Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises, Scribner, New York, 1926.

Some one asked Georgette to dance, and I went over to the bar. It was really very hot and the accordion music was pleasant in the hot night. I drank beer, standing in the doorway and getting the cool breath of wind from the street. Two taxi were coming down the steep street. They both stopped in front of the Bal. (27)

The waiter came and said the taxi was outside. Brett pressed my hand hard. I gave the waiter a franc and we went out. “Where should I tell him?” I asked.
“Oh, tell him to drive around.”
I told the driver to go the Parc Montsouris, and got in, and slammed the door. Brett was leaning back in the corner, her eyes closed. I sat beside her. The cab started with a jerk.
“Oh, darling, I’ve been so miserable,” Brett said. (32)

I blew out the lam. Perhaps I would be able to sleep. / My head started to work. The old grievance. Well, it was a rotten way to be wounded and flying on a joke front like the Italian. In the Italian hospital we were going to form a society. It had a funny name in Italian. I wonder what became of the others, the Italians… That was where the liaison colonel came to visit me. That was funny. That was about the first funny thing. I was all bandaged up. but they had told him about it. Then he made that wonderful speech: “You, a foreigner, an Englishman” (any foreigner was an Englishman) “have given more than your life.” What a speech! I would like to have it illuminated to hang in the office. He never laughed. He was putting himself in my place, I guess. “Che mala fortuna! Che mala fortuna!” (38-39)

I lay awake thinking and my mind jumping around. Then I couldn’t keep away from it, and I started to think about Brett and al the rest of it went away. I was thinking about Brett and my mind stopped jumping around and started to go in sort of smooth waves. Then all of a sudden I started to cry. Then after a while it was better and I lay in bed and listened to the heavy trams go by and way down the street, and then I went to sleep. (39)

It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing. (42)

We ate dinner at Madam Lecomte’s restaurant on the far side of the island. It was crowded with Americans and we had to stand up and wait for a place. Some one had put it in the American Women’s Club list as a quaint restaurant on the Paris quais as yet untouched by American, so we had to wait forty-five minutes for a table. Bill had eaten at the restaurant in 1918, and right after the armistice, and Madame Lecomte made a great fuss over seeing him.
“Doesn’t get us a table, thought,” Bill said. “Grand woman, though.”
We had a good meal, a roast chicken, new green beans, mashed potatoes, a salad, and some apple-pie and cheese.
“You’ve got the world here all right,” Bill said to Madame Lecomte. She raised her hand. “Oh, my God!”
“You’ll be rich.”
“I hope so.” (82)

We walked on and circled the island. The river was dark and a bateau mouche went by, all bright with light, going fast and quiet up and out of sight under the bridge. Down the river was Notre Dame squatting against the night sky. We crossed to the left bank of the Seine by the wooden foot-bridge from the Quai de Bethune, and stopped on the bridge and looked down the river the Notre Dame. Standing on the bridge the island looked dark, the houses wre high against the sky, and the trees were shadows.
“It’s pretty grand,” Bill said. “God, I love to get back.” (83)

At the end of the street I saw the cathedral and walked up toward it. The first time I ever saw it I thought the façade was ugly but I liked it now. I went inside. It was dim and dark and the pillars went high up, and there were people praying, and it smelt of incense, and there were some wonderful big windows. I knelt and started to pray and prayed for everybody I thought of, Brett and Mike and Bill and Robert Cohn and myself, and all the bull-fighters, separately for the ones I like, and lumping all the rest, then I prayed for myself again, and while I was praying for myself I found I was getting sleepy, so I prayed that the bull-fights would be good, and that it would be a fine fiesta, and that we would get some fishing. I wondered if there was anything else I might pray for, and I thought I would like to have some money, so I prayed that I would make a lot of money, and then I started to think how I would make it, and thinking of making money reminded me of the count, and I started wondering about where he was, and regretting I hadn’t seen him since that night in Montmartre, and about something funny Brett told me about him, and as all the time I was kneeling with my forehead on the wood in front of me, and was thinking of myself as praying, I was a little ashamed, and regretted that I was such a rotten Catholic, but realized thee was nothing I could do about it, at least for a while, and maybe never, but that anyway it was a grand religion, and I only wished I felt religious and maybe I would next time; and then I was out in the hot sun on the steps of the cathedral, and the forefingers and the thumb of my right hand were still damp, and I felt them dry in the sun. The sunlight was hot an hard, and I crossed over beside some buildings, and walked back along side-streets to the hotel. (102-103)

We packed the lunch and two bottles of wine in the rucksack, and Bill put it on. I carried the rod-case and the landing nets slung over my back. We started up the road and then went across a meadow and found a path that crossed the fields and went toward the woods on the slope of the first hill. We walked across the fields on the sandy path. The fields were rolling and grassy and the grass was short from the sheep grazing. The cattle were up in the hills. We heard their bells in the woods. (121)

