The man has Camp Stools, which he and his visitors take with them when they go about the country upon their nocturnal or diurnal excursions, and have also a Portfolio in which they enter their observations, which they have been heard to say were almost finished. They have been heard to say that they should be rewarded for them, and were very attentive to the River near them - possibly the River coming within a mile or two of Alfoxden from Bridgwater. These people may possibly be under-agents to some principal at Bristol.

From a report by a government spy observing William and Dorothy Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1797   

Out walking and you pass it,

In its lonely trance of watching, 

A peculiar kind of witnessing,

Authority shivered into a million forms.

 

How to distil this presence?

 

This thing with a crick in its neck

Like someone always looking over the shoulder,

This thing that aims all round itself

Instead of a head has grown

 

An all-encompassing gaze.

 

It thinks it sees, it sees, and thinks

When is a person actually a person?

Perhaps it's that young man, his careful stroll

Hooded and watchful through the afternoon?

 

And now he's all but out of range.

 

Parkforce! There are frail new trees

And a skyline of antennae.

What difference does it make

To the one who walks through this?

 

As if through a hall of mirrors.

 

Chilly receptacle, it never shows its face,

Its surface splits like an insect's faceted eye

Or like a timid bird of prey declares

'Our actions are proportionate

 

We'll get you if you feel like it'

 

Being made almost entirely of such words:

'Proportionate' 'Governance'

Recording 'for training purposes'

The anxious tremor of your voice

 

How many bits of you are there?

 

And this vetting procedure

That harbours our darkest desires,

Its wavering attention,

Its careful perplexity -

 

Believe in it. What else is there?

 

And another justice secretary's

'Non-conviction disposals',

Each one a licence then

To break into your past

 

It's what we'll find, one day, in your saliva

 

And you? You sit here, wondering

How far your art can take you

Until you'll disappear like that young man

And later you'll emerge, as something perfect?

 

The citizen unharmed

 

Invisible harm! As if

Each one of us were waiting to be rescued.

Taking a picture of the sky?

But there's too much sky for a photograph.

 

Forbidden

 

And here it comes, the high gaze down at you

From under a peaked cap

Or else a disk containing most of you

A piece of plastic pressed against the flesh

 

Scaly like a politician's handshake

 

Thick animal smell, the burden that is 'you'.

Meanwhile you thought it was a private art

Since armed in secret

There is the distance your art gives you

 

However much it dances . . .