If Bloomfield's poetry gives the lie to Wordsworth's fear (expressed in the Preface
to Lyrical Ballads) that mechanical labour corrupts, by its very repetitiveness, the taste of the labourer,
it nevertheless displays many of the same characteristics as Wordsworth's own verse—a
matter not of mutual influence but of similar responses to times in which an industrialising
culture left many people deracinated and yearning for a half-remembered place of origin—a
childhood land in which the power of capital had not yet disturbed the culture or
the consciousness. These similar responses included the organisation of verse according
to the work-rhythms of shepherds and labourers, the penning of rural tales based on
popular ballads and songs, and the addressing of poems to favourite landscapes. Not
surprisingly, Bloomfield was an early supporter of Wordsworth's poetry: he had read
'Tintern Abbey' by 1802; he was, by 1807 a poet steeped in the latest developments
in the loco-descriptive poetry that James Thomson and William Cowper had perfected
a few generations earlier.

Bloomfield took to the hills. When he climbed Box Hill, Surrey, in 1803, during a
solitary walking tour, it was the first time he had been in upland country, having
previously, like most of the labouring classes, been confined to the fields and the
shop where he worked: ‘Having been harrassd by too much thinking and too many trivial engagements, and an
employment that I shall never like, I determined that I would respire one mouthfull
of real country air if possible and I know at the same time that pollution of smoke
reaches ten miles round the Metropolis. I had heard much of Leithe Hills and of Box
Hill in the neighbourhood of Dorking. . . . Remember that I am no Welshman, therefore
to me these Hills are Cader Idris's and Snowdens.— (letter 106 of The Letters of Robert Bloomfield: to George Bloomfield, 17 April 1803)’ The tour put Bloomfield in the position of a Romantic for the first time: a solitary
walker travelling as a social, aesthetic and moral antidote to the effects of modern,
urban life upon him. It led to no published writing, only to private correspondence,
but it made him all the more eager to go west in 1807 when a tour of Wales was suggested
by his friend Mary Lloyd Baker of Uley in Gloucestershire.

Lloyd Baker, née Sharp, had written a fan-letter to Bloomfield in 1803. This led to a correspondence
and to Bloomfield's warm reception in Lloyd Baker's extended family-circle of sisters,
aunts and uncles, based near London and in Northamptonshire. The Sharps were radical
Whig gentry (Granville Sharp, the anti-slavery and anti-cruelty campaigner, was Lloyd Baker's uncle) who neither
wished to interfere in his publications nor make him recite verses in public. They
had no designs upon him, though he remained conscious of their difference in class,
power and education and knew that he could never reciprocate their invitations to
their houses. But Bloomfield enjoyed their attention and readily made his way in August
1807 to Uley, to take the tour in the company of Lloyd Baker, her husband the local landowner, and their friends Robert Bransby Cooper and his son and daughter (relatives of the radical surgeon Astley Cooper). Together,
the party then embarked on an elongated version of the already-popular tourist route:
they went by road from Uley to Ross, then by boat along the Wye, alighting at Tintern.

But it was the boat trip along the river that initially fascinated Bloomfield and
that led him into the spots celebrated by picturesque writers, not least Tintern Abbey.
Bloomfield's response to the famous ruin was a little different from Gilpin's and
Wordsworth's: he neither wished for a mallet to break some of the gables to make the
abbey more picturesque nor averted his gaze from the beggars and ironworks that clustered
around. Instead, moved too deeply to sit and sketch the arches as his companions did,
he 'gave vent to my feelings by singing for their amusement and my own the 104th Psalm'. The 104th Psalm thanks the Lord for creating the earth. In the King James' version
Bloomfield knew, it evokes pastoral valleys such as that in which Tintern stands:

He sendeth the springs into the valleys, which run among the hills.

They give drink to every beast of the field: the wild asses quench their thirst.

By them shall the fowls of the heaven have their habitation, which sing among the
branches.

He watereth the hills from his chambers: the earth is satisfied with the fruit of
thy works.