I got my rod that was leaning against the tree, took the bait-can and landing-net, and walked out onto the dam. It was built to provide a head of water for driving logs. The gate was up, and I sat on the one of the squared timbers and watched the smooth apron on water before the river tumbled into the falls. In the white water at the foot of the dam it was deep. As I baited up, a trout shot up out of the white water into the falls and was carried down. Before I could finish baiting, another trout jumped at the falls, making the same lovely arc and disappearing into the water that was thundering down. I put on a good-sized sinker and dropped into the white water close to the edge of the timbers of the dam.
I did not feel the first trout strike. When I started to pull up I felt that I had one and brought him , fighting and bending the rod almost double, out of the boiling water at the foot of the falls, and swung him up and onto the dam. He was a good trout, and I banged him head against the timber so that he quivered out straight, and then slipped him into my bag.
When I had him on, several trout had jumped at the falls. As soon as I baited up and dropped in again I hooked another and brought him in the same way. In a little while I had six. They were all about the same size. I laid them out, side by side, all their heads pointing the same way, and looked at them. They were beautifully colored and firm and hard from the cold water. It was a hot day, so I slit them all and shucked out the insides, gills and all, and tossed them into the cold, smoothly heavy water above the dam, and then picked some ferns and packed them all in the bag, three trout on a layer of ferns, then another layer of ferns, then three more trout, and then covered them with ferns. They looked nice in the ferns, and now the bag was bulky, and I put it in the shade of the tree. (124)

There is no reason why because it is dark you should look at things differently from when it is light.
The hell there isn’t!
I figured that all out once, and for six months I never slept with the electric light off. That was another bright idea. (151-152)

“You wouldn’t believe it. It’s like a wonderful nightmare.”
“Sure,” I said. “I’d believe anything. Including nightmares.” (226)

After lunch I went up to my room, read a while, and went to sleep. When I woke it was half past four. I found my swimming-suit, wrapped it with a comb in a towel, and went down-stairs and walked up the street to the Concha. The tide was about half-way out. The beach was smooth and firm, and the sand yellow. I went into a bathing-cabin, undressed, put on my suit, and walked across the smooth sand to the sea. The sand was warm under bare feet. There were quite a few people in the water and on the beach. Out beyond where the headlands of the Concha almost met to form the harbor there was a white line of breakers and the open sea. Although the tide was going out, there were a few slow rollers. They came in like undulations in the water, gathered weight of water, and then broke smoothly on the warm sand. I waded out. The water was cold. As a roller came I dove, swam out under water, and came to the surface with all the chill gone. I swam out to the raft, pulled myself up, and lay on the hot planks. A boy and girl were at the other end. The girl had undone the top strap of her bathing-suit and was browning her back. The boy lay face downward on the raft and talked to her. She laughed at things he said, and turned her brown back in the sun. I lay on the raft in the sun until I was dry. Then I tried several dives. I dove deep once, swimming down to the bottom. I swam with my eyes open and it was green and dark. The raft mad ea dark shadow. I came out of the water beside the raft, pulled up, dove once more, holding it for length, and then swam ashore. I lay on the beach until I was dry, then went into the bathing-cabin, took off my suit, sloshed myself with fresh water, and rubbed dry. (238-239)

William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads

William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads 1798, from Wordsworth and Coleridge Lyrical Ballads, Routledge Classics, London 2005

It is an ancient Marienere,
And he stoppeth one of three:
“By thy long grey beard and thy glittering eye
“Now wherefore stoppest me?

(opening, The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere, 50)


Listen, Stranger! Storm and Wind,
A Wind and Tempest strong!
For days and weeks it play’d us freaks—
Like Chaff we drove along.

(The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere, 53)


And I had done an hellish thing
And it would work ’em woe:
For all averr’d, I had kill’d the Bird
That made the Breeze to blow.

(The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere, 55)


Water, water, every where
And all the board did shrink;
Water, water, every where
Ne any drop to drink.

The very deeps did rot: O Christ!
That ever this should be!
Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs
Upon the slimy Sea.

About, about, in reel and rout
The Death-fires danc’d at night;
The water, like a witch’s oils,
Burt green and blue and white.

(The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere, 56)


The many men so beautiful,
And they all dead did like!
And a million million slimy things
Liv’d on—and so did I.

I look’d upon the rotting Sea,
And drew my eyes away;
I look’d upon the eldritch deck,
And there the dead men lay.

