I AM back to my nest in North Walsham, back to my abandoned routines, back to my daily prayer walks in Sadlers Wood. I miss all these things sorely when I am abroad in a maze of lecture days, meetings and greetings, and then the anonymous placelessness of various hotel rooms.

On my return, I greet my routines like old friends newly appreciated, especially the walks. The advantage of daily April walks in the same patch of woodland is that you see the spring unfold gradually, almost flower by flower.

Three days ago, I saw just a few shy bluebells peeping through early under the shade of trees, little dots of blue splashed between last year’s dead leaves; then, the next day, a few more; and then, yesterday, a little blue oval of them, as though a patch of sky had come down and become a pool. In a couple of weeks, they’ll be everywhere, and people will flock to see what they call “the bluebell wood”; but I am glad to have enjoyed the bluebells’ tentative, less spectacular beginnings.

I take comfort, too, from knowing how gradually it all begins, before the whole wood is, to the newcomer, suddenly transfigured. Why comfort? Well, I sense a parallel between the gradual emergence of these spring flowers, one by one or in little clumps, with the emergence of sonnets in a sequence, stanzas in a longer poem, staves in a ballad cycle.

When we read the great works of the past — the whole sequence of Shakespeare’s sonnets, all the glorious Spenserian stanzas in Keats’s “Eve of St Agnes”, sweeping us along with a lovely unforced inevitability, all seven sections of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, moving us with the power of unalterable, immemorial myth — we are both delighted and daunted.

This is because only when it is completed do we read each work and take in the vast sweep of it. We are like late visitors to “the bluebell wood”, visitors whose last view of the wood was in its wintry bareness. We see the whole thing as sudden and miraculous. The great poems and poetic sequences of the canon strike us as complete, perfect, so that even to attempt such a feat ourselves simply seems impossible.

But, if we could have dropped in every day on the book-lined studies, the writing huts, and the cluttered desks of our favourite writers in the months or even years before their work saw the light of day, we would witness something more gradual, more tentative, and less seemingly inevitable — and, if we were writers ourselves, we would have taken heart. Not everything has to be written all at once: lines that now seem carved in stone, inevitable, implicit from the outset, are there in rough draft, sketches, and premonitions of what is to come.

Not being time travellers, we cannot make such visits, of course; but we can, in some instances, read the first drafts and manuscripts that have been preserved for posterity: we can look over Milton’s shoulder, as it were, in a manuscript at Trinity College, where he sketches out a possible Arthurian epic, then switches to a biblical theme from Genesis, but changes the genre to a tragic play, opening with a great soliloquy from Satan, and then, finally, realises that it should be an epic after all, and not a five-act tragedy. Only now it is not Arthur’s Adventures Underground, but Paradise Lost.

Home from my survey of spring’s tentative beginnings in Sadlers Wood, I feel a bit better about the slowly accumulating stanzas of my own Arthuriad.