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The Concept of Grace in Wordsworth's Poetry
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
One sentence in Wordsworth's long letter to Dorothy describing his journey through France and Switzerland in 1790 might very well be used as a datum line from which to chart later utterances of the poet, either in prose or poetry, on God and nature. Wordsworth says, “Among the more awful scenes of the Alps I had not a thought of man or a single created being; my whole soul was turned to him who produced the terrible majesty before me.” When we add to this a sentence from a letter to Mathews written from Keswick late in 1794, “Cataracts and mountains are good occasional society, but they will not do for constant companions,” we can measure more or less accurately the distance Wordsworth had covered between 1790 and 1798, when cataracts and mountains had become “the soul of all his moral being” and He who had produced the terrible majesty a “motion and a spirit” that “rolls through all things.” Both sentences serve a salutary purpose in focusing attention on those formative elements in Wordsworth's early training which we tend under the influence of descriptions in The Prelude and its apostrophes to the “Wisdom and Spirit of the Universe” either to forget or to push into the background. With their outlines sharpened by a proper perspective they support the contention that Wordsworth's later orthodoxy is less a retreat from the naturalism of “Tintern Abbey” and The Prelude than it is a return to an earlier position, which, while all its implications at the time may not have been realized, was more in line with the later Wordsworth than with the pantheist of 1798–1802.
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References
1 Ernest De Selincourt, Early Leiters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1937), p. 33.
2 Ibid., p. 128.
3 See Christopher Wordsworth, Scholae Academicae (Cambridge, 1877), p. 52.
4 In Descriptive Sketches (1793 version) statements that might be considered adumbrations of the naturalism of “Tintern Abbey” are relegated to their proper sphere by such as the following:
To viewless realms his Spirit towers amain,
Beyond the senses and their little reign. (11. 548-549)
Marmaduke in The Borderers is full of benevolence and sententious piety. An amusing sidelight on Wordsworth's later philosophy is the conversation between Lacy and Wallace:
Lacy I have noticed
That often, when the name of God is uttered,
A sudden blankness overspreads his face.
Yet, reasoner as he is, his pride has built
Some uncouth superstition of its own.
. . . Once he headed
A band of Pirates in the Norway seas;
And when the King of Denmark summoned him
To the oath of fealty, I well remember,
'Twas a strange answer that he made; he said,
“I hold of Spirits, and the Sun in heaven.”
Wallace Such Minds as find among their fellow-men
No heart that loves them, none that they can love,
Will turn perforce and seek for sympathy
In dim relation to imagined Beings. (II. 1437-17)
For further examples of shopworn pious phraseology see:
Descriptive Sketches, 11. 486-487; 520 ff.; 544 ff.; 792.
The Borders, 11. 195; 615-617; 791-792; 839-840; 999 ff.; 1345; 2145 ff.; 2350 ff.
5 Pietism persisted until at least the spring of 1797, when The Borderers was being written. See G. R. McGillivray, “Date of the Composition of The Borderers,” MLN, xlix (1934), 104–111.
6 Coleridge, “Eolian Harp.” For these “shapings” the less philosophical Sara bade Coleridge “walk humbly with his God.”
7 Empson's brilliant analysis quoted by John Crowe Ransom in The New Criticism (New Directions, 1941, pp. 115–119) of lines 88–102 in “Tintern Abbey” support my contention that Wordsworth in such lines as those quoted above was subject to cautious misgivings, or at least to half-conscious doubts, of his pantheism.
