I didn't make it to the Lakes until I was in my late 20s. I thought it might be overpopulated with hikers or kitsch, so I was slightly resistant to it, and I hadn't fallen in love with Wordsworth yet. As you drive there and see the mountains, you realise how extraordinary the Lakes are, the compactness; it is an amazing transition from one landscape to another. You feel part of a world that is self-sufficient, contained, extraordinary. I spent a lot of time looking at mist on my first encounter.

Going back to the Lake District and visiting the Wordsworth Centre, I realised that the area had become a sacred place to me. Any brooding, romantically inclined person will be aware of the literary and personal past overlapping to an extraordinary degree. There's no doubt in my mind that the mountains of the Lake District have a peculiarly animating effect on our imagination. Paradoxically, by reminding us of our own small scale, they insist on what human beings are and can do. I went to Lake Geneva and it seemed so dead compared to the Lakes, a feeling of being used up.

Sadly, it's difficult to go anywhere in the countryside and not be brought close to the ravages of climate change - it's like the Book of Job, you see images of endurance but they're criss-crossed with anxieties, which is incredibly melancholic. So much of what Wordsworth wrote remains true. What the poems do is gather evidence of the sublime - the light, the lakes - and explain what makes him feel that way. As he gets to those high points the language can't help but become abstract, that inarticulacy is part of experience - what looks like failure is success.

My most magical moment in the Lakes was a couple of years ago when I was up there with Tim Dee, an expert birder. We climbed up a small mountain just outside Grasmere, and as we got to the top, an osprey, which had probably arrived from Africa five minutes before, flew past. To see it flying past and appearing to greet us was like a benediction.

· Andrew Motion was appointed Poet Laureate in 1999