Written at an Inn at Henley
To thee, fair Freedom! I retire,
From flattery, cards, and dice, and din;
Nor art thou found in mansions higher
Than the low cot, or humble inn.
’Tis here with boundless power I reign,
And every health which I begin,
Converts dull port to bright champagne;
Such Freedom crowns it, at an inn.
I fly from pomp, I fly from plate,
I fly from Falsehood’s specious grin;
Freedom I love, and form I hate,
And choose my lodgings, at an inn.
Here, waiter! take my sordid ore,
Which lackeys else might hope to win;
It buys what courts have not in store,
It buys me Freedom, at an inn.
Whoe’er has travell’d life’s dull round,
Where’er his stages may have been,
May sigh to think he still has found
The warmest welcome – at an inn.
****
William Shenstone, 1714–1763, was a prolific poet, comfortably born into the inheritance of a small estate in Shropshire. He became increasingly involved with its development through landscape gardening and the construction of an “ornamental farm”. The garden planning, partly a labour of love, seems also to have been a compensatory bid for the fame that had eluded him as a poet. His efforts left him impoverished at his death.
Originally entitled Written at an INN on a Particular Occasion, this week’s poem, dated 1735, seems to celebrate the delights of travelling hopefully rather than arrival. The Henley inn in question, the White Swan, was a well-known staging post on the route from Lichfield to London. In those days, of course, such an inn offered comforts beyond those of today’s local, including hospitality and accommodation for travellers racked by miles of jolting and swaying in an overcrowded stagecoach.
So Shenstone is probably writing from life, which is not to say that he and his speaker in the poem are one. The poet’s worldly resources clearly reached beyond the “low cot”. His opening stanza might indicate dissatisfaction, hypocritical or otherwise, with a relatively lofty status and private income. But the emphasis is on freedom, which is located not in rural life but in that temporary staging post, the inn. The capitalised “Freedom” recurs like a joyous shout in each of the first four stanzas.
The protagonist’s large gestures, his boasting and exaggeration, are not disagreeable. On the contrary, the manner matches the environment. He’s clearly a man who buys his round, and soon the drink begins to taste like champagne even if it isn’t. He rejoices in informality, the kind of freedom celebrated in the third stanza. Shenstone’s ease of versification adds mimetic pleasure: we can relax in the cosy-armchair stanzas, and imagine firelight, friendliness and something warming to sip. The metre is regular but not plodding, the alliteration pleasingly judged (“To thee, fair Freedom! I retire, / From flattery, cards, and dice, and din.”) The poem is the right length for the refrain to keep the element of ironic surprise at finding such perfections “at an Inn”.
When Shenstone is seriously considered as a poet, which is perhaps too seldom, he is regarded a precursor of the Romantics. The tendency towards Romantic idealisation is perhaps signalled here in the opening apostrophe, and the moral vocabulary or implications in the diction: honesty, fellowship, the value of trust. A deeper complexity comes in when the speaker cries, “Here, waiter! take my sordid ore.” This strikes an almost confessional note. Without money, there’s no room at the inn, after all, no lodgings, fellowship, or liquid refreshment, and no freedom. But the admission is lightly, urbanely handled. An early Romantic may still be a realist.
Samuel Johnson, who might also have had occasion to lodge at the White Swan, was cool in his final appraisal of Shenstone: “Had his mind been better stored with knowledge, whether he could have been great I know not; he could certainly have been agreeable”.
And Donald Davie, in his anthology The Late Augustans, describes him as “undoubtedly very small beer as a poet”, while exonerating, to some degree, the Spenserian stanzas of The School-Mistress (also “pleasing” to Johnson), and some of his Elegies.
“Small beer” seems an appropriate designation for this week’s poem, but I would like to argue that it’s not all froth. The praise of conviviality and its pleasures reaches a certain depth within the limits of conventional morality, and even finds a trace of ambiguity at the bottom of the tankard.