He causeth the grass to grow for the cattle, and herb for the service of man: that
he may bring forth food out of the earth.5

(Psalm 104:10-14)

Bloomfield declared of his performance 'though no "fretted vault" remains to harmonize
the sound, it soothed me into that state of mind which is most to be desired'. 'Fretted
vault' is a quotation from Gray's 'Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard': 'Where
thro' the long-drawn aisle and fretted vault / The pealing anthem swells the note
of praise' (lines 39-40). For Bloomfield, then, the pastoral valley and ruined church
call forth a poetic act of worship, poetry being the mode which he feels to be profound
enough to express his love of nature and its creator. This act, he knows, is over-determined:
he sees the abbey and imagines his Psalm-singing in relation to Gray's portrait of
the country church as a place where the act of commemoration acquires value. He is
self-consciously following in Gray's verse-steps, quietly claiming poetry as a deeper,
more pious, response to Tintern than the picturesque sketches that tourists were expected
to make.

Visiting the Wye as a labourer-poet taken-up by well-meaning patrons, and as a tourist
expected to sing for his tour, Bloomfield found himself in a new and precarious position.
Mostly, he enjoyed it, since, precisely because he had been tied to his trade in a
way gentlemen poets never were (even poor and radical ones like Wordsworth and Coleridge),
he had never before travelled west of London. Nonetheless, his new and, to him, anomalous
position, a visitor rather than rather a Londoner recollecting his native Suffolk,
led him to commence an innovative kind of work—a conventional tour poem (The Banks of Wye (1811)) that was to accompany a prose guide with accompanying sketches made at picturesque
spots. As such, the project, like Wordsworth's Description of the Scenery of the Lakes (1811) was a new, hybrid, genre, the tour guidebook as rewritten by the poet to feature
his own verse and illustrations. The effect was to represent the region as a place
of aesthetic value and antiquarian interest: footnotes gave historical information
about ruined castles and Roman forts. Bloomfield hoped to take advantage of his popularity
as a topographical poet and of the Wye's renown as a picturesque location, building
on the success of The Farmer's Boy, which featured many engravings of rural scenes, by feeding the public's ever-increasing
desire for lavishly illustrated books.

Bloomfield began the making of his Wye-book while still basking in the warmth of the
new experience and the attention paid him by the gentlewomen of the party. His letters
show him taking his new roles as artist and tour guide very seriously, seeking sketches
and verse from Mary Lloyd Baker and promising her a private view of his work: ‘But of all this I will write more in due time. And you will here probably ask yourself,
what does he mean by due time? Why I mean that when you have fulfilld your promise, and sent me your Wye Scetches to copy, and the said copying is done. I mean
to have the pleasure of exhibiting to you and them my whole triple-page'd Journal,
Drawings, prose, and rhime.’ ‘Since my return I have spent an evening at Fulham, very delightfully. Mr and Mrs
Owen, and a Sweedish Gentleman, the Baron De Gear... The Sweed talkd of the scenery of the Baltic, Mr O talk'd of the Alps, and of
the passage of mount St Gotherd &c, —and I—What could I talk about?—The Wye, to be sure! (letter 216 of The Letters of Robert Bloomfield: to Mary Lloyd Baker, 2-5 October 1807)’ Once he received the sketches, Bloomfield set about recreating the tour on paper:

I have succeeded beyond the former estimate of my own self approving vanity, and the
proof that I posess that latter article, is my telling you so. They are all done by
Candle light! These long winter evenings are all in my favour, and you may figure
to yourself the solid oak of my old Table bearing on his back half the Castles in
Wales, besides my two elbows, and all the paraphernalia of drawing! Remember that
though I am in general pleased with my own performances I percieve that some of my
trees are amazingly like a pile of Cheshire Cheeses. And one in particular, I was
hamper'd with, it seem'd to have a determination to resemble a large Oil Jar with
a handle, but I cut the handle off, and, it became as good a tree as the rest, aye
and as good as some that I have seen at Sadler's Wells. (letter 217 of The Letters of Robert Bloomfield: to T. J. Lloyd Baker, 18 November 1807)

Mildly flirtatious letters of this kind were Bloomfield's way of prolonging a relationship
that was valuable to him: Lloyd Baker's admiration, and that of her sisters and aunt, gave him confidence without intimidating
him (as the patronage of noblemen tended to do). He flourished in a feminine circle,
enjoying being humorous for their benefit, unbuttoning as he could not to others outside
his class, but knowing, all the same, that his value to these gentlewomen depended
upon his amusing them. He was, nonetheless, careful to show the ladies' powerful husbands
that he needed their help too, consulting Thomas Lloyd Baker and his friend Robert Bransby Cooper about histories of Monmouthshire in preparation of the prose section of the book.
As a result, he made frequent use of Coxe's An Historical Tour in Monmouthshire, adding to both prose journal and verse tour historical notes that affiliated his
work to the antiquarian texts consulted by learned gentlemen.

