Poetic synergy: Jonathan Wooding has more on the ‘Quakerish predisposition’ of William Wordsworth

‘Wordsworth helped Friends say what they mean to say.’

If Friends were obliged to write a creed by which others (and we ourselves) might understand what we are up to in Meeting for Worship, I can plainly confess I wouldn’t mind hearing these words ring out of a Sunday morning:

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.

It’s lively and properly controversial, isn’t it? It’s not a dead doctrinal statement, nor a catechistic calamity. It can be heard as personal witness to the mind’s distinctively receptive and creative powers. It is enlivening and unmediated, telling of an access to the divine that is sublime and intimate, and not requiring a paid priest. When I first heard it read by my English teacher many setting suns ago, it was life-changing and life-directing.

The words were, of course, written by the young William Wordsworth. And this is not the first time that his words – their poetic synergy with Quakerism – have helped Friends find a way to say what they mean to say. According to Heidi Snow (William Wordsworth and the Theology of Poverty, 2013), Wordsworth’s ‘Quaker sensibility… rings out’ in several poems she examines. ‘It is clear from the examination of the Quaker attitudes towards poverty and Wordsworth’s poetry that he found much in their theology that shaped his own views.’

Wordsworth was gratified that Quakers proved enthusiastic readers of his verse: ‘This poem is a favourite among the Quakers, as I have learnt on many occasions’, he tells us of his ‘Expostulation and Reply’. What’s more, Jessica Fay reveals, in Wordsworth’s Monastic Inheritance: Poetry, place and the sense of community (2018), that Wordsworth’s good friend and neighbour, the abolitionist Thomas Clarkson (1760-1846), quoted from that poem in his A Portraiture of Quakerism (1806). It includes the lines:

Nor less I deem that there are Powers
Which of themselves our minds impress;
That we can feed this mind of ours
In a wise passiveness.

Wordsworth’s boldness in expression and theological assertion is noted by Fay, tellingly, as being ‘as apt to produce incredulity and ridicule as was Quakerism.’

In A Portraiture of Quakerism Clarkson makes this remarkable claim about all authentically religious people: ‘Neither dress, nor language, nor peculiar customs, constitute the Quaker, but the spiritual knowledge which [s/]he possesses. Hence all pious [people] may be said to have been Quakers.’ Neither Clarkson nor Wordsworth, for all their admiration of Quakerism, felt able to join the Society, but this claim may indicate where their hearts truly lay. Wordsworth would have been inspired and comforted, too, by this assertion: ‘Many of our own countrymen have been Quakers… Among these we may reckon the great and venerable Milton. His works are full of the sentiments of Quakerism.’

The late, great poet Geoffrey Hill (1932-2016), in his essay ‘Rhetorics of Value and Intrinsic Value’, provides another insight into Wordsworth’s Quakerish quality. Hill ranks Wordsworth’s Prelude alongside George Eliot’s Middlemarch as exemplary of what he calls ‘the faculty of sustained attention; attention conceived of, moreover, as a redemptive power’. In another essay, Hill’s depiction of Wordsworth’s ‘temerity and effrontery’ in confronting his own readers’ prejudices, can only remind us of the Quakers’ resolution to speak truth to power.

This ‘synergy with Quakerism’, as Jessica Fay writes, can be seen in the epic poem ‘The Excursion’, of 1814. It is the poem that established Wordsworth’s reputation. On its publication, Wordsworth himself recorded that, ‘a Lady of Liverpool, a Quaker, breaks through all forms of ceremony to express her gratitude by Letter.’ An anonymous Quaker also reviewed the poem in The Philanthropist, stressing, perhaps unhelpfully, its ‘moral teaching’.

The poem features a despondent ‘Solitary’, and a ‘Wanderer’ – whose ‘mind was filled with inward light’ – who speaks out against ‘such misrule | Among the unthinking masters of the earth | As makes the nations groan’. This Wanderer, much like George Fox, dare I say, sets about overcoming ‘despondency’, and the materialism and atheism of his age, wherever he finds it. Wordsworth says of him that:

Sometimes his religion seemed to me
Self-taught, as of a dreamer in the woods;
Who to the model of his own pure heart
Shaped his belief, as grace divine inspired,
And human reason dictated with awe.

It is this figure, with his radical understanding of the religious mind’s excursive power, who was to inspire William James (1842-1910) to write The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), with its high praise for Quakerism, and its ‘liberation from scientism’. David Leary, in his essay ‘“Authentic Tidings”: What Wordsworth gave to William James’ writes: ‘The point of The Excursion is whether – and how – it might be possible to… overcome despondency – in the face of political upheaval, social disillusionment, natural disasters, the loss of loved ones, and all the other painful and disappointing realities of human life.’ James read parts of ‘The Excursion’ over and over.

The Wanderer proclaims the ‘native brightness’ of the individual mind. It is ‘an unconsuming fire of light’, ‘a calm, a beautiful, and silent fire’. And the poet declares that we must pay close attention to the universe as if it were ‘a smooth-lipped shell’ where we hear ‘murmurings’ – ‘authentic tidings of invisible things’. The Solitary’s ‘cherished sullenness’ is everywhere challenged, and the ‘false conclusions of the reasoning power’. Only then is the ‘dull eye’ of Science reanimated, no longer ‘treacherous’ to ‘the mind’s excursive power’. Authentic tidings indeed – the Solitary, who is struggling with despair and loss of faith, nevertheless achieves a profound understanding of what ‘the excursive mind’ most ardently desires:

          peace,
The central feeling of all happiness,
Not as a refuge from distress or pain,
A breathing-time, vacation, or a truce,
But for its absolute self; a life of peace,
Stability without regret or fear;
That hath been, is, and shall be evermore!

Well, this might be a Quaker creed, too; a mind at peace, receptive and excursive.

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Comments

Thank you, Jonathon, for prompting me to reread Wordsworth after many decades.

By gturner on 8th February 2024 - 10:55

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