The Isle of Wight
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Edward Thomas
Edward Thomas was born near Uxbridge in 1943 and grew up mainly in Hackney, east London in the 1950s. His teaching career took him to cental Africa and the Middle East. Early retirement from the profession enabled him to concentrate on writing. Along with authorship of half a dozen books, he has contributed regular columns to several journals.
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The Isle of Wight - Edward Thomas
IMPRESSIONS AND MEMORIES
In the year 1781 an anonymous writer published a poem on the Isle of Wight in three cantos. He was one of the discoverers of the isle, and many will envy him his panting heart if not his pen when he wrote:
Now wafted slowly by the indented shore
With panting heart the Needles we explore.
Somehow the words suggest that the panting heart might be impaled upon the Needles—but no matter; it is quite evident to the least historic mind that the poet had never seen a picture of the rocks on a postcard or above the seat of a railway carriage. To-day everyone is in search of something to cause the heart to pant, but except in climbing a steep hill it is rarely found. Least of all, perhaps, is it likely to be found in the celebrated places of the earth. Thus the picture in the railway carriage often repels, even by its beauty, the beholder whom it is meant to attract. He makes a vow never to see Bedruthan steps or the eternal dog on Padstow Quay; and then not long afterwards he happens to be at the very place and is startled by its resemblance to the coloured photograph and delighted to see by how much it is superior. The Isle of Wight contains the most-advertised of beauties, so that it might be supposed difficult to see the beauty for the praise. It is under the further disadvantageous advantage of being very easily approached and traversed. A man can see everything that he is expected to see in a Bath chair or in dancing slippers; it is all as easy as lighting a bought cigarette. The only inconveniences are the bad and expensive railways, and the other people. Conveniences crowd out joy. Only a driven reporter would now write of Cowes in the terms that rushed from the heart in 1781:
Here Europe’s terror and Britannia’s pride,
The world’s great terror, can with safety ride;
Here George’s thunder unprovoked may sleep,
Rock’d by the swellings of the subject deep;
On thy soft bosom peace may here repose,
Whilst France and whirlwind are in vain its foes.
Perhaps only a lodging-house keeper, and that a novice, could recite without more than one blush the words:
See ruddy health with naked bosom stand,
On yonder cliff, and wave the vigorous hand,
Above the banks with florid cheeks that glow,
Pointing triumphant at the tide below;
The pregnant tide with healing power replete,
Where health, where vigour, and where pleasure meet:
Here ocean’s breath comes mingled with the breeze,
And drives far off the bloated fiend, disease;
Here ocean’s balm the sinking heart delights,
And drooping Britain to the shore invites . . .
No more to foreign baths shall Britain roam,
But plunge at Cowes, and find rich health at home.
The fact is that these early discoverers ate the gingerbread and left us the gilt. They found beauty and we have to be content with scenery and fresh air; and scenery alone provides the thinnest of all the pleasures known to mankind. Fortunately there is no such thing as scenery alone
. Even to the most stupid or jaded a hillside, a cluster of trees above a lawn, a spread of sea beyond cliffs, is never merely a view. We cannot see with our eyes alone, even if we would. It is most sad when we see but cannot feel
that something is fair, but the sadness itself comes often to our relief; it may be what is labelled and condemned as morbid to wish always to see the world as vividly as Marlow in Mr. Joseph Conrad’s Youth
saw the east for the first time—from a little boat in which he had escaped out of a burning ship and rowed to exhaustion, to awake at dawn and see looking down at him from the jetty an Eastern crowd, and the fronds of palm trees standing still against heavens that had never before looked so high.
Keats was one of the discoverers. He came first in April, 1817, and stayed at Carisbrooke, or rather at New Village, between Carisbrooke and Newport. He was inclined to think the place already threatened, because, going from Cowes to Newport, he saw the barracks, which disgusted him extremely with the Government for placing such a nest of debauchery in so beautiful a place
. A man in his coach told him that the place had in