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

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

by Jonathan Wooding 26th January 2024

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.