(The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere, 62)


My husband’s father told it me,
Poor old Leoni!—Angels rest his soul!
He was a woodman, and could fell and saw
With lusty arm. …

(The Foster-Mother’s Tale, 79)


…these gloomy boughs
Had charms for him; and here he loved to sit,
His only visitants a straggling sheep,
The stone-chat, or the glancing sheep,
The stone-chat, or the glancing sand-piper;
And on these barren rocks, with juniper,
And heath, and thistle, thinly sprinkled o’er,
Fixing his downward eye, he many an hour
A morbid pleasure nourished, tracing here
An emblem of his own unfruitful life:

(Lines Left Upon a Seat in a Yew-Tree, 83)


By Derwent’s side my Father’s cottage stood,
(The Woman thus her artless story told)
One field, a flock, and what the neighbouring flood
Supplied, to his were more than mines of gold.
Light was my sleep; my days in transport roll’d:
With thoughtless joy I stretch’d along the shore
My father’s nets, …

(The Female Vagrant, 88)


The staff I yet remember which upbore
The bending body of my active sire;
His seat beneath the honeyed sycamore
When the bees hummed,…

(The Female Vagrant, 89)


All, all was seized, and weeping, side by side,
We sought a home where we uninjured might abide.
/
Can I forget that miserable hour,
When from the last hill-top, my sire surveyed,
Peering above the trees, the steeple tower,
That on his marriage-day sweet music made?
Till then he hoped his bones might there be laid,
Close by my mother in their native bowers:

(The Female Vagrant, 90)


There foul neglect for months and months we bore,

(The Female Vagrant, 92)


But from these crazing thoughts my brain, escape!

(The Female Vagrant, 94)


How dismal tolled, that night, the city clock!
At more my sick heart hunger scarcely stung,
Nor to the beggar’s language could I frame my tongue.
/
So passed another day, and so the third:

(The Female Vagrant, 96)


But, what afflicts my peace with keenest ruth
Is, that I have my inner self abused,
Foregone the home delight of constant truth,
And clear and open soul, so prized in fearless youth.

(The Female Vagrant, 98)


Oh! what’s the matter? what’s the matter?
What is’t that ails young Harry Gill?
That evermore his teeth they chatter,
Chatter, chatter, chatter still.
Of waistcoasts Harry has no lack,
Good duffle grey, and flannel fine;
He has a blanket on his back,
And coats enough to smother nine.

(Goody Blake, and Harry Gill, 99)


Old Ruth works out of doors with him,
And does what Simon cannot do;
For she, not over stout of limb,
Is stouter of the two.

(Simon Lee, 106)


At this, my boy, so fair and slim,
Hung down his head, nor made reply;
And five times did I say to him,
“Why? Edward, tell me why?”
/
His head he raised—there was in sight,
It caught his eye, he saw it plain—
Upon the house-top, glittering bright,
A broad and gilded vane.
/
Then did the boy his tongue unlock,
And thus to me he made his reply;
“At Kilve there was no weather-cock,
“And that’s the reason why.”

(Anecdote for Fathers, 110)


And ’tis my faith that every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes.
/
The birds around me hopp’d and play’d:
Their thoughts I cannot measure,
But the least motion which they made,
It seem’d a thrill of pleasure.

(Lines; written in early spring, 113)


And all that winter, when at night
The wind blew from the mountain-peak,
’Twas worth your while, though in the dark,
The church-yard path to seek:
For many a time and oft were heard
Cries coming from the mountain-head,
Some plainly living voices were,
And others, I’ve heard many swear,
Were voices of the dead:
I cannot think, whate’er they say,
They had to do with Martha Ray.

(The Thorn, 120)


When I was young, a single man,
And after youthful follies ran,
Though little given to care and thought,
Yet, so it was, a ewe I bought;

(The Last of the Flocks, 124)


She talked and sung the woods among;
And it was in the English tongue.

(The Mad Mother, 128)


Burr, burr—now Johnny’s lips they burr,
As loud as any mill, or near it,
Meek as a lamb and pony moves,
And Johnny makes the noise he loves,
And Betty listens, glad to hear it.

(The Idiot Boy, 134)


Now Johnny all night long had heard
The owls in tuneful concert strive;
No doubt too he the moon had seen;
For in the moonlight he had been
From eight o’clock till five.
/
And thus to Betty’s question, he
Made answer, like a traveler bold,
(His very words I give to you,)
“The cocks did crow to-whoo, to-whoo,
“And the sun did shine so cold.”
—Thus answered Johnny in his glory,
And that was all his travel’s story.

(The Idiot Boy, 145)

Glide gently, thus for ever glide,
O Thames! that other bards may see,

(Lines; written near Richmond, upon the Thames, at Evening, 146)


“Why William, on that old grey stone,
“Thus for the length of half a day,
“Why William, sit you thus alone,
“And dream your time away?
/
“Where are your books? that light bequeath’d
“To beings else forlorn and blind!
“Up! Up! and drink the spirit breath’d
“From dead men to their kind.
/
“You look round on your mother earth,
“As if she for no purpose bore you;
“As if you were her first-born birth,
“And none had lived before you!
/
One morning thus, by Esthwaite lake,
When life was sweet I knew not why,
To me my good friend Matthew spake,
And thus I made reply.
/
“The eye it cannot chuse but see,
“We cannot bid the ear be still;
“Our bodies feel, where’er they be,
“Against, or with our will.
/
“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.
“Think you, mid all this mighty sum
“Of things for ever speaking,
“That nothing of itself will come,
“But we must still be seeking?