8 Prelude, ii, 405–436 (1805–06).
9 Ibid., iii, 215–216 (1805–06).
10 Joseph Warren Beach, “Reason and Nature in Wordsworth,” JHI, i (1940) 335–357.
11 Wordsworth uses the word grace one hundred and seventy-seven times: one hundred and seventy-five occurrences are listed in A Concordance to the Poems of William Wordsworth; two additional are to be found in The Prelude (1805): v, 339; xii, 243. Seventy-three references out of the total one hundred and seventy-seven are used with definite religious meaning. It is on these seventy-three that this article has been based. For the convenience of the reader the references used in this article are listed by page (Oxford edition of Wordsworth's Poetical Works) as they are given in the Concordance: pp. 92, 94, 119, 134, 140, 168, 196, 205, 226, (2 references), 229, 247, 256, 269, 270, 274, 285, 288, 323, 332, 360, (2 references), 363, 365, 366, 373, 390, 397, 398, 402 (2 references), 414, 416, 423, 427, 430, 438, 443, 445, 446, 450, 454, 455, 456, 458, 459, 466, 479, 502, 505, 506, 525, 538, 542, 543, 576, 586, 628, 677, 724, 752, 762, 802, 808, 817, 835, 839, 841, 885, 894. The two additional in The Prelude of 1805 are given above. As could be expected, the term occurs most frequently in verse written after 1822. From 1800 to 1807 Wordsworth used the term with definite religious meaning nine times, from 1807 to 1822, twenty-four times, from 1822 to 1845, forty times.
12 Ecclesiastical Sonnets, 3, 22, 1.
13 Ibid., 3, 22, 4.
14 Prelude, iii, 307–322 (1805–06).
15 Ibid., vii, 546–565 (1805–06).
16 Ibid., x, 272–275 (1805–06).
17 For a reprint of the Rydal Mount library catalogue see Transactions of the Wordsworth Society, No. 6. For the Cambridge reading list see Christopher Wordsworth, op. cit., p. 129. For discussion of Wordsworth's reading between 1795–1814 see The Concept of Nature in Nineteenth Century English Poetry by Joseph Warren Beach (Macmillan, 1936), 569–577.
18 David Hartley, Observations on Man (London, 1749), 510.
19 Matthew Hale, The Primitive Origination of Mankind (Wm. Godbid, 1677).
20 Unpublished Letters from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to the Rev. John Prior Eatlin, Miscellanies of the Philobiblon Society, XV (1884), p. 33.
21 “Religious Musings,” 1. 92; “On receiving a Letter informing me of the Birth of a Son,” 11. 3, 11.
22 See S. F. Gingerich, “From Necessity to Transcendentalism in Coleridge,” PMLA, xxxv (1920), 1–59.
23 “Religious Musings,” 1. 92.
24 Coleridge's later views on grace have no bearing on Wordsworth's concept of grace. The only point I have wished to establish is the one that Wordsworth was fully aware of the theological significance of the term.
25 William A. Knight, Wordsworthiana (Macmillan, 1889), p. 340.
26 “Michael,” ll. 177–179.
27 Prelude, v, 338–341 (1805–06). In 1832 the last three lines were deleted either because their facetiousness offended Wordsworth or because the term grace had lost its “film of familiarity” when it had passed through the alembic of the poet's thought and experience. However, this same mechanical use of grace was most in evidence after 1830. See, for instance, the Somnambulist, 1. 140; the sonnet “At Albano,” 1. 8; “The Egyptian Maid,” 1. 295; “The Armenian Lady's Love,” 1. 35; “Russian Fugitive,” 1. 85; “Westmoreland Girl,” 1. 90; “Peter Bell,” 1. 971 (added in 1819); “The Highland Broach,” 1. 44; “Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle,” 1. 158 (grace added in 1845); “The Poet's Dream,” 1. 11; “If those brief records,” 1. 13.
28 There is no doubt that the concept of transcendence held sway in the Anglican church of the eighteenth century (see article “Immanence” in Hastings' Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics). The Divine Governor and Author for Bishop Butler was indisputably separate from the natural world and was apprehensible only through man's conscience. Wordsworth's early remarks on God and Nature in Descriptive Sketches (1795) all throw light on the Butlerian, semi-Deistic religious training of his youth.
29 Prelude, v, 278 (1805–06).
30 The same question is asked by The Solitary in The Excursion, iv, 1082–1100, but by 1814 it had connected itself witb the specifically theological problem of justification.
