Wild Forms #poetry #dVerse

The mountains were wild forms, or monstrous shapes
which towered above the moonlit lakeside road
foreign to me as the stars above
which were obscured by streetlights in my town.
How I feared those dark foreboding heights!
And even in the day, the scree could send
you tumbling down the hillside like a doll:
it was enough to keep me for a time
sheltered from harm within the valley green
but as I grew courageous I began
to climb, and then you could not keep me down.
The broad realm of the sky was my playground
throughout my yearning teenage years until
the clamour of the ‘real world’ clouded in
and I forgot that heavenly realm above
where I once rambled solitary, fine
enchanted by untamed wild nature’s love.

Written for dVerse

Tonight, Laura is hosting Poetics, and she has asked us to:

Write a poem recalling some specific thing or things from the past
OR
 more generally about what evokes a memory or memories in you

• It can be recent, or as far back as childhood.
• It can be true or fictional
• It can incorporate persons, places or events/happenings
• It is NOT a mournful remembrance as in elegy!

For an extra challenge write it in the ten-syllable or blank verse line (to give the sensation of actual speech, engaging others).

I went for the extra challenge, taking inspiration from Wordsworth’s epic biographical poem, ‘The Prelude,’ in which he describes his childhood and youth spent in the Lake District, where I happened to spend much of my younger days. In Book 1 of this poem, he describes an incident from his youth when he went rowing upon Ullswater at night. After returning from this adventure, he describes how:

That spectacle, for many days, my brain
Work’d with a dim and undetermin’d sense
Of unknown modes of being; in my thoughts
There was a darkness, call it solitude,
Or blank desertion, no familiar shapes
Of hourly objects, images of trees,
Of sea or sky, no colours of green fields;
But huge and mighty Forms that do not live
Like living men mov’d slowly through the mind
By day and were the trouble of my dreams.

The idea of those ‘huge and mighty Forms’ gives me the shivers! The photo was taken at Wythburn close to Thirlmere this summer.