(Expostulation and Reply, 148)


Books! ’tis a dull and endless strife,
Come, hear the woodland linnet,
How sweet his music; on my life
There’s more of wisdom in it.
/
And hark! how blithe the throstle sings!
And he is no mean preacher;
Come forth into the light of things,
Let Nature be your teacher.

(The Tables Turned, 149)


One impulse from a vernal word
May teach you more of man;
Of moral evil of good,
Than all the sages can.
/
Sweet is the lore which nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Misshapes the beauteous forms of things;
—We murder to dissect.

(The Tables Turned, 149)

’Tis sorrow enough on that visage to gaze,
That body dismiss’d from his care;
Yet my fancy has pierced to his heart, and pourtrays
More terrible images there.

(The Convict, 154)


Five years have passed; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a sweet inland murmur. —Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
Which on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect
The landscape with the quiet of the sky.

(Tintern Abbey, 156)


…these pastoral farms
Green to the very door, and wreaths of smoke
Sent up, in silence, from among the trees,

(Tintern Abbey, 156)


…Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye and ear, both what they half-create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognize
In nature and the language of the sense,
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.

(Tintrn Abbey, 159)


…Nature never did betray
The heart that loved her; …
…
…neither evil tongues,
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all
The dreary intercourse of daily life,
Shall e’er prevail against us, …

(Tintern Abbey, 160)


…in after years,
When these wild ecstasies shall be matured
Into a sober pleasure, when thy mind
Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms,
Thy memory be as a dwelling-place
For all sweet sounds and harmonies; Oh! then,
If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief,
Should by thy portion, with what healing thoughts
Of tender joy wilt thou remember me,
And these my exhortations! …

(Tintern Abbey, 161)

Edith C. Batho, The Later Wordsworth

Edith C. Batho, The Later Wordsworth. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1933.

“It is important to emphasize that he resumed the practice of Christianity while his theological convictions were still unsettled—before, for example, having arrived at a steady belief in the immortality of the soul. As late as 1805 he still seems to have been struggling towards a confident assurance of an afterlife” (Robert M. Ryan, The Romantic Reformation; Religious politics in English literature, 1789-1824. p. 98)

“A fair specimen of the average conscientious High Church parish priest is the Rev. William Cole, as we know him from his diaries. All the materials for the Tractarian Revival are there: the strong historical sense, passing into antiquarianism, the sense of duty towards the spiritual needs of his parishioners, the sense of the Church, he sacramental sense leading to a strong sympathy with Roman Catholicism on the sides of religious devotion and ceremonial” (Batho 240)

“It is clear from everything he wrote that, bred an Anglican, he was not bred either a Low Churchman or an Evangelical” “High Churchmen with the characteristic regret for the destruction at the Reformation of so much that was noble, there characteristic wish to revive it, the characteristic respect for the religious devotion of Roman Catholics, and the characteristic dislike for the Roman Church” (240-241)

“why, Hale White wondered, should Wordsworth in The Ecclesiastical Sonnets, after a series of sonnets celebrating the liturgy, write one on Mutability? ‘Is mutability, then, so characteristic of things ecclesiastical that when the thoughts are turned to them it naturally presents itself?’ Hale White was not a Churchman, or he would have knows that the answer was ‘Yes’. There are at least three places in the Prayer Books which consider that precise point of the mutability of rites and ceremonies” (243)

The High Church might at the times, with more or less justice, be accused of dryness and formality, but that very insistence on external forms and obligations would have the effect of impressing upon a man brought up in it the possible existence of truths which were not at every moment emotionally felt or believed, or received with complete and overpowering intellectual conviction. Even a strong intellectual disagreement, or an emotional desolation, would not make such a man feel that he must exclude himself from the Church; and the Church would not exclude him. (264)

1824. O dearer far. “a poem which means nothing at all if it does not mean that he envied not only her unhesitating belief in a matter which might be looked upon as an open question—the belief that we shall recognize in the next life those whom we have loved—but her who religious attitude” (277)

The Ecclesiastical Sonnets are ecclesiastical, therefore, necessarily narrow, bigoted, and not to seriously considered for their poetry. Actually, beside the Mutability sonnet and those on King’s College Chapel, they contain much good poetry…and they are marked by a lofty absence of partisanship which is sufficiently indicated by the fact that, while Crabb Robinson was touched by their fairness to Nonconformists, Hale White and others have been equally struck by their Catholic tone” (292-293)

not seeing W as mystical depends “partly on a general misconception of the mystical attitude, a belief that implies a vague, blurred and sentimental habit of mind, which is obviously far removed from Wordsworth’s definite and unsentimental thought; partly on a failure to understand the successive states of the mystical life” (306-307) no more mystical experiences doesn’t mean you stop being a mystic: “the ecstasies, the intuitions, the ‘consolations’, to use a technical religious term, come at the beginning and may never be repeated” (307) “from about 1795 onwards for several years, a longer period than seems to be usual, the mystical experience was frequently repeated, with deepening significance” (309)

Williard L. Sperry, Wordsworth's Anti-Climax

Willard L. Sperry Wordsworth’s Anti-Climax. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1935.