31 “Resolution and Independence,” 11. 50–56. Wordsworth in a letter to Sara Hutchinson, June 14, 1802, comments on the stanza in question: “I think of this [miserable reverses] of young poets till I am so deeply impressed by it, that I consider the manner in which I was rescued from my dejection and despair almost as an interposition of Providence.” It is interesting to note that in The Borderers (ll. 1362–66) an analogous “interposition” is described by Herbert.
32 Ibid., 112.
33 Ibid., 139–140.
34 “To a Highland Girl,” 62–65.
35 Prelude, vi, 188–189 (1805–06). The 1850 version reads:
Such dispositions then were mine unearned
By aught, I fear, of genuine desert—
Mine, through heaven's grace and inborn aptitudes.
36 Ibid., xiii, 437–441 (1805–06).
37 Harper dates “The Recluse” about 1800. Lines 73–78 in “At the Grave of Burns” with the reference to grace present the same difficulty of date. The poem was composed in 1803, published in 1842. I am relatively certain (mainly because of the references to Christ) that lines 73–78 were later additions.
38 “The Recluse,” 103–109.
39 Prelude, xii, 24–44 (1805–06).
40 “To My Sister,” 33–34.
41 “Lines Written in Early Spring,” 22.
42 E.g., Prelude, ii, 420 ff.; iii, 125 ff.; v, 13–17 (1805–06).
43 Ibid., x, 386–393 (1805–06).
44 Ibid., x, 420–424 (1850).
45 Italics mine. The lines are from an isolated piece of blank verse found in a MS belonging between 1798–1800. De Selincourt quotes them in a note on Prelude, ii, 220–224 (1805–06).
46 “Nature's self, which is the breath of God.” Prelude, v, 222 (1805–06).
47 Ibid., v, 516–518 (1805–06).
48 Ibid., xi, 336 (1805–06).
49 “A Complaint.”
50 Prelude, xiii, 205 (1805–06).
51 “Elegiac Stanzas suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle.”
52 Wordsworth was as thrifty ideologically as he was practically. He was no systematizer, and traces of earlier, abandoned beliefs are to be found in his latest poems. See note 115.
53 Prelude, xi, 237 (1805–06). These two attributes Wordsworth evidently considered necessary for a soul to be both “sensitive” and “creative.” See the entire passage, XI, 224–255 (1805) for Wordsworth's estimate of humbleness and love.
54 The White Doe (1844–49).
55 See Fenwick note to The White Doe.
56 E. De Selincourt, Letters of Dorothy and William Wordsworth, The Middle Years (Oxford, 1937), v. 1, 197.
57 The White Doe, 75–78 (text of 1815). Significantly enough, Wordsworth in 1836 altered line 78 to read: “A pledge of grace from purest heaven.”
58 Italics mine. De Selincourt, loc. cit. It is ironical that Coleridge raised the same objection to The White Doe that Wordsworth had raised against “The Ancient Mariner.”
59 Walter Raleigh, Wordsworth (London, 1909), p. 193.
60 See quotation from Bacon prefixed to The While Doe.
61 If, as Harper suggests in William Wordsworth (London, 1929), pp. 440–441, Wordsworth in the five major poems written between 1805 and 1807 chose to set up his private faith against the creeds of Christendom, it is apparent that between writing the “Ode to Duty” and The White Doe of Rylstone Wordsworth had moved deliberately in the direction of the Christian creed.
62 The White Doe, 1622.
63 Ibid., 532 ff.
64 Ibid., 1820 (text of 1836). The 1815 text read:
For that she came; there oft and long
She sate in meditation strong.
65 Ibid., 1596–97. In a recent critical edition of The White Doe (The White Doe of Rylstone [Cornell University Press, 1940], p. 7), Alice Pattee Comparetti points out that Wordsworth was using the word “melancholy” in its Miltonic sense “to denote a calm of soul and perfect faith resulting from contemplative effort.”
