Poetry and Walking

Michael Dennis Browne

My interest in the connection between poetry and walking began in a British high school over forty years ago with William Wordsworth, whom my teachers read to us with great relish, and the subject has become of interest to me as a poet in ways I could never have anticipated back then. I remain grateful for my first contact with Wordsworth in general—with the Lyrical Ballads, The Prelude, the “Immortality Ode,” with “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey.” On a family vacation in the Wye Valley a dozen years ago, my brother Peter and I went walking the river path at dawn, upstream from the Abbey. We saw swans drifting under pale strands of mist and, on the opposite bank of the river, two young horses thundering up and down, up and down, out of the sheer joy of running, as it seemed to us.
    Walking played a large part both in Wordsworth’s life and in his compositional process: he relied on it, as I in my own way have come to do. According to his sister Dorothy, William walked out “every morning, generally alone, and brings in a large treat almost every time he goes out.” By “treat” she means, of course, lines of poetry. Thomas De Quincey estimated that Wordsworth, by the time he was sixty-five, had walked close to 180,000 miles! And in Henry David Thoreau’s essay on walking, one finds this anecdote: a traveler, arriving at the house while Wordsworth was Out, asked the poet’s servant to show him her master’s study, only to receive this reply: “Here is his library, but his study is out of doors.”
    Another major influence on me was A. E. Housman, author of the impeccably melancholy A Shropshire Lad. “Loveliest of Trees,” a particularly well-loved poem, ends with the poet’s resolve to go about the woodlands and “see the cherry hung with snow,” and the “going” is, of course, on foot. But it is a piece of prose by Housman, a section of his famous lecture “The Name and Nature of Poetry,” which has been especially helpful to me in thinking about the relationship between poetry and walking.
    In this clear, quirky piece, Housman, arguably the greatest classical scholar of his time in England, describes poetry as “more physical than intellectual” and says that he tries not to think of poetry while shaving because if he does, his skin bristles and the razor “ceases to act.” He then gives this accounting of his poetic process, and while I am mindful of D. H. Lawrence’s admonition to “trust the tale, not the teller,” I have always found this little telling of Housman’s convincing:

    Having drunk a pint of beer at luncheon—beer is a sedative to the brain, and my afternoons are the least intellectual portion of my life—I would go out for a walk of two or three hours. As I went along, thinking of nothing in particular, only looking at things around me and following the progress of the seasons, there would flow into my mind, with sudden and unaccountable emotion, sometimes a line or two of verse, sometimes a whole stanza at once, accompanied, not preceded, by a vague notion of the poem which they were destined to form part of. Then there would usually be a lull of an hour or so, then perhaps the spring would bubble up again. I say bubble up, because, so far as I could make out, the source of the suggestions thus proffered to the brain was an abyss which I have already had occasion to mention, the pit of the stomach. When I got home I wrote them down, leaving gaps, and hoping that further inspiration might be forthcoming another day. Sometimes it was, if I took my walks in a receptive and expectant frame of mind; but sometimes the poem had to be taken in hand and completed by the brain, which was apt to be a matter of trouble and anxiety, involving trial and disappointment, and sometimes ending in failure. I happen to remember distinctly the genesis of the piece which stands last in my first volume. Two of the stanzas, I do not say which, came into my head, just as they are printed, while I was crossing the corner of Hampstead Heath between Spaniard’s Inn and the footpath to Temple Fortune. A third stanza came with a little coaxing after tea. One more was needed, but it did not come: I had to turn to and compose it myself, and that was a laborious business. I wrote it thirteen times, and it was more than a twelvemonth before I got it right.

Many elements of this rich paragraph are worthy of exploration, but I will confine myself to two of them—firstly, the “looking at things around me and following the progress of the seasons” and, secondly, “there would flow into my mind, with sudden and unaccountable emotion, sometimes a line or two of verse, sometimes a whole stanza at once”—which I believe have something to do with the rhythms aroused by walking.
    For Housman, the looking, the thinking of nothing in particular, precedes the appearance of the lines of poetry. When he is able to pay attention to the immediate surroundings, when the anxiety engendered by leaping about between thoughts of past and present and future is gone—or has, at the least, subsided—when he is able to be present, mindful, then there is more room than usual within his relatively emptied consciousness for all the visual (and other sensory) particulars that present themselves to the walker.
    Mary Oliver, a contemporary American poet, has some thoughts on this subject. “How important it is to walk along,” she writes in her poem “Yes! No!,” “not in haste but slowly, looking at everything and calling out / Yes! No!” In an interview, she says:

    I take walks. Walks work for me. I enter some arena that is neither conscious nor unconscious. It’s a joke here in town: I take a walk and I’m found standing still somewhere. This is not a walk to arrive; this is a walk that’s part of a process.