The Ecclesiastical Sonnets… include some worthy appreciations of Nonconformists—Covenanters and Pilgrim Fathers and others—but are designed to extol the value of the historic English Church. Many of these Sonnets are trivial. The outlook seems too restricted. Yet the whole series is restrained from bigotry by their noblest number, Mutability (48)

Are we not reversing the issues when we ask why Wordsworth wrote mediocre poems for forty years? The real question is, How was Wordsworth able to write good poems for eight or ten years? (30)

No mystic has ever laid claim to constant inspiration…If we allow Wordsworth eight or ten years of inspiration out of his sixty years of productive life, we can only say that, as these matters go, the ratio is in his favor. (31)

…given the parallel of other literary lives, we may dismiss the last twenty, even the last thirty years, of Wordsworth’s life as lying beyond the time when we have normal expectation of first-rate work from a poet. This takes us back to 1820. The period which compasses a culpable anti-climax is shortened to the ten or fifteen years which followed the golden decade. (35)

Abstract theories are once removed from the facts which they profess to explain the normal follow those facts in time. If they antedate the experiences which are their subject they eventually become sterile…The theory, as he formulated it, seemed to throw much light on his own past thoughts and emotions, but his supply of past experiences was limited. (123)

During the golden decade he had used his best material with prodigality. The first books of The Prelude incorporated the matchless little poems about rowing and nutting and skating which were no small part of his most precious heritage from the past… but surely he should have been able to re-stock his mind and heart with fresh source-material for further verse… [yet] Anyone who understands how the human mind works knows that any such conscious and deliberate quest for experience must be self-defeating. (140-141)

Wordsworth said in so many words that he regarded the Church of England as the strongest buttress of the English Constitution, and therefore as necessary to the life of the nation…The church was to him a means to ends, which, if not political, were cultural rather than theological. (186)

After his settlement at Grasmere, his marriage, and the coming of the children, we find Wordsworth, with Dorothy and Mary, back at church. They went, we are told in the journals and letters, mainly for the sake of the children. But they ‘took turns.’” (Sperry 187) “As the children grew up, the dutiful habit of church-going seems to have been relaxed. There is an amusing description of Wordsworth in later life vehemently defending in one breath the Church of England, and then admitting in the next breath that he could not remember when he had last been to church. (188)

high-church propensities: “Crabb Robinson says that Wordsworth moved in this direction because high-churchmen had a greater reverence for antiquity than the evangelicals. (188)

Wordsworth “insisted upon the ‘distinction between religion in poetry and versified religion,’ and refused to venture in the latter field. His Ecclesiastical Sonnets contains fine lines, and was his contribution to the cause of tradition; but it is conventional as history and unimportant as theology. (188)

He loved the Church of England, not because it provided sermons and sacraments, but because it kept in its perpetual care the memory of the successive generations of his fellow-countrymen. Within its acre tradition was powerfully felt and the continuity of the English nation guaranteed. (189)

A. D. Martin, The Religion of Wordsworth

A. D. Martin, The Religion of Wordsworth, George Allen & Unwin Ltd, London, 1936.

Twenty years later he would have hesitated to speak so disparagingly of dogma, nor can we reasonably approve his contempt, for dogma is the considered opinion of a multitude of persons (Martin 11)

“n those earlier days when Wordsworth planned the great work he never accomplished, but for which The Prelude, The Excursion, and The Recluse are parts awaiting assemblance, his position in regard to organized Religion was one of indifference, perhaps even of hostility. Until middle life he seldom attended Christian worship. I do not think he read the Bible deeply or extensively (79-80)

“Jehovah—with his thunder, and the choir/Of shouting Angels, and the empyreal thrones—/I pass them unalarmed” [The Recluse]… I am quite sure that at that time Wordsworth knew very little of ‘Jehovah and the choir of shouting Angels.’ For no one accustomed to Hebrew Religion from within would fail to feel its profound and moral sense of awe for that Deity whose very name might seldom be spoken. (80)

…we should not be disappointed in finding that Wordsworth’s early individualism in religion did not stand the strain of circumstance. Lasting peace is always more readily found through the expression of our inner life conjointly with our fellows. We cannot afford to plough lonely furrows. Our life draws its richest sustenance when it combines an individual with a communal apprehension of God. If there is something pathetic in Wordsworth’s turning at last to his wife’s simple-minded piety for support, as his own inner light faded, there is in this new attitude an instinctive wisdom, the beginning of a recognition that Religion safeguards our humility best when it shows us that stored up is history, in liturgy, in the priestliness of saints, is the food we need for real amplitude of the soul. Here lies the significance of The Ecclesiastical Sonnets…they are evidence of an actual broadening of his sympathies, his growth in personality, as compared with the days when he wrote much better poetry. (Martin)