Despite Bloomfield's diligent effort, his Wye-book never appeared in the intended
tripartite prose/poetry/picture format. Back in London, away from the Lloyd Baker/Sharp
circle, afflicted by financial difficulties and sinking into depression, he found
work slowing-up. It was not until February 1811, after many months' practice at turning
his rough sketches into finished drawings and much research into local history, that
he sent the Wye-book to his publishers, Vernor and Hood, only to hear that that they were now 'averse to the costly and fashionable stile
of publishing' and would produce only a smaller-scale volume with no more than four
illustrations (letter 256 of The Letters of Robert Bloomfield: to Mary Lloyd Baker, 16 January-2 February 1811). Their decision may have been an early indication of
the financial difficulties that would bankrupt the firm after Hood's death in 1811. At all events, it made the book they did publish in that year a far
less appealing production, containing only Bloomfield's Georgic verse and a few engravings
after his fellow-tourist Bransby Cooper's sketches. Nevertheless, The Banks of Wye, now more straightforwardly a poetry publication, was a substantial work, albeit
not one for which the public was looking from a poet they liked for his tales of village
life. Two centuries later, however, we can finally reconstitute the Wye-book that
Bloomfield originally prepared, by accompanying the 1811 poem with the prose journal
(transcribed from the manuscript), exhibiting the sketch- and scrap-book, restoring
deleted passages of the poem from manuscript, and investigating hitherto unpublished
letters.

The journal, as the facsimiles presented here show, was never simply a verbal document.
Bloomfield carefully interspersed his prose descriptions with a wealth of visual material,
surrounding it on the page and facing it too, so that writing is but one element of
a representation of the tour to which pictures and maps were also fundamental. In
this respect Bloomfield's Wye-book offers a glimpse of the practice, common especially
among gentlewomen, of compiling sketch- and scrap-books that included verse, drawings
and letters, reconstituting a place, an experience or a relationship on paper. It
is not, that is to say, the sketchbook of a professional artist who intended to work
his on-the-spot sketches into finished oils at a later date. Rather, it is a record
of the tour produced with an audience in mind – compiled to be shared after the event
with his fellow tourists, to aid them in recreating the tour, and the companionship
the tour offered, in memory. Even the sketches are social: Bloomfield includes his
own designs, in and around his prose, with his copies of original drawings made by
Robert Bransby Cooper and Mary Lloyd Baker and loaned to him after the party's return.
They represent his incorporation in a gentleman- (and woman-)ly tradition of amateur
art: Cooper and Lloyd Baker had received tuition in drawing—mastering perspective,
composition and shading—and Bloomfield's sketches showed them that he in turn had
learned from them.

By including maps in his Wye-book, Bloomfield showed he was keen to anchor the sketches
and the prose to places on a route. Like the published guidebooks, which began to
feature maps from the 1790s, he sought to locate the views in a graduated space that,
by virtue of its cartographic representation, he and others could reaccess virtually
(moreover, he included in the prose journal specific timings of arrival and departure
from each place visited: the tour would be relivable in memory because it was calibrated
spatially and temporally on paper). He pasted in small-scale engraved county maps
of Gloucestershire and Monmouthshire, but these offered little local detail. And so
he made his own map, a fold-out sheet he entitled 'Sketch of the River Wye, from Ross
to Chepstow'. Delineating the river in a strip-map, this marked the principal stopping
point and views: it was, in effect, a new kind of sketch map aimed at serving the
tourist rather than at giving an overall survey of an estate or county (it would have
been of no use to a land surveyor, a landowner or an army). As such it reflected a
change in mapping conventions produced by a change in the social use (and users) of
maps: in that other area of tourism, the Lake District, Peter Crosthwaite began in
1783 to sell linear maps of the main lakes to tourists who wanted to follow the shorelines
in search of picturesque views. The lake, like Bloomfield's river, was abstracted
from the country that surrounded it, its banks becoming the object of largescale (three
inches to the mile) cartographic focus. And the map now had for the first time an
openly aesthetic, rather than economic, aim — to record beauty spots rather than landholdings
or political boundaries.

