Thursday, November 29, 2012

Wordsworth And A Windermere Boutique Hotel

By Steven Harrison


William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy did not live in great luxury but quite humble circumstances. They might not have enjoyed the luxury of a Windermere boutique hotel but the Romantic Movement in English poetry owes a great deal to the sights, scenes and sounds that surround such a place even to this day.

It may be due in part to the influence of writers like Wordsworth that the right to enjoy the countryside is an important part of English culture. There is hardly anything left that has not been man made but the country is quite like a carefully tended garden to which people have some access and in which they may escape temporarily from the ubiquitous surveillance cameras that afflict cities.

Wordsworth lived in the Lake District at a time when Industrialization was changing the face of the planet. Like an astronaut returning from space he saw a spiritual dimension in the unique quality of natural life on Earth. It is thought that he composed much of his poetry as he walked in the beautiful Lake District and that the rhythm of his steps can be felt in poems like, 'Daffodils'.

Greece and England are now two fairly insignificant places on the Globe but each has made an important contribution the the world order that is developing in the twenty-first century. The idea of democracy comes from Greece and a language that is used almost as much as Mandarin from the island of England.

Though Shakespeare and Wordsworth were Englishmen, English no longer belongs to England. The language is currently being shaped by users from America, India and China. World experts on Wordsworth are as likely to come from Australia as from England because there are only about sixty million native speakers of English in England and five hundred million in other countries.

At a Windermere boutique hotel tourists may enjoy the company of others from various parts of the world who are English experts. They will squeeze into small places like Dove Cottage and imagine the great writer setting out from there to breathe the spirit of the countryside that is sustained in part by his poetry.




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