66 Ibid., 1757–58.
67 Ibid., 544–545.
68 Ibid., 532–537.
69 Ibid., 583.
70 Ibid., 1091. Wordsworth emphasized the Stoic flaw of ℓβριs in 1836 by revising Emily's original lines:
Speak to him with a voice and say
“That he must cast despair away!”
to read:
“If hope be rejected stay,
Do thou, my Christian Son, beware
Of that most lamentable snare,
The self-reliance of despair!” (ll. 1053–56)
71 De Selincourt, loc. cit. The Platonic implications in the phrase doubtless derive in part from the translation Wordsworth had made of certain of the sonnets of Michelangelo. The phrase suggests the argument of the translated sonnet “Yes! hope may with my strong desire keep pace” (translated late in 1805 and published in 1807) in which grace is used to signify God's benevolent interest and help in the “ascent of love.”
72 The White Doe, 1678–79 (text of 1836). The 1815 version read “And take this gift of Heaven with grace.”
73 Ibid., 1681.
74 Ibid., 1743.
75 Ibid., 231–232 (text of 1816).
76 Ibid., 1875–76.
77 Excursion, IV, 1089–1100.
78 It is significant to remember at this point that Coleridge, commenting on the truisms of The Excursion, said that they were caused not by Wordsworth's acceptance of second hand truths but by the poet's convincing himself through “the conjoint operation of his own experience, feelings, and reason,” of truths “which the generality of persons have either taken for granted from their infancy or at least adopted in early life.” See Elsie Smith, An Estimate of William Wordsworth (Oxford, 1932), 197.
79 Excursion, v, 844–849.
80 Ibid., vi, 177–185 (text of 1814).
81 Ibid., iv, 477.
82 Ibid., iv, 491–492. Probably a development of what in Prelude, xiii, 282 (1805–06), Wordsworth had called “Nature's secondary grace.”
83 Ibid., i, 412–413 (text of 1814).
84 Ibid., vi, 71–72 (text of 1814). By the substitution of or for and in line 72, Wordsworth in 1827 suggested the possibility that faith was not earned, but a divine gift.
85 Ibid., iv, 50–51.
By the grace
The particle divine remained unquenched.
86 Ibid., ix, 104–113:
I cannot but believe
That, far as kindly Nature hath free scope
And Reason's sway predominates …
Country, society and time itself, …
Do, by the almighty Ruler's grace, partake
Of one maternal spirit, bringing forth
And cherishing with ever-constant love.
87 Ibid., ix, 672–678.
88 During the time The Excursion was being written there were three references to grace acting on hearts visited by sorrow. They occur in “Epistle to Sir George Beaumont (1811), ”Maternal Grief“ (originally intended to be part of The Excursion), and in the sonnet ”November, 1813.“
89 The Excursion, iv, 158–161.
90 Ibid., iv, 130 ff.
91 Prelude, viii, 630–639 (1805–06).
92 Excursion, v, 295–296.
93 See “Weak is the will of man,” prefixed to The White Doe in the 1820 edition.
94 The growth of the language of dogma may be seen in “Ode, January 18, 1816.”
95 Excursion, ix, 631–646.
96 Ibid., v, 295–300.
97 “Artegal and Elidure.” The quotation is from The Faerie Queen, ii, x.
98 “Pure element of waters.”
99 “Vernal Ode” (text of 1827).
100 Ll. 72 ff.
101 Excursion, iv, 1092 ff.
102 See two sonnets by Michel Angelo translated by Wordsworth (XXI and XXII in Memorials of a Tour in Italy, 1837). Wordsworth's conception of grace would agree with the first, Platonic in its emphasis, rather than with the second, which is definitely Christian.
103 Excursion, v, 309–315.
104 Ecclesiastical Sonnets, 1, 36, 1.
105 Ibid., 2, 6, 14. The “matter-of-factness” of Wordsworth's thoughts as well as his own “humble-minded experience” precluded his attaching great weight to the sacramental offices. The might of the Anglican church for him lay in “simple truth with grace divine imbued.” (Ecclesiastical Sonnets, 3, 40, 8.)