Earlier in the century, Eleanor Farj eon describes walking with Edward Thomas, an English poet known for his influence on, and walks with, Robert Frost:

    To walk with Edward Thomas in any countryside was to see, hear, smell and know it with fresh senses. He was as alert to what was happening in and on the earth and the air above it as an animal in the grass or a bird on a tree. Just as certain friends who share their thoughts with you will sharpen your thinking, he had the effect, when you took the road together, of quickening your seeing and hearing through his own keen eyes and ears. You would not walk that road again as you did before. You would know it in a new way.

Farjeon tells of a walk in Sussex with Edward Thomas and D. H. Lawrence, himself one of the great poets of the century:

    At that time I walked with the long lope that matched Edward’s negligent stride. He covered ground fast without any appearance of hurry. It was too fast for Lawrence, who soon said, “I must teach you to walk like a tramp. When you are going to walk all day you must learn to amble and rest every mile or so Lawrence was in his angelic, child–like mood. .. . Our talk that day seldom touched on the things that irked him unendurably. In one of the deep bottoms, where the whitebeams looked like trees in silver blossom, he cried, “We must be springlike!” and broke green branches and stuck them round our hats.

I like to think of the often testy Bert Lawrence in an “angelic, child–like mood.” How much credit for that, I wonder, can one assign to the company, how much to the walking, how much to the whitebeams?
    All around, as one walks, are the inscapes and instresses, as Gerard Manley Hopkins calls them, of the natural or the urban world (to make what I know is a crude distinction). For my own part, if I can be not crammed with thinking, and set out in the kind of “receptive and expectant frame of mind” that Housman speaks of, and if walking can contribute to the further emptying out of the kind of mental chatter with which we constantly interpret the world to ourselves, then, in the unhierarchical nature of things observed, anything at all can make an impression, can initiate an image, a rhythm, a phrase; can propose a theme, a pattern. One does not look for these things—looking being a good in itself—but rather lets the things around become endlessly suggestive to the imagination.
    I often think of John Keats’s sentence, from a letter: “And if a sparrow come before my window, I take part in its existence and peck about at the gravel.” If one substitutes “eyes” for “window,” then here is a fair example of what can happen when one is on foot, moving along the ground, well grounded in a motioned way. One’s response is by no means always empathetic; sometimes the revelation is simply of the complete otherness of things, and in this regard Lawrence’s “I didn’t know him” often occurs to me, though this was said of a big pike, and from a small boat, not on foot, on land. “He was born in front of my sunrise,” Lawrence goes on. “And I, a many–fingered horror of daylight to him, have made him die.”
    And it is very real, walking, real time over real ground, and with everything around being honest in what it is—everything just, after all, merely and miraculously being—a sparrow, a tree, a daffodil, a wheelbarrow—this is no place or time for dissembling. Nor is it a place or time for favoring the human over the nonhuman: walking, I experience myself not as owner or appropriator of what I am seeing, but as merely one more example of consciousness in the landscape. The things I am among and pass by—the species, the tribes, the varieties, the variations—remind me continually of the extraordinary fertility and otherness of the contents of the natural and the humanly created worlds. And as a walker I am one such thing—only, in this case, a walking thing. Looking, like the walking that induces and enhances it, is a great leveler.
    A poem is a sequence of imaginative decisions. What the walker–writer receives is, in its essence, sequential. The looking in no way ties me to a consistent, literal, linked descriptiveness or to any particular kind of poem or writing. But just as it helps to have a good hard surface if one has a mind to bounce something, sometimes *he kind of relaxed, attentive observing that takes place during a walk can generate elaborate associations that take the imagination far from the literal point of departure. This interaction can also generate a greater imaginative intimacy between the observed and the invented (again, crude distinctions). I like what Francis Ponge said once of images: “An image should depart from its object to show how the mind has kindled it, but it should also resemble it.” Pablo Neruda’s elemental odes might be one example of the kind of intimacy that can be achieved between—that radiates from—the two modes of seeing.
    According to Anne Wallace, author of a recent book on walking and nineteenth–century poetry, particularly the poetry of Wordsworth, there seem to be no real histories of walking—it has been thought to be too ordinary an activity, and its immense popularity is relatively recent. There is also a frequent tendency, Wallace says, to “fall up,” to neglect the process itself by dephysicalizing walking into analogy (life–as–journey). But now the books on walking and literature begin to appear. Wallace, in one of the first of them, makes an ingenious analogy; she sees Wordsworth’s walking and his walking poetry as