…the external conditions of his life grew easier…If in such things as these the springs of satisfaction are ever found he should have been happy. But who can think of them so? The mystery of Life and Death haunts every reflective being. What man grows old and is content with a blank mind about the final event in time for him, coming, it may be next week, and most surely within a year or two? Only the abnormal, the morally undeveloped, the imbecile. (81)

The change from what he wrote when twenty-three years of age to the verdict of his seventy-third year represents fifty years of experience, and that in politics seventy-three counts for much, twenty-three for very little. (Martin 40)

The tremendous importance of this new way of quest lay in its opening to him an aspect of life he had never sufficiently considered. In the Areopagitica Milton describes with just scorn the man who, not wishing to be troubled about Religion finds “some divine note and estimation to whose care and credit he may commit the whole managing of his religious affairs”… It was the distinctive glory of Puritanism generally that it knew real religion must be an individual apprehension of God…Hence came that strong, almost boastful assertion in The Recluse which brushed aside Jehovah and his shouting Angels, to find in “the individual mind”…the one authentic source of Truth.

A person who needs to go up to a five-barred gate and push it hard in order to convince himself that there is any reality outside his own mind…is not an ideal man, because his spirit too greatly overflows his body and swamps, so to speak, the body’s contribution to thought. For there are such contributions. Rodin’s famous statue The Thinker, the nude figure of a man of huge muscular development sitting in a brooding attitude, may be an exaggeration, but as a symbol it is true. Every thought of the mind is accompanied by a change in the body. (85)

Brennan O'Donell, The Passion of Meter; A Study of Wordsworth's Metrical Art

Brennan O’Donnell, The Passion of Meter; A Study of Wordsworth’s Metrical Art, The Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio, 1995

Concentration on the image, abandonment of rhyme, calculated unmetricality or arhythmicality, innovative breaking of traditional metrical metrical forms, concrete poetry, the use of typographical means to call attention to the text of the poem as text… (3)

…criticism of poetry in the past seventy years has, as David Perkins argues, “devoted itself largely to explaining and defending” contemporary tendencies… (3)

The elegance of Surrey falls on deaf ears, whereas Wyatt’s more “modern” roughness draws praise; the rhythms of Donne and Browning make those of Herbert and Tennyson seem merely tame by comparison. (3)

Many approaches to poetry recently in favor—among them the various “cultural studies” methods—tend to discourage any critical approach that values literary language as a consciously and intentionally shaped medium significantly set apart from other kinds of “discourse.” (3)

The Preface to Lyrical Ballads (with its appen-[3]dix) has become a lens through which Wordsworth’s attitudes toward metrical art have been viewed, despite Wordsworth’s explicit claims that its arguments are applicable primarily to the poems originally published as Lyrical Ballads. Complicating the issues raised in the Preface, too, in Coleridge’s influential disparagement of its arguments. (3-4)

His most characteristic lines are perfectly traditional accentual-syllabic decasyllabics or octosyllabics. Even the most cursory survey of his selection and use of verse forms shows that he regarded regular, traditional, and recognizable verse patterns and stanzas as important means for framing his own individual voices. (4)

In a postromantic climate in which originality tends to be equated with breaking through or out of the old, such tendencies seem to be at [4] odds with the image of the revolutionary Wordsworth, who according to Hazlitt heralded an age in which “rhyme was looked upon as a relic of the feudal system, and regular meter was abolished along with regular government.” [“Lectures on the English Poets, VIII: On the Living Poets,” in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe (London: Dutton, 1930-34), 5:162.] … Blake’s long line in the “prophetic” books provides an example of romantic metrical form as originating with the individual poet. (One must make one’s own meter or be enslaved to another’s.) In comparison with such manifestos and such practice, Wordsworth’s versification lends itself to censure as representing at least a partial failure to effect a genuinely “romantic” liberation of the spirit of poetry from its exile in the Egypt of its own remembered past. / The most influential late-nineteenth – and early-twentieth-century compendium of prosodic opinion, George Saintsbury’s monumental History of English Prosody, is also (unfortunately for Wordsworth’s critical reception) an excellent example of this kind of thinking. For Saintsbury, Blake and, especially Coleridge led the way in establishing a “romantic revival.” They liberated English verse from a numerical conception of the line (a syllabic prosody in which the number of total syllables in the line is strictly governed) and instituted a foot-based prosody that, in allowing latitude in the total number of syllables so long as the number and placement of stressed syllables remains consistent, is more adaptable to the actual qualities of spoken English. The Coleridge of Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Christabel is figuratively the hero of Saintsbury’s providential history… Coleridge’s verse helps to make possible Shelley, Browning, and [5] Swinburne (3:60). … “In no great poet does prosody play so small a part” (3:74). / This study argues for Field’s ear against Saintsbury’s. It argues, that is, for the desirability of an ear open to the possibility of important and unexpected sources of interest and creative tension in the metrical forms the sensuous patterns of Wordsworth’s verse (whether or not these are anticipator of later developments)… (5-6)