106 A. F. Potts, Ecclesiastical Sonnets of William Wordsworth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1932), p. 45.
107 Ecclesiastical Sonnets, 3, 20, 4. An interesting article might be written on the changes in Wordsworth's view of childhood. See also “The Infant M-M” line 1; and “Like a Shipwrecked Sailor tost” 1. 37.
108 Ibid., 3, 25, 8.
109 Ibid., 3, 11, 13.
110 Ibid., 2, 6, 12–13.
111 Ibid., 2, 37, 13–14.
112 The argument that Joseph Warren Beach advances in his article “Reason and Nature in Wordsworth” needs both amplification and qualification. That argument is (to quote Mr. Beach directly):
Where Wordsworth uses the phrase “right reason” and most often where he uses the simple word “reason” he is making appeal to that ethical intuitive reason which the new humanists are inclined to deny to him along with the other romantics.
That, as can be shown is true up to the time Wordsworth wrote The White Doe of Rylstone. After that the intuitive reason is superseded by the “imaginative will” and eventually by faith. Unassisted reason has no access to the laws of God:
truths
Which unassisted reason's utmost power
It is too infirm to reach. (Exc., v, 520–522)
By 1833 reason was something to distrust. The last stanza of “Stanzas Off St. Bees' Heads” says so explicitly. One of the itinerary poems of 1833 (“Desire we past illusions”) gives Wordsworth's final position on reason:
… conquering Reason, if self-glorified,
Can nowhere move uncrossed by some new wall
Or gulf of mystery, which thou alone,
Imaginative Faith! canst overleap,
In progress toward the fount of Love.
113 “Stanzas suggested in a Steamboat off St. Bees' Heads,” 154–162.
114 Ibid., 28–31.
115 He comes close to being one in “Presentiments.” The poem is interesting not only for its indication of Wordsworth's belief that presentiments often guide “when lights of reason fail” but also for its late reference to the scale of being. In “A Wren's Nest” the instinct of the “Kind” is spoken of as a “special grace.”
116 “The Warning,” line 124.
117 Ibid., ll. 129–133.
118 14–15.
119 Excursion, vi, 177–188.
120 “Not in the lucid intervals of life,” 20 ff.
121 “The Cuckoo at Laverna,” 49–65.
122 Ibid., 69–70.
123 Ibid., 71–73.
124 The moon is a monitor in the poem “To the Moon,” 13–14; so too is nature monitorial in “Soft as a Cloud,” 21.
125 Prelude, vi, 527 (1805–06).
126 Ibid., iii, 193–194 (1805–06).
127 “Theologians may puzzle their heads about dogma as they will, the religion of gratitude cannot mislead us.” To Sir George Beaumont, May 28, 1825. Quoted by Edith Batho in The Later Wordsworth (Cambridge, 1933), 285.
128 “The Russian Fugitive,” 171–172.
129 “The Cuckoo Clock,” 35.
130 “By a blest Husband guided,” 21–22.
131 “The world forsaken,” 3–4.
132 Ibid., 11–12.
133 “Written after the Death of Charles Lamb,” 111–120.
134 “On a High Part of the Coast of Cumberland,” 21–24.
135 “Lines inscribed in a Copy of His poems,” 5–8.
136 “The Cuckoo Clock.” 39–44
137 See also Ecclesiastical Sonnets, i, 19, 13–14; “The Labourer's Noon-day Hymn.”
138 Prelude, xiii, 447–452 (1805–06).
139 “Prelude,” 20–32.
140 Hastings' Encyclopaedia of Religion & Ethics—article on “Grace.”
141 See Newton P. Stallknecht “Wordsworth's ‘Ode to Duty’ and the ‘Schöne Seele,‘” PMLA, lii (1937), 230–237.