‘The Anglican establishment did not speak to his condition.’ Photo: Portrait of William Wordsworth by Benjamin Robert Haydon, 1842
‘Summoned, roused, constrained’: Jonathan Wooding on the ‘Quakerish predisposition’ of William Words
‘It is fit for the unchurched, post-truth, twenty-first century pilgrim.’
In 1925, a long revolutionary poem, composed in the years leading up to 1805, was published in England for the first time. Its composer had died in 1850. A pale version of this poem had been published earlier, and it was greeted by Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859), a historian and former government secretary at war, none too calmly: ‘It is to the last degree Jacobinical, indeed Socialist. I understand perfectly why Wordsworth did not choose to publish it in his lifetime.’ This long poem, addressed to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, is now referred to as The 1805 Prelude, and is, for this reader at least, to the last degree, Quakerish.
William Wordsworth (1770-1850) began the poem in 1798, during a rather bleak time of uncertainty while staying with his sister and soul mate Dorothy in Germany. After an extraordinarily eventful young life, Wordsworth asks, ‘Was it for this that my rapturous childhood prepared me!’. What he means by ‘this’ seems to include his present dispiriting circumstances, his questionable achievements to date, and his mood of regret and nostalgia. Crucially, he may also be referring to Coleridge’s conviction that, after the failure of those revolutionary times, William was to write a national, redemptive poem! (This might remind us, of course, of John Milton, who wrote his epic Paradise Lost after the failure of the Cromwellian revolution, ‘to justify the ways of God to men’.)
The first stirrings of The Prelude are evident in a 150-line freestanding apostrophic poem from October 1798. It is, let us imagine, as if Wordsworth is in a Meeting for Clearness, here attended by, say, Coleridge and Dorothy, his late mother Ann, and also the wise old Ann Tyson, the pious woman who raised him after his parents’ deaths. The subject matter includes (oddly enough) the river Derwent (accompanist to ‘my nurse’s song’), and ‘ye beings of the hills’ of Cumberland, as well as ‘ye spirits of the springs’ – ‘Gentle powers, / Who give us happiness and call it peace’. In true worshipful fashion he mentions ‘the eternal spirit – he that has / His life in unimaginable things’. Wordsworth calls on all that is sacred in his life heretofore, the things that are invisible and eternal, and submits his plea: ‘In the light of such experience, what next?’ He wants neither egotistical fantasy, nor disingenuous or preconceived advice in illuminating his destiny – ‘no gentle dreams / Complacent, fashioned fondly to adorn / The time of unrememberable being’. Apparently puritanical and unworldly, he seeks to put aside vain ambitions, ‘the mean and vulgar works of man’. He returns to childhood experiences, and ‘primordial feelings’, and there he discerns not anger and revolutionary fervour, but peace: ‘even yet I feel / Their tranquillizing power.’
Wordsworth never identified as Quaker, of course. It was a daring person who would gainsay Anglicanism at that time, with its hierarchical establishment and power to confer favours, and its fear of revolution. But Wordsworth’s friend and neighbour Thomas Clarkson, the abolitionist (1760-1846), was at that time working on his A Portraiture of Quakerism (1806). Jessica Fay’s book Wordsworth’s Monastic Inheritance: Poetry, place, and the sense of community (2018) demonstrates brilliantly the role Quakerism plays in Wordsworth’s verse, and how Clarkson even drew on this verse in his own understanding of Quakerism: ‘it would be impossible to distinguish between aspects of Wordsworth’s poetry that were influenced by Quakerism and elements of Clarkson’s description of it that were inflected by his own admiration for Wordsworth’s early work.’
Quakers were not welcome at Cambridge University or in the House of Commons, nor open to aristocratic or ecclesiastical preferment. The Quaker position was open to Wordsworth in a manner we might call ‘theopoetic’, but certainly not theologically (and therefore politically) in its usual sense. What we can say is that, in a striking parallel with George Fox’s elected vagabondage, Wordsworth declined the opportunities of the Anglican establishment; it did not ‘speak to the condition’ of this wandering scholar and malcontent. Wordsworth rather protests about the aristocratic culture prevailing at the university:
and over all
Should be a healthy sound simplicity,
A seemly plainness – name it as you will,
Republican, or pious.
This Quakerish predisposition and percipience may not be surprising in one raised in the Lake District at that time. This was ‘one of the most densely populated Quaker areas in England’, according to Heidi Snow’s William Wordsworth and the Theology of Poverty (2013): ‘When Wordsworth walked out the front gate of his new home at Greenend Cottage he would have looked directly at the whitewashed Friends Meeting House’. Wordsworth’s mother Ann had died aged thirty in 1778, his father John aged forty-two, in 1783. He and his brothers lodged from 1779 with Ann Tyson in Ambleside. When the weather was inclement, William later recalled that he would attend the Quaker Meeting house, saving him a drenching on the longer walk to the parish church. It is possible to feel this formative experience in Wordsworth’s verse even when he is describing fell-walking; one might think fell-walking were code for sitting in an illicit dissenters’ meeting for worship!
Gently did my soul
Put off her veil, and self-transmuted stood
Naked as in the presence of her God.
As on I walked, a comfort seemed to touch
A heart that had not been disconsolate;
Strength came where weakness was not known to be,
At least not felt; and restoration came
Like an intruder knocking at the door
Of unacknowledged weariness.
The fragmentary poem ‘Was it for this?’ grows and grows over the next few years. In the 1805 version Wordsworth remembers his time at Cambridge University, ‘Seated with others in a festive ring / Of commonplace convention’. He finds it wanting in terms of the values already instilled in him. All the time, one feels, Wordsworth was rather ‘seated’ in vision in a less ‘commonplace’ ring:
As if awakened, summoned, roused, constrained,
I looked for universal things, perused
The common countenance of earth and heaven,
And turning the mind in upon itself
Pored, watched, expected, listened, spread my thoughts
And spread them with a wider creeping; felt
Incumbencies more awful, visitings
Of the upholder of the tranquil soul,
Which underneath all passion lives secure
A steadfast life. But peace, it is enough
To notice that I was ascending now
To such community with highest truth.
So, what next? Well, over these five reclusive years Wordsworth works passionately on his great confessional poem, never intended for publication. It is the very model of a latter-day spiritual autobiography, the natural revolution of a self-delighting mind. It is fit, I would say, for the unchurched, post-truth, twenty-first century pilgrim, waiting expectantly on clearness and on peace.
