“The last green field that Lucy’s eyes survey’d” – Wordsworth’s Lucy poems and the Calderdale connection

Lovers of poetry will be familiar with William Wordsworth, and with at least fragments if not the entirety of his five “Lucy Poems” and the poem Lucy Gray. But not all of Wordsworth’s inspiration was taken from the Lake District, North Yorkshire, and Cumbria – the initial inspiration for these six poems, in particular, has a much more immediate relevance to our area.

View from Sterne Bridge, Weaver To Web (date unknown)

The Lucy poems are a series of six poems written between 1798 and 1801, some very short and others longer, with each poem’s narrator’s loss of Lucy (either as a child or grown woman) symbolised in different ways. Lucy herself is not merely a fictional concept but was, supposedly, a real child who died at some point in the 1700s. There is little in the record about this inspiration that is solidly able to be proven, but the sources agree that it was his sister Dorothy’s time spent in Norland and Triangle that brought the tale to his attention.

Halifax Courier, 28th October 1932

Dorothy Wordsworth was William’s main inspiration and closest confidante and for a time in her youth was a resident of Hipperholme and Ryburn. Following their mother’s death in 1778 she went to live with an aunt in Halifax at the age of six and attended boarding school and later a day school in the area. Dorothy ended up living in Halifax for nine years and made many close friendships who she wrote letters to for the rest of her life, as detailed in W.B. Crump’s “Halifax Visitor’s Book vol. 2” which can be found in the 1938 Transactions of the Halifax Antiquarian Society. Crump quotes William as saying that Lucy Gray was based on a tale “told me by my sister, of a little girl who, not far from Halifax, was bewildered in a snow-storm’ and was found drowned in the canal”. William’s own quote, in its expanded version in his notes on the poem itself, reads: “Her footsteps were traced by her parents to the middle of the lock of a canal, and no other vestige of her, backward or forward, could be traced. The body however was found in the canal”. We wanted to see if we could find more information on this tale, and using a few other sources from within the Local Studies department some more of the story can be pieced together.

W.B. Trigg, in another Transactions article (this time in 1951), mentioned Sterne Mills near Norland and William and Dorothy’s walks to and from Norland. The area gains its name from Wood Hall, home of the Sterne family which included the author Lawrence Sterne himself. A very literary area, it would seem! Other sources give additional information about the inspiration for these poems, not just verification but also disagreements about the origin story. J.R. Turtin’s “Wordsworth in Yorkshire” published in 1890 states that:

“A contributor to Notes and Queries believes that the Mill-weir at Sterne Bridge, near Halifax, was the scene of Lucy Gray’s death. It is not improbable that the event occurred near to the place referred to, but I cannot wholly accept the supposition … for one reason: Sterne Mill Bridge crosses the River Calder, whereas, we are informed by Wordsworth, in his note to the poem, that the accident occurred in crossing ‘the lock of a canal’ … it may be that the circumstance occurred not far from this scene.”

Looking now at Lucy Gray itself, the longest and best known of the five poems, it’s up to us to try and work out what might be truth and what is embellishment within this part of the poem. This section of the poem details the event itself:

“The storm came on before its time, She wander’d up and down, And many a hill did Lucy climb But never reach’d the Town. The wretched Parents all that night Went shouting far and wide; But there was neither sound nor sight To serve them for a guide. At day-break on a hill they stood That overlook’d the Moor; And thence they saw the Bridge of Wood A furlong from their door. And now they homeward turn’d, and cry’d “In Heaven we all shall meet!” When in the snow the Mother spied The print of Lucy’s feet. Then downward from the steep hill’s edge They track’d the footmarks small; And through the broken hawthorn-hedge, And by the long stone-wall; And then an open field they cross’d, The marks were still the same; They track’d them on, nor ever lost, And to the Bridge they came. They follow’d from the snowy bank The footmarks, one by one, Into the middle of the plank, And further there were none.”

Sterne Bridge sits between Sowerby Bridge and Copley, crossing the Calder as mentioned above. The current bridge crosses at the original site of the bridge which existed in Dorothy and William’s time, although it is now a concrete bridge built to replace numerous earlier and less robust versions – we certainly cannot expect the plank of wood to still exist – and most who cross it while out on a walk probably have no idea that it, or at least its location, figures in a well-known work by one of Britain’s most celebrated poets.

Sterne Bridge, photo from geograph.org.uk (copyright Humphrey Bolton 2010)

So, is any of this true? The primary sources are silent; Dorothy did not write about the story in her letters to William or anyone else, and no older newspapers or firsthand accounts exist in the historical record of such an event prior to William’s mention of it in his notes on Lucy Gray. It’s the sort of story that we have to take on trust, but sometimes that makes it all the more intriguing. It certainly intrigued the Wordsworths.

If you want to read more about Dorothy’s childhood in Halifax, the two Transactions articles quoted in this post give far, far more detail of her experiences in the area and are generally an interesting look into life in Halifax in the late 1700s. William’s poems can, of course, be found pretty much anywhere. And lastly, if you go walking on Norland Moor any time soon, accept the challenge from the 1932 Halifax Courier article earlier in this post and see if you can verify the final two stanzas of Lucy Gray:

“Yet some maintain that to this day She is a living Child, That you may see sweet Lucy Gray Upon the lonesome Wild. O’er rough and smooth she trips along, And never looks behind; And sings a solitary song That whistles in the wind.”