Excerpt from Poems of Charles Cotton: Edited With an Introduction

Walton, the reader 'may see a good Picture of both; and, so much of your own mind too, as will make any Reader that is blest with a Generous Soul, to love you the better'; This poem, The Retirement,1 indeed tells us much of Cotton, who regularly reveals himself, far more than most writers of his time, in his poetry. Perhaps that is one cause of Wordsworth's and Cole ridge's and Charles Lamb's vivid enjoyment of it. The hint of nostalgia in this poem, as throughout The Compleat Angler, derives not from the hankering of a townsman, but from the contrast between the peace\ of the countryside observed by a countryman and the political and other troubles of the busy world. For the countryside that Cotton describes is known intimately, as by those who are born and bred there: it is a place not of refuge, but of active p1easure;.not for holidays, but for every day. Here the infinite consequence of the shifting seasons is realized; the rain, and wind, and sun have their elaborate, indirect part in man's life through soil, and crops, and cattle. The River Dove is a source of pleasure to Cotton not alone for its sound and sparkle, and for the fanciful limestone rocks in the dale, but because (having discovered every yard of it himself in the absorbed and stealthy explorations of childhood) he knew the secret caves there, where he could smile as he hid from his creditors, and because he knew which pools would ofi'er him and his friends best sport. The delightful river dances through Cotton's poems, suggesting always the deep afl'ection he had for his own countryside. By its banks in 1674 he built the fishing-house, a sort of temple dedicated to the river and its sportsmen, Piscatoribus sacrum; and over the door, twisted together in monogram, he had carved his and his old friend's initials.

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