Bloomfield's map remained in manuscript, part of the tripartite Wye-book that never
achieved publication. What he did publish. however, the verse Banks of Wye, defines
more directly and forcefully than ever before the new purpose of touring: not the
education of taste in rules of aesthetic judgement (as in Gilpin) but the mental restorative
that holiday-escape into natural beauty offered an urban middle-class otherwise chained
to the account-book and the office.

Wait not, (for reason's sake attend,)

Wait not in chains till times shall mend;

Till the clear voice, grown hoarse and gruff,

Cries, 'Now I'll go, I'm rich enough.'

Youth, and the prime of manhood, seize; 5

Steal ten days absence, ten days ease;

Bid ledgers from your minds depart;

Let mem'ry's treasures cheer the heart;

And when your children round you grow,

With opening charms and manly brow, 10

Talk of the Wye as some old dream,

Call it the wild, the wizard stream;

Sink in your broad arm-chair to rest,

And youth shall smile to see you bless'd.

(The Banks of Wye, book IV, lines 407-20)

Here the Wye is a consolation of age: taking a longer view than Wordsworth at Tintern,
Bloomfield sees the river, recreated virtually in memory and talk, as reviving, in
an otherwise sedentary figure, a younger and livelier self. It confers a blessed experience
of wildness that is also a token of masculinity: the father, defined by domesticity,
is cheered in himself and admired by his children because recollecting his experiences
of 'the wizard stream' conjures into being the 'manly brow' of his 'prime of manhood'.

Bloomfield is ambivalent about the picturesque. His Wye-book was to feature engravings
after his and his friends' sketches. His prose journal records them sketching at every
castle they visited. At Tintern, however, sketching was not a deep enough response
and, as he concludes his verse tour, he offers only faint praise of Gilpin. Artists
may learn from the Wye, he declares, but by encountering nature's forms and rhythms
rather than by applying artificial criteria and apparatus:

Artists, betimes your powers employ,

And take the pilgrimage of joy;

The eye of genius may behold

A thousand beauties here untold;

Rock, that defies the winter's storm;5

Wood, in its most imposing form,

That climbs the mountain, bows below,

Where deep th'unsullied waters flow.

Here Gilpin's eye, transported, scann'd

Views by no tricks of fancy plann'd; 10

Gray here, upon the stream reclined,

Stored with delight his ardent mind.

(The Banks of Wye, book IV, lines 421-32)

Gilpin is 'transported' when he looks at nature unguided by fancy or predetermined
ideas. Bloomfield's role model is, instead, the poet Gray, who absorbs delight by
letting his ardent mind repose on the water, as if in meditation.

As a beginning to a four-book landscape poem, the lines on Giant Scoop are highly
unorthodox, a versification of the tongue-in-cheek humour of Bloomfield's correspondence
with Lloyd Baker. They are playful, revealing the poet's enjoyment of his own ability to fictionalise,
to tell it like it's not—and in this they reflect the West Country's status as a charming
holiday place, an escape from Bloomfield's London cares and from his branding as a
Suffolk labourer poet. Yet for all that, they do concern themselves with labour, as
Bloomfield so often did: funny though they are, they show the giant working up a sweat
digging. Polished, knowing and displaying a flexible deployment of Samuel Butler's
Hudibrastic cocktail of octosyllabic couplets, phrasal verbs and casual diction, Bloomfield's
light verses still suggest, however jokily, that the country depends on backbreaking
toil—a point quietly made later in the poem when the tourists in their pleasure-boat
glide effortlessly past bent-backed gleaners in the fields. Bloomfield's West Country
was not a holiday-land for everyone.