…reassess what Wordsworth actually said about the significance of meter… in contrast to what he commonly taken to have said… The poet’s duty to give pleasure restricts him in matters of versification to … a severely limited range of fixed, familiar, and conventional patters of arrangement of sound and rhythm. At the same time, Wordsworth’s definition of a poem as a “spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling” commits him to a language organized according to the dictates of a genuinely motivating passion. This language is vitally rhythmic (as is all passionate expression) but innocent of the abstract metrical forms of literary convention. Wordsworth describes the poet as an artist who engages in a process of “fitting” the syntax and rhythms of impassioned speech to the conventional arrangements of metrical form… This notion of tense opposition between what Wordsworth calls the “passion of the sense” (or “passion of the subject”) and the “passion of [7] meter” marks a significant distinction between Wordsworth’s theories and the better-known (and widely embraced and promulgated) theories of Coleridge. Coleridge describes successful metrical art as involving the reconciliation of tensions within an overarching unity of effect. (7-8)

Wordsworth…complex oppositional relationship between artfully structured language in metrical forms and the actual language of passion. According to this view, metrical form does not function solely (as it does for Coleridge) as one among many indications of a heightened state of passion; it is (or can be) a kind of counter-presence in the poem, … Thus, Wordsworth’s theory properly understood encompasses the Coleridgean notion of successful metrical composition as productive of a unified whole in which tensions are fully reconciled (a unity in multeity) but does not limit its definition to this one possibility. (8)

…Wordsworth denies his reader the comfort of taking for granted the function of meter in any one poem or body of [8] poems. (8-9)

He learned the basics of his craft during a period remarkable for its uniformity of practice and opinion and published his major work in a climate of intense debate about the nature and function—and even value—of verse. By the time he died, practice and theory in England were both characterized as pervasively by diversity and experimentation as they were by uniformity in his youth. In Wordsworth’s youth, the heroic couplets of Dryden, Waller, and especially Pope had defined the technical limits of the heroic line. Edward Bysshe’s Art of English Poetry ruled the day. The heroic line contained ten syllables and ten syllables only; hypermetrical syllables were not allowed, were routinely lopped off by contraction or elision, and were, in for subject to one or another rule for syllabic reduction, mightily offensive to the ear of the cultivated reader. Even-numbered syllables were stressed; odd were not (with only a few variations allowed). Pauses [9] were to be employed midline, after the fourth, fifth, or sixth syllable. Run-on lines were discouraged. These practices were so firmly institutionalized by the 1770s that Samuel Johnson could proclaim, apparently without a tinge of irony, that to attempt improvements beyond what Pope had been able to accomplish would be “dangerous.” / During Wordsworth’s lifetime, English literature saw many “dangerous” attempts at improvement. Critics argued against Pope’s contradiction and elisions as unnatural and called for looser restrictions on the number of syllables admitted per line… Milton’s blank verse—heavily indebted to Italian models, and to many eighteenth-century ears exceedingly wild and sublime—was increasingly cited as a musically various, liberating alternative to Dryden’s urbanity and correctness. The greater availability of more accurate texts of the elder English poets—especially of Chaucer and Shakespeare—meant that more and more the model on which poets’ formed their style was English rather than classical. A vogue for popular English and Scottish song and balladry brought verse from an oral and musical tradition into respectability—and the romantic poets drew freely on the language, and eventually on the rhythms, of Bishop Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, Robert Burns’s Highland songs, Scott’s Minstrelsy of Scottish Border, and other collections of “extraliterary” verse. (9-10)

…Wordsworth persisted for the most part in writing relatively strict accentual-syllabic verse in the midst of this rapid change. By the 1840s, Wordsworth was admitting that he could not accustom his ear to the “freer movement” of the accentual verse of younger poets, … by the mid- to late century, those subtleties of his verse that stem from his strict adherence to tradition (elision of extrametrical syllables and a uniform placement of stress that makes small variation significant, for example) were already becoming lost on most readers (as they certainly are lost on Saintsbury). (10)

William Wordsworth, Ecclesiastical Sketches

William Wordsworth, Ecclesiastical Sketches, in Sonnet Series and Itinerary Poems, 1820-1845, Ed. Geoffrey Jackson, Cornell Univeristy Press, Ithaca, 2004

LAMENT! For Dioclesian’s fiery sword
Works busy as the lightning; …

(I.VI. Persecution)


As, when a storm hath ceased, the birds regain
Their cheerfulness, and busily retrim
Their nests, or chaunt a gratulating hymn
To the blue ether and bespangled plain;
Even so, in many a re-constructed fane,
Have the Survivors of this Storm renewed
Their holy rites with vocal gratitude;
And solemn ceremonials they ordain
To celebrate their great deliverance;
Most feelingly instructed ’mid their their fear,
That persecution, blind with rage extreme,
May not the less, thro’ Heaven’s mild countenance,
Even in her own despite, both feed and cheer;
For all things are less dreadful than they seem.