    an extension of the Virgilian georgic accomplished by placing the walker in the ideological space vacated by the farmer. The result, which I call “peripatetic,” represents excursive walking as a cultivating labor capable of renovating both the individual and his society by recollecting and expressing past value.

This is from a chapter called “Walking Where the Sower Dwelt.” Earlier in the book, Wallace quotes some of the many claims made for the general worth of walking, among them Patricia Edwards Bleyle’s notion of walking as a kind of “cure”—with its “sustained and regular rhythm of solitary movement through the countryside”—and John Elder’s notion that “The landscape and the imagination may be united through the process of walking,” in which “walking becomes an emblem of wholeness, comprehending both the person’s conscious steps and pauses and the path beneath his rising and falling feet.”


THE PHRASE “RISING AND FALLING FEET” inevitably makes me think of lambs and trochees, and of Oliver Wendell Holmes’s description of walking as “a perpetual falling with a perpetual self–recovery” (trochees first for him), and it brings me to the large topic of the effect of walking rhythms upon the poet and its possible generating of the “sudden and unaccountable emotion” of which Housman speaks. The walking itself is, to put it plainly, pedestrian—syllabic, isochronous (equal time: left right, left right). One’s stride has, in its mechanical way, no metrical mercy: it lays down a very basic rhythm track—as in, for example, the cadences of marching Marines. This is quite different from the traditional poetic feet that we have inherited in English from quantitative classical prosody and modified into accentual–syllabic, to say nothing of the cadences of free verse. Classical quantitative verse is governed by the length of the syllables, and if one walked according to those ancient measures, one would be doing the fox trot, or something akin to it: slow, slow, quick, quick, slow. There’s nothing to stop anyone from doing that (best to pick a quiet road, perhaps), but I am suggesting that the lowest of the layers of rhythms I experience when walking, that of the feet themselves, is, in its regularity, at best an indirect, if powerful, influence on the writing it provokes and enhances. Walking itself is metronomic—and we compose, as Ezra Pound says, by the cadence of the musical phrase, not the metronomic.
    In languages other than English, it is possible that the consequences of the walking rhythm may be very different and somewhat more direct. When Osip Mandeistam writes of Dante that

    both the Inferno and, in particular, the Purgatorio glorify the human gait, the measure and rhythm of walking, the footstep and its form. The step, linked with breathing and saturated with thought, Dante understood as the beginning of prosody. . . the metrical foot is the inhalation and exhalation of the step,

