When I was sixteen, I started keeping a journal, to which I entrusted my innermost thoughts. I headed it with a quotation from Wordsworth: "Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears."
I had first started reading Wordsworth seriously about a year earlier, having been given a copy of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, which I read while staying with a great-aunt in Norfolk one summer. At that time, I was struggling with my Christian faith, having by then left the Roman Catholic Church; but my parents were concerned that my schooling should not be interrupted, so I remained at my Catholic grammar school, keeping quiet about my apostasy while I sat ‘O’ and ‘A’ levels.
In those years, I also discovered D.H. Lawrence, another intensely religious writer; and William and Bert became my imaginary friends, with whom I could not only share my doubts about religion as it was taught me but also explore another way of seeing the world. Wordsworth is often described as a pantheist, Lawrence sometimes as a pagan; and I found myself drawn to both these alternatives to mainstream Christianity, for they both appear to transcend what the poet Tom Cheetham has called the “poisonous dualism of matter and spirit.”
I certainly see Wordsworth as being a pantheist in his youth, but he appears to have ultimately sacrificed “the visionary gleam” for the safety of religious orthodoxy (as would T.S. Eliot). However, I now think he would better be described as a panentheist – that is, as someone who believes that God is in everything and everything is in God. For the theist, deity is transcendent (God creates everything); for the pantheist, deity is immanent (God is everything, everything is God); for the panentheist, deity is both transcendent and immanent. And isn’t that what we find in the justly famous lines from ‘Tintern Abbey’:
And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man,
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.
The (transcendent) spirit whose dwelling is the light rolls through all things (immanence). Or, as Blake put it, everything that lives is holy.
Jonathan Bate comments that Wordsworth’s friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge “would have called that motion and spirit ‘God’ or ‘the Infinite Mind.’ Wordsworth locates it firmly in the landscape in which he is walking, and that is why ‘Tintern Abbey’ was regarded by some as the work of a pantheist.” When, later on, Wordsworth describes himself as ‘A worshipper of Nature’, how literally does he mean it? “To a conservative Christian sensibility,” says Bate, “this was not merely blasphemous but dangerously close to the materialism of those revolutionary thinkers who influenced the unorthodox ideas of radicals…”
Wordsworth’s slightly older contemporary William Blake, who was opposed to materialism and conservative Christianity in equal measure, was also not impressed by nature-worship: "I see in Wordsworth the Natural Man rising up against the Spiritual Man Continually & then he is No Poet but a Heathen Philosopher at Enmity against all true Poetry or Inspiration," which come from the Imagination; and Natural Objects, he wrote, obliterated Imagination in him.
Bate sees the Gnostic in Blake setting Nature against the Spirit. But if, as Wordsworth believed, the Imagination could transcend the split between Nature and Man, could it not also overcome the enmity between inspiration and heathenism? Perhaps Blake and Wordsworth are just approaching the same (panentheist) truth from different directions: Wordsworth imagines the spirit rolling through all things, Blake imagines all things as holy. It is interesting to note that the term ‘panentheism’ was only coined in 1828, the year after Blake’s death; I see him as a panentheist avant la lettre…
When I went to study English Literature at university, I wrote a long essay on visionary perception in the poetry of Wordsworth, Blake and Eliot. Of the three, it was only Blake who kept the “gleam” alive throughout his life. Eliot shrank from it: Where Blake held infinity in the palm of his hand, Eliot saw fear in a handful of dust.
For Wordsworth, it was more like a long, slow fading away of “the vision splendid”, as he puts it in his 'Ode: Intimations of Immortality.' He had once seen the Earth “apparelled in celestial light”; and in a poignant later Ode, he describes how “an evening of extraordinary splendour” would miraculously restore the lost light, if only briefly: "This glimpse of glory," he would ask, "why renewed?"
In the Immortality Ode he asks where the glorious light has gone ("Whither is fled the visionary gleam?/ Where is it now, the glory and the dream?") and then talks of where it and we come from:
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The soul that rises with us, our life’s star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar;
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home.
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
So, we have come from our home in God and we are still apparelled in the light of Heaven, therefore able to see that light spread out over the Earth. Here, as Bate puts it, Wordsworth has “framed eternity via an image of pre-existence. He was criticized for this by orthodox Christians, for whom eternity was an afterlife…” But for Wordsworth, we are in Heaven before and after earthly life; and, in blessed moments, during life:
Though inland far we be,
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither…
What we start to forget when we are born is the shore beyond that sea. During the course of my life, I have had some moments of anamnesis, glimpses of that immortal sea. Twelve years ago, I glimpsed it again, reflected in the partly frozen waters of Llandrindod Lake, beneath the icy woods. The light was dancing on the lake; and I wept tears of compassion, knowing "That there hath passed away a glory from the earth."
Some thoughts are not too deep for tears.
Top reviews from United Kingdom
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Jeffrey John Dixon
That Immortal Sea
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 10 December 2020
Amazon Customer
Extraordinary & uplifting insight into William Wordsworth Poetry & Lyrical Legacy
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 27 December 2023Jonathan Mark
Fascinating biography of the man as a radical thinker as well brilliant poet
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 12 March 2022andrew
its too much about Jonathan and not enough about William
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 6 April 2021Top reviews from other countries
MR MICHAEL E KITSON
Kindle crashes every time I try to read this title
Reviewed in Australia on 5 May 2020James Goss
description accurate and timely deliveruy
Reviewed in the United States on 3 November 2022P. L. McNamara
Eminently readable scholarship
Reviewed in the United States on 9 November 2020