We left the Coleridge Conference in Somerset early on Friday so that we could enjoy driving through the English countryside on our way to Dover. Our first destination was Canterbury. Byron and Polidori also passed through Canterbury on their way to Dover. The pilgrimage theme is strong: Chaucer's pilgrims were going to the shrine of Thomas Beckett at the Canterbury Cathedral, of course, and for Byron, his character Childe Harold is about to set forth again upon his pilgrimage.
The route we took, between London and Dover, is also described very dramatically by Dickens at the beginning of
A Tale of Two Cities.
We strolled around the cathedral complex and sat in on Evensong. Here are some photos:
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| Canterbury Cathedral |
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| A Forest of Pillars |
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| This spot marks the location of the shrine to Beckett, until it was destroyed by Henry VIII |
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| Pedagogy by Images |
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| Canterbury scene |
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We next drove to Dover and checked into this lovely hotel nicely situated between the white cliffs and the channel:
I like to think that it is the same hotel where Matthew Arnold stayed in 1866 when he wrote this wonderful poem of Victorian existential angst:
Dover Beach
The sea is calm tonight,
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Agean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Here are some photos, as I attempted to capture the view from our window, the dim gleam of the French coast, and the pebbles on the beach:
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| Come to the window, sweet is the night air! |
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on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone |
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the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling, |
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the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay |
This is also the location in Shakespeare's
King Lear, when Gloucester thinks he is leaping to his death over the cliffs:
Come on, sir; here's the place. Stand still. How fearful
And dizzy 'tis, to cast one's eyes so low!
The crows and choughs that wing the midway air
Show scarce so gross as beetles. Half way down
Hangs one that gathers samphire, dreadful trade!
Methinks he seems no bigger than his head.
The fishermen that walk upon the beach
Appear like mice; and yond tall anchoring bark,
Diminished to her cock; her cock, a buoy
Almost too small for sight. The murmuring surge
That on the unnumbered idle pebbles chafes
Cannot be heard so high. I'll look no more
Lest my brain turn, and the deficient sight
Topple down headlong.
In the morning I woke up early to go to the cemetery where the poet Charles Churchill is buried. Byron visited his grave in his 1816 trip, and I wanted to do the same:
And then we turned in our rental car, took a taxi to the ferry docks, and we were off to the continent!