and when Robert Bly says that Antonio Machado’s “poetry secretes in itself the rhythm of the walker,” it may be that such claims apply more directly to poets writing out of a syllabic tradition, itself derived from the original classical quantitative meter, than to someone like myself whose metrical home base, the original Anglo–Saxon meter, is accentual, where the syllables can be allowed to run wild between accents, irrespective of duration. Spanish, as I understand it, observes stress and syllable as a unit of measure in poetry, but that challenging complication lies beyond the boundaries of my present thinking.
    The rhythm of walking, then, as I experience it in all its syllabic regularity, grounds what goes on rhythmically above it and acts in some sort of subliminal consort with it. There is a symbiosis. Leaving aside yet another vast matter, that of brain waves, one can say that the primary rhythms above the feet are those of the heart and of the breath.
    The heartbeat speeds up with exercise, but its basic rhythm is iambic— lub DUB. The diastolic lub is the flowing (inhalation) of the fresh blood into the left atrium from the lungs and into the right atrium from the whole body; the systolic DUB is the contraction of the heart muscle and the exhalation of blood from the ventricles. As in breathing, the inhalation period tends to be longer than the exhalation and, in this regard, the heart rhythm could conceivably be thought of as anapestic—xx/—if one thinks merely in terms of duration (there is no question of where the intensity of stress occurs—in the second sound, the DUB). On a recent walk, I counted a hundred and ten steps to the minute and wondered if that rate might conceivably be either in synchronization with, or counterpoint to, my heartbeat, which might just be a hundred and ten also. Not being a physiologist, I do not know the answer to my speculation, and I do not need to know, but I am aware of many possible permutations of rhythm, all of which the walker experiences subliminally, which the act of walking sets in motion.
    To add to the syllabics of walking and the iambics of the heartbeat, there is the breathing above it. The breathing seems to me to be quantitative in a rhythmical, not a metrical, sense—there are no feet in the lungs. By that I mean, simply, long or short. In meditative circumstances, say, breathing can be more under our control than the heartbeat, though never wholly so. But during walking, the exhalation period, as with the heartbeat, is both a briefer and more emphatic experience than the inhalation period. It is possible to center on one’s breathing while walking, and even to do a specific walking meditation, but I am focusing on processes generally thought of as autonomous—that is, not under our physiological governance.
    Walking, I am polyrhythmical, an intricate, self–enclosed world. Human beings are already essentially rhythmical creatures, but in motion, that intrinsic rhythmical nature is now intensified and enhanced into a highly complex and varied orchestration. The landscapes of whatever kind I walk through— the species, the tribes, the varieties, the variations—surround me with their rhythms (aural, visual, olfactory, among others), and I find myself better tuned than usual—more opened, in my rhythmically charged walking state, to receive them, to let them in, to be affected by them. In this collaborative circumstance, the two worlds, human and nonhuman, engage with an unaccustomed intimacy—one possible reason for Housman’s “sudden and unaccountable emotion” and for the appearance of “sometimes a line or two of verse, sometimes a whole stanza at once.” This constitutes a marrying of rhythms in which, if one is in “a receptive and expectant frame of mind,” the body, with its often neglected energies realerted and rereleased by the act of walking, participates, so that the walker consists of a matrix of rhythms composed of body, mind, and physical surroundings (ongoing crude distinctions).
    This puts the intellect in its place. This says that the indispensable intellect is not the primary agent in the writing of poetry. This reminds us that “verse,” meaning “to turn,” has its origins in sacred dance, and that the poem is, like the body itself, a rhythmical world. This says, with Housman, the scholar of classical literature, that poetry is “more physical than intellectual.” Walking might be said to compensate for habitual and excessive thinkiness, for incessant cerebration; it might put the walker more fully back in the body, a body moving across ground that seems inert .but is actually in motion, beginning at the molecular level.
    It is possible for me to go months between poems, for all the thoughts and feelings and opinions and experiences that I have during that time. I think what is often missing is an initiating rhythm, a suggestive rhythmical catalyst, which enables me to gather all the disparate elements together into the matrix of the poem. To walk is to invite the body into a complex of intimate relationships in which thinking, feeling, and the body’s own intrinsically rhythmical nature harmonize with the landscape through which it moves and in which it lives—and that it too often disregards.
    There is never a guarantee of imaginative outcome in the act of walking, and it would be gruesome and self–conscious to see everything as grist, as potential “material”; this would be to cheapen the innate value both of looking and of walking. In recent years I have taken to walking with a little tape recorder handy, and into this I murmur, sometimes to the amusement or curiosity of neighbors or passers–by, whatever occurs to me, much of it occasioned by looking. I have come to rely on this as one main method of composition— something which would have astonished the younger poet I once was—but the primary experience remains my encounter with the immediate surroundings, what the day, moment by moment, is bringing me. I walk to walk: the act itself is of intrinsic value, and the words, if they happen to arrive, are in the nature of a gift—a gift I had not consciously anticipated to receive.
    Just as I do not know what triggered D. H. Lawrence’s benign and inspired mood during his walk with Eleanor Farjeon and Edward Thomas—the company, the walking, or the whitebeams—so I do not feel able to say, finally, which of the rhythms involved in walking is the chief begetter of whatever poetry might occur. And, to say it again, I do not need to know. Instead, I set out as a walker and then rely on what happens. A. Alvarez has described Lawrence’s poetry as a series of “improvisations at the full pitch of his intelligence.” It is to just such a pitch that I believe walking brings the body, a pitch of rhythmical intelligence, and in this condition the improvisations are sometimes known to begin. May they continue.

Michael Dennis Browne has taught at the University of Minnesota since 1971. His most recent book, Selected Poems 1965-1995, was published by Carnegie Mellon University Press.

“Poetry and Walking” appears in our Winter 1998 issue.