf, and all the load came back
Into its place, and I was on the earth
Again, and not above the gill. He said
Nothing to me about it. He led on,
And at the foot he gave me a dry peat
To carry home, as if it were my wage;
And it was burning on our hearth that night.

Now ask me why, of all that summer gave,
And all the summers that came after it,
This should come back so often, and so whole,
And come most often in the quiet times,
When I am sitting by a fire like this
And nothing in the room is like to fall.
It is not fear; the fear was gone before
The wheel was down. It is the standing still.
It is a man who had no book but the fell,
Who knew there are some weights no hand can hold,
And that the thing to do with such a weight
Is to speak low to what is carrying it.

He has been dead these thirty years. The moss
Is cut no more; the sled-gate is grown up
With bracken to the shoulder of a man.
But when the peat-smoke rises from a hearth
I hear him: the low voice, and then the wheel
Coming to earth again, by slow degrees.

The Toll-Bar Keeper

She keeps the toll-bar; and in wind or rain,
When wheels are heard upon the road, her door
Is open, and her lantern held before
Her face, and her hand ready on the chain.
Nine years she has been widowed; and the pain
Of it, she says, was less than she looked for,
For there was always someone at the door,
Some drover, or the mail, or the slow wain.
I asked her once if she had never planned
To take the road herself, that runs below
Her door to Lancaster, and to the sea.
She counted out my change into my hand,
And said, "It comes to me. I let it go."
Then drew the bar behind me, quietly.

The Bobbin-Mill

There is a mill on Hollin Beck,
A long shed and a wheel,
Where they turn birch and alder down
To bobbins for the reel;

For far off, over Lancashire,
Ten thousand spindles spin,
And every spindle wants a spool
To wind the cotton in.

I met a man by Hollin Beck
Who worked there as a lad;
He told me of it as we went,
Not merry, and not sad.

"I was but nine when I went in;
My father brought me down;
The wheel was going, and the noise
Was like a market town.

"From six till it was dark I stood
Beside the turner's lathe,
And swept the shavings off the floor
As mowers sweep the swathe.

"The beck was in my ears all day;
It was the beck that turned
The shaft, the belts, the twelve lathes round,
And by the beck we earned.

"And yet I never saw the beck,
Not once, the year I came;
I heard it only through the wall,
And felt it in the frame.

"Then came the frost of 'fourteen, sir;
The dam froze like a floor;
The wheel stood bearded in its race,
And it would turn no more.

"The master sent us home. I went
Not home, but up the brow,
To see the thing I'd heard a year
And never seen till now.

"And there it was. The force stood up
Like pipes in Kendal church,
And every pool was glass, and held
A leaf of last year's birch.

"I stood there, sir, I cannot say
How long, against the hill;
I never heard a thing so loud
As the beck when it was still.

"I laid my hand upon the ice,
And there, a hand below,
I felt it going all the while,
Though it went very slow.

"Three days, and then the thaw came on;
The wheel went round again;
I swept the shavings as before
Among the lathes and men.

"But it was not the same, sir. Now,
When the beck shook the wall,
I knew it: I had had my hand
Upon it, after all."

He left me where the road goes down
Among the coppice-wood;
I went on up by Hollin Beck,
And stood where he had stood,

And laid my hand flat on the stone
Beside the summer force,
And felt it going in the rock
As the heart goes in a horse.

Written on Finding a Wren's Nest in January

Within the ivy on the barn,
Where no one looks, a wren had made
A house of moss, and hair, and yarn
Pulled from the hedge where sheep had strayed.

The door was round, and no more wide
Than a child's finger. I put in
My finger: it was dry inside,
And soft, and cold, and nothing in.

The young went out in June, I guessed,
Through that small door into the year,
And left the frost to have the nest;
And nothing now would winter here.

I would have pulled it down, to bear
Home to the children; but the light
Was going, and I left it there,
And came back by it, nearly night,

And stopped: for out of the bare thorn,
And off the wall, and from the tree,
Came wrens, as brown as leaves wind-torn,
By one, by two, and sometimes three,

And went in at that little door,
One after one, till I had told
A dozen; and there came no more;
And the ivy closed upon the cold.

On Hearing a Curlew over a Market-Town

Over the market, over all the cries
Of buyer and of seller, stall by stall,
A curlew went, and let its bubbling call
Run down the air like water. No man's eyes
Went up to look for it in those grey skies
But mine. The wool, the heifer by the wall,
The carrier's news, were business for them all;
And who shall say that they were less than wise?
But I was gone. I was a child again,
Knee-deep in cotton-grass upon the moss,
And the same cry was falling, and the same
Wet wind was in my face, as it was then;
And it went over, and was gone; across
The square a drover shouted someone's name.

The Calling in the Mist

At seventeen I went alone across
The high pass that divides two dales, to fetch
A book my father wanted from a man
Who had it, and would lend it, over there.
The morning had been clear. But on the top
The cloud came down as cloud comes down up there,
Not falling, but as if the hill had breathed
And I was in the breath of it. The cairns
Went first, and then the path, and then my feet;
And I stood still, as I was taught to do,
And waited for a wind to take it off.

