School Daze - Hiking England's Coast to Coast Way: Landscape, Laughter and Love - page 15

had thought of the Coast to Coast as an adventure to strengthen me, but it was turning out
to be something of a challenge to my equilibrium. At college, we had read Blake's “Songs
of Innocence and Experience,” simple poems contrasted with more disturbing ones, like his
famous “The Lamb” and “The Tyger,” but when it came to it, were the simple so simple,
the disturbing the only verses to disturb. And the work was illustrated in unsettling ways
too. The tiger from the well-known poem beginning, “Tyger tyger burning bright,” is pic-
tured almost as a cuddly pet. Given Blake's artistic power, it was clearly a choice he had
made. Was Blake merely meddling, toying with us? My hunch was that Blake didn't see
things in simple categories, I'd guess he saw a shifting, many faceted whole taut with con-
tradiction and ambiguity. I wondered what he would have written or drawn about our skip-
ping redhead. She was innocence all right, seeing the world through the eyes of a child, but
not sentimental innocence. There was a flash of mischief in her, a sparkle of self-will and
more than a glimmer of defiance. We enjoyed her the more because of it, not in spite of
it—capricious innocence wiggling ahead of flat-footed experience.
Climbing Tongue Gill
The Lake District and the Coast to Coast specialize in contrasts and only half an hour after
we had parted ways with the giggling, headstrong girl, we were eating lunch on the banks
of Grisedale Tarn. There is an air dark and foreboding about this place. Even on a glorious
summer's day the water is black, shrouded, promising menace. Although we were togeth-
er in pleasant company, eating bacon sandwiches and drinking effervescent Lucozade, I
thought of the dark side of romantic literature, of sinister threat, cosmic malevolence and
human isolation. While Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and John Polidori's precursor to Bram
Stoker's Dracula were first conceived on the stormy shores of Lake Geneva in 1816, I
could well imagine Grisedale Tarn inspiring similar but perhaps more circumscribed horror.