As different from Wordsworth's 'Tintern Abbey' as they are from Gilpin's Observations, Bloomfield's lines on Scoop reveal a cultivated, accomplished, well-read poet entertaining
his patrons; they also suggest that he was worldly enough to know that the Cotswolds
were not, after all, the Alps and that, therefore, describing them in pious and solemn
terms would only lead to bathos. Nevertheless, getting the tone right was a vexing
matter for him, and as the tour became a more and more distant memory, and the flirtatious
feminine circle receded from his grasp, he worried about whether the opening was appropriate
for a piece intended for public consumption. Revealingly, it was when Mary Lloyd Baker wrote to him during the course of another West Country tour she was making (of Cheddar
Gorge) that, in the light of her intimate attention, he again became enthusiastic
about the lines, writing in reply ‘[t]he Cheddar Cliffs have taken up a nook in my heart, and imagination scratches
a picture of her own, like an old Hen in a garden.’ ‘I had taken a momentary dislike to Old Scoop, but you strengthen my original feeling
and I begin to think that He may be a personage not altogether to be ridiculed. I have a great mind to keep him alive. (letter 245 of The Letters of Robert Bloomfield: to Mary Lloyd Baker, 31 October-1 November 1809)’ In the end, The Banks of Wye, to its detriment, appeared without Scoop: the lines fell prey to Bloomfield's anxiety
(evident in the more sober main body of the poem) about his qualifications to write
in the style of a leisured gentleman—a position in which the trip put him for the
first time. He internalised the perceived doubts of his patrons, Capel Lofft and Thomas Park, literary gentlemen who edited poetry for magazines, and consulted other friends
too: it seems none of these men, arbiters of conventional taste, saw the opening as
serious enough. Effectively, as another letter to Mary reveals, Bloomfield's was too playful a discourse to meet male expectations about
the proper language for topographical poetry:

Since you saw or heard any part of my Journal, and I think I remember how far I had then proceeded in my amusement, much alteration has taken place in the plan
and divisions &c. As I advanced I began to conceive that it might even eventualy be
renderd fit for publication, and this perswasion set me about a thorough examination
and revision. I concieved that it was, owing to the careless and hasty manner of its
early composition, much too hudibrastic, and containd a vast deal of useless matter
which might give way to the superior graces of nature, or to unbridled fancy. I had
finished it, as I thought, according to this plan, last summer; and I had the joint
opinion of my then companions, Inskip, himself a poet, and a man of strong mind, and my host, Mr. Weston of Shefford, Beds, and as he has read and thought more than any man I ever found
in his station of life, and his age, and is an enthusiast in poetry, with a memory
truly astonishing considering his multifarious reading, I consider him highly capable
of detecting what were blemishes in a harum scarum story like mine,—We read it for
the purpose of criticizing closely, We all doubted the propriety of Giant Scoop in
the outset of the piece, yet all agreed that the ridiculous thought was not without
merit, only perhaps out of place. Previous to this I had shown it to Mr Rogers, author of 'The pleasures of memory', and he, even then, in its ruder state, said
that it would probably be well recieved if published, but that it was evident that
I had not taken the pains with it which might be taken. I then wrote the whole out
again with great emendations, in which state Mr. Lofft gave the opinion which I very barely stated to you. I took his hints and the others
in conjunction, and wrote the whole out again, still in the mending way with additions and curtailments, and in this new dress,
without the personage above mentioned, Scoop, I submited the piece to the calm, judicious,
and candid Mr Park of Hampstead (He had seen the giant long ago and said nothing in his praise, which
I know how to understand) He was decidedly of opinion that the thing would do me credit,
and at the same time pencil'd his doubts and remarks. With this encouragement I once
more wrote out the whole; gave the brat a name; and offer'd it to My Bookseller. I
know of nothing which can now retard its ultimate appearance before the world. (letter 256 of The Letters of Robert Bloomfield: to Mary Lloyd Baker, 16 January 1811)

Being new to the tour-poem and of inferior class to his readers, Bloomfield did not
dare to be facetious and mock the public's cultural expectations of such a book and
of the place it described. Abandoning his hudibrastic lines, he left out the most
characteristic and individual of his poetic voices, submitting to male critics rather
than reproduce in public the verse inspired by his chatty, female correspondents.
What was lost in this new excision from The Banks of Wye, however, was an idiosyncratic response to the West Country that remade the poetic
traditions in which that region had previously been compassed and that questioned
the conventional pieties of the gentlemanly tour. Without this response, and lacking
the prose journal and extensive illustrations intended for the tripartite publication,
The Banks of Wye was a slighter and less original book than first planned.

The abandonment of the tripartite Wye-book and the excision of Old Scoop revealed
that Bloomfield was unable to continue in a direction in which his writing took comic
flight away from his homeground. He was not helped by those arbiters of politeness
and propriety, the reviewers: 'the author's humour is generally very poor; and the
language of it too coarse even for his honesty of style' declared the Eclectic Review, while the Critical Review spoke of 'bathos' and 'vulgarity' and singled-out offending phrases. In the second
edition of the poem of 1813, perhaps in response to the reviewers' sniffiness about
the colloquialisms, Bloomfield revised in favour of more formal, serious and socially
conservative diction: thus he omitted a whimsical passage imagining a war between
earth and gods:

Celestial power with earthly mix'd;

Gods by the arrow's point transfix'd!

(III, 247-48)

He also added initial capitals to 'king' and 'heaven'. Elsewhere he redrafted to
clarify meaning but, in the process, made the verse more Latinate and Thomsonian,
as a topographical poem was expected to be (as a youth Bloomfield had been inspired
to write by reading The Seasons). Thus the lines 'When a dark thunder-storm had spread / Its terrors round the guilty
head' (II, 71-72 in the 1811 text) became, in 1813, 'A summer flood's resistless pow'r
/ Raised the grim ruin in an hour! / When that o'erwhelming tempest spread / Its terrors
round the guilty head'. All verbal revisions in the editions published (or prepared
for publication) in Bloomfield's lifetime are recorded as variants in the present
edition, the copytext for which is the 1811 first published version.

The revisions are regrettable because they tend to cloak the innovative, common speech
element of the poem in gentrified respectability. Bloomfield in fact understood better
than did the prissy reviewers for polite journals, as Wordsworth and Byron also did,
that a tour poem – whether the 'Epistle to Sir George Beaumont, Bart' or Don Juan — demanded informality, since it depended on the convention that it was a letter
home from a traveller. And this was still more the case in view of the fact that Bloomfield
was a commoner, a shoemaker rather than a lord, who aimed to be a man speaking to
men (and who, revealingly, admired the Wordsworth's colloquial 'The Idiot Boy'). Unlike
Wordsworth (himself scorned by reviewers for his adherence to common speech) and still
more unlike Byron, Bloomfield was dependent on powerful gentlemen who were his social
superiors. He could not ignore polite disapproval and so he pruned some of his colloquialisms
away. The published Banks of Wye of 1811 and 1813 suffered by this removal, the remaining comic slang seeming increasingly
out of place in a poem that mostly conformed to approved poetic diction.

Despite its often stilted verse, time after time the poem flares into life for the
space of a highly original passage. Bloomfield's sincerity to his own highly unusual
viewpoint —a labouring-class man accompanying gentlefolk on a tour that labourers
would never be able to take by themselves, let alone in such company—led him to see
and say things that escaped most other Wye tourists. There is, for example, a brilliant
meditation on the mind's relationship to place and time. Bloomfield had read and admired
Lyrical Ballads: his Wye poem may eschew the first-person self-analysis of Wordsworth's famous Tintern
lines, but it nevertheless also considers the effects on the reflective mind of recalling
a spot of natural beauty and human history. In climactic verses on ruined Raglan castle, once the last stronghold of the Royalists in the Civil War, Bloomfield first evokes
the triumph of nature over man's achievements, however violent and heroic they once
were:

Majestic Ragland! Harvests wave

Where thund'ring hosts their watch-word gave,

When cavaliers, with downcast eye,

Struck the last flag of loyalty:

Then, left by gallant Worc'ster's band, 5

To devastation's cruel hand

The beauteous fabric bow'd, fled all

The splendid hours of festival.

No smoke ascends; the busy hum

Is heard no more; no rolling drum, 10

No high-toned clarion sounds alarms,

No banner wakes the pride of arms;

But ivy, creeping year by year,

Of growth enormous, triumphs here.

Each dark festoon with pride upheaves 15

Its glossy wilderness of leaves

On sturdy limbs, that, clasping, bow

Broad o'er the turrets' utmost brow,

Encompassing, by strength alone,

In fret-work bars, the sliding stone, 20

That tells how years and storms prevail,

And spreads its dust upon the gale.