There was no wind. There was no sound at all
But what the water made in gills unseen
On every side of me, and once a sheep,
Somewhere, and then no more. And then a voice:
A woman's voice, that called a name — I will not
Set down the name; it was a common one,
And there is one who bears it in each dale —
And called it, and was silent, and then called;
Not loud, as one would call a dog, or call
Across a field to someone at the hay,
But as one sets a candle in a window.
And then nothing. And then the name again.

I went towards it by the sound, and by
The falling of the ground, and found her there
Upon a stone beside the track, a shawl
About her, beaded with the mist, as I
Was beaded, and her hands upon her knees.
She looked at me as if she had expected
Someone, and it did not much matter who.
Her man had gone at first light to the tops
To gather in, for there was weather coming;
And the cloud had come instead, and he was out
Somewhere above, with the dog and with the sheep,
And would not know which way the house was. So
She had come up as far as she could come,
To give him something he could walk towards.

She told me this as plainly as I tell it,
And turned her face up to the fell, and called.
And I sat down beside her, as a boy
Will sit, not knowing what else he should do,
And held my tongue, and listened as she listened.

How long we sat I cannot tell. The cloud
Went by us, close enough to touch, in threads,
Like wool when it is drawn out for the wheel.
And every while she called; and every while
The fell gave nothing back; but once it gave
Her own voice back to her, off some near crag,
A little changed; and she did not call again
Until that other voice had quite gone by.

And then, so faint I took it for the beck,
An answer. Not a name: a single sound,
Such as a man will make to say, I hear.
And she stood up, and went into the cloud
Towards it, and did not look back at me;
And I did not go after her. I went
Upon my errand, down into the clear,
And fetched the book (what book it was, I could not
Tell you now), and never learned their names,
Nor which farm was their farm, nor if I passed it
Upon the way home, when the day was fair
And the whole dale lay open to the sky.

She will be old by now, or dead; and he,
Whatever word it was he called. And yet
When the cloud settles on the tops, and the dale
Goes out like a blown candle, and the gills
Are all that can be heard, I listen for her;
And for a moment, sometimes, I can hear.

The Hiring

The hiring was at Whitsuntide.
The lads stood out along the street
With straws stuck in their hats, and tried
By farmers' eyes from head to feet.

The lasses by the churchyard wall
Stood quieter, and stood in rows;
And one of them was very small,
And wore her mother's Sunday clothes,

Let down at hem, and taken in.
She told me, for I asked her, how
She had walked twelve miles; she could spin,
And bake, and churn, and milk a cow;

That there were three at home below
Herself, and that the farm was small;
And she was glad enough to go
If she could be took in at all.

The farmers came along, and passed;
One stopped, and asked her age, and eyed
Her arms, and asked her, at the last,
Could she lift pans? and turned aside.

The noon went over, and the shade
Came off the wall; and one by one
The others found a place, and made
Their bargain, and their day was done.

At last a woman, grey and lame,
Came by, and stopped her pony-cart,
And looked at her, and asked her name,
And said it over, as by heart;

And held a shilling down, to seal
The bargain until Martinmas.
The child climbed up beside the wheel;
I stood aside to let them pass,

And watched them up the hill-road go
Into the evening and the west.
She never once looked back, although
I saw her hand shut at her breast.

On Letters Cut in a Stone beside a Beck

Two letters and a year, cut in the stone
Beside the beck with a knife's point; the look
Of them is a child's work: where the blade shook,
The moss has entered, and made them its own.
These many winters they have lain alone
Under the spray; the floods that tore and took
The footbridge twice have spared them, as a book
Is spared, sometimes, when all the house is gone.
I cannot tell whose hand. It may be mine;
I cut such things, and have forgotten where;
The letters fit, and do not fit, my name.
And so I trace them over, line by line,
And the beck talks, and there is no one there
To say which of us two it was that came.

Lines Written in a Room Without a Prospect

This room looks out on nothing that I know.
There is no fell beyond it, and no beck
Below it; I may sit as still as stone
And hear no water; and the light that comes
Comes evenly, as if it had no east.
And yet tonight they have been with me all:
The cart, the mare, the old man's lowered voice;
The keeper of the toll-bar at her chain;
The frozen force; the wren's small door; the bird
Above the market; and the woman's call
Set out upon the cloud; the child who held
Her shilling shut; the letters by the beck.
They came unbidden, as such guests will come,
At no one's asking, and they found me in.

And I have asked them, as a man might ask
A traveller who has come in late and wet,
How far he came, and by what road, and when;
And they have no more answer than the cloud.
I cannot say, as other men can say,
I stood upon that spot, upon that day.
There is no day. There is the coming back.

And it may be that this was always so:
That he who stood among the stones, the wind
Upon him and the water at his feet,
Had not, then, what he had in after years
Beside a fire, alone; that what the field
Gave him was lent, not given; and the gift
Came long years after, in a room like this,
In quiet, when the field was far away.
If that is so, then I am not so poor
As I had feared, who sit where no hill is;
The room was where it happened, even then.

And now, as if to try me, comes the sound
I said I could not hear: not water, no,
A man's voice, low, before a frightened mare,
Speaking a wheel down, inches at a time,
Out of the air, on to the solid earth.

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum Nōnās Octōbrēs (2 October 2026), ā Guilielmō Wordsworthō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

William Wordsworth, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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