(I.VII. Recovery)


…Shun the insidious arts
That Rome provides, less dreading from her frown
Than from her wily praise, her peaceful gown,
Language, and letters;—these, tho’ fondly viewed
As humanizing graces, are but parts
And instruments of deadliest servitude!

(I.VIII. Temptations from Roman Refinements)


…But Heaven’s high will
Permits a second and a darker shade
Of Pagan night. Afflicted and dismayed,
The Relics of the sword flee to the mountains:
O wretched Land, whose tears have flowed like fountains!

(I.XI. Saxon Conquest)

“MAN’S life is like a Sparrow, mighty King!
“That, stealing in while by the fire you sit
“Housed with rejoicing Friends, is seen to flit
“Safe from the storm, in comfort tarrying.
“Here did it enter—there, on hasty wing
“Flies out, and passes on from cold to cold;
“But whence it came we know not, nor behold
“Whither it goes. Even such that transient Thing,
“The Human Soul; not utterly unknown
“While in the Body lodged, her warm abode;
“But from what world She came, what woe or weal
“On her departure waits, no tongue hath shewn;
“This mystery if the Stranger can reveal,
“His be a welcome cordially bestowed!”

(I.XVI. Persuasion)


Death, darkness, danger, are our natural lot;
And evil Spirits may our walk attend
For aught the wisest know or comprehend;
Then let the good be free to breathe a note
Of elevation…

(I.XVIII. Apology)


METHINKS that to some vacant Hermitage
My feet would rather turn—to some dry nook
Scoop’d out of living rock, and near a brook
Hurl’d down a mountain-cove from stage to stage,
Yet tempering, for my sight, its bustling rage
In the soft heaven of a translucent pool;

(I.XXII. Continued)


BUT what if One, thro’ grove of flowery mead,
Indulging thus at will the creeping feet
Of a voluptuous indolence, should meet
The hovering Shade of venerable Bede;
…
Sublime Recluse!
The recreant soul, that dares to shun the debt
Imposed on human kind, must first forget
Thy diligence, …

(I.XXIII. Reproof)


As with the stream our voyage we pursue
The gross materials of this world present
A marvelous study of wild accident;

(I.XXXVI. Papal Abuses)


For where, but on this River’s margin, blow
Those flowers of Chivalry, to bind the brow
Of hardihood with wreaths and shall not fail?
Fair Court of Edward! wonder of the world!
I see a matchless blazonry unfurled
Of wisdom, magnanimity, and love;

(II.IV. Continued)

ENOUGH! For see, with dim association
The tapers burn; the odorous incense feeds
A greedy flame; the pompous mass proceeds;
The Priest bestows the appointed consecration;
And, while the Host is raised, its elevation
An awe and supernatural horror breeds,
And all the People bow their heads like reeds,
To a soft breeze, in lowly adoration.
This Valdo brook’d not. On the bands of Rhone
He taught, till persecution chased him thence,
To adore the Invisible, and Him alone.
Nor were his Followers loth to seek defence,
’Mid woods and wilds, on Nature’s craggy throne,
From rites that trample upon soul and sense.

(II.VI. Transubstantiation)


YET more,—round many a Convent’s blazing fire
Unhallowed threads of revelry are spun;
There Venus sits disguis[e]d like a Nun,—
While Bacchus, clothed in semblance of a Friar,
Pours out his choicest beverage high and higher,
Sparkling, until it cannot chuse but run
Over the bowl, whose silver lip hath won
An instant kiss of masterful desire—
To stay the precious waste. In every brain
Spreads the dominion of the sprightly juice,
Through the wide world to madding Fancy dear,
Till the arch’d roof, with resolute abuse,
Of its grave echoes, swells a choral strain,
Whose votive burthen is—“OUR KINGDOM’S HERE!”

(II.XIII. Monastic Voluptuousness)


THREATS come which no submission may assuage;
No sacrifice avert, no power dispute;
The tapers shall be quenched, the belfries mute,
And, ’mid their choirs unroofed by selfish rage,
The warbling wren shall find a leafy cage;

(II.XIV. Dissolution of the Monasteries)


The lovely Nun (submissive but more meek
Through saintly habit, than from effort due
To unrelenting mandates that pursue
With equal wrath the steps of strong and weak)
Goes forth—unveiling timidly her cheek
Suffused with blushes of celestial hue,
While through the Convent gate to open view
Softly she glides, another home to seek.

(II.XV. The Same Subject)


NOT utterly unworthy to endure
Was the supremacy of crafty Rome;
…
…and, therefore, to the tomb
Pass, some through fire—and by the scaffold some—
Like saintly Fisher, and unbending More.
…More’s gay genius played
With the inoffensive sword of native wit,
Than the bare axe more luminous and