(Book III, lines 19-40)

The ivy embraces the stone; as the castle moulders, the plant prospers, until the
monuments of martial valour are encased in a 'wilderness of leaves' and the sounds
of human life give way to the stifling constriction of the creeper. These are sophisticated
verses that demonstrate how much could still be achieved in the Augustan rhyming couplet.
Partly this is a matter of allusion: Milton's serpent Satan is not far behind the
snake-like plant that 'with pride upheaves' itself at the tower's expense. It's also
a result of lexical vividness, rhetorical insistence and syntactical energy creating
urgency: Bloomfield pressures his reader to feel awed and threatened by a nature that,
in the figure of the ivy, represents the triumphant and vampiric power of death, supporting
itself on the works of mankind. Yet, encasing the crumbling masonry, the ivy also
configures a natural, growing memorial to a defunct human edifice. This is a post-Edenic
fallen world, where nature is both beautiful (as in the glossiness of the leaves)
and menacing because time, death and—in Miltonic terms—sin are fundamental to its
growth. It is a world, too, in which nature and humanity (here represented by historical
monuments to human deeds and achievements) are at odds.

It is now that Bloomfield ventures a meditation on time, history and nature that is
akin to Wordsworth's and that may represent his response to reading Lyrical Ballads:

The man who could unmoved survey

What ruin, piecemeal, sweeps away;

Works of the pow'rful and the brave,

All sleeping in the silent grave;

Unmoved reflect, that here were sung 5

Carols of joy, by beauty's tongue,

Is fit, where'er he deigns to roam,

And hardly fit—to stay at home.

Spent here in peace,—one solemn hour

('Midst legends of the Yellow Tower, 10

Truth and tradition's mingled stream,

Fear's start, and superstition's dream)

Is pregnant with a thousand joys,

That distance, place, nor time destroys;

That with exhaustless stores supply 15

Food for reflection till we die.

(Book III, lines 41-56)

'[O]ne solemn hour / . . . / Is pregnant with a thousand joys' is verbally close
to Wordsworth's 'One impulse from a vernal wood / May teach you more of man, / Of
moral evil and of good, / Than all the sages can' from 'The Tables Turned', although
for Bloomfield it is the encounter with nature's overwhelming of humanity's works,
rather than solely with its beauty, that makes visiting the spot so endlessly educative.
The surprising word here is 'joys': as in Wordsworth's 'Tintern Abbey' the visitor
unexpectedly derives joys from a scene that should, because it reveals the passing
of time, produce melancholy. This is, then, no simplistic sightseeing event, no mere
touristic picturesque, but a complex response that finds, as the paradoxical one/thousand
phrasing suggests, a plenum of emotions and thoughts from a brief encounter. These
emotions and thoughts are joys, despite the evidence of destruction that gives rise
to them, because they fertilise a human activity that turns out to be less vulnerable
to time than castles and towers are—the activity of reflection that vivifies the mind
and restores the past in memory and that, though it may die with us, survives, in
the form of 'legends' and tradition, as the stories, songs and poems that we make
and that others repeat after us. And these, implicitly, renew the 'carols of joy'
that long-dead denizens of the castle once sang with 'beauty's tongue'. This, of course,
is an implicit poetic; Bloomfield was adding another turn to the traditions, legends
and songs that allow us to redeem from oblivion the works of the past—and redeem ourselves
as consciousnesses destined for oblivion. Carolling joyfully in the poem, he retrieves
the songs of yore from the ivy's clutches. As a response to a Wye-tour this is as
profound, but not as self-foregrounding, as Wordsworth's in his 'Lines Composed a
few Miles above Tintern Abbey' to which it compares in its intimation of the ability
of the human mind to overcome time's depredations when that mind, fertilised by an
encounter with a temporally-shaped landscape, is prompted to reflect upon itself and
assert its power of song.

Profound though it is, Bloomfield's response to Raglan remains isolated, lost in a poem of occasional brilliance that was published without
its more original lines and without the prose journal and sketches that should have
accompanied it. Bloomfield missed a chance, owing to his booksellers' reluctance and
his own inhibiting consciousness of what was proper for a labourer-visitor writing
at the touring-gentry's behest. As a result it was easy to neglect the merits of his
Wye: literary criticism, although idealising a fellow nature-poet's imaginative response
to the Wye valley, damned the poem with faint praise. In the twentieth century, Bloomfield's
reputation dwindled to nothing. His multimedia Wye texts, now published for the first
time, show us both that this eclipse was not of his own making and that Wordsworth's
egotistical sublime was not the only way to bring into being a new and distinctive
response to landscape. The Wye, in Bloomfield's verse, prose and pictures, produced
an original, humane and at times profound contribution to the visual and literary
culture of the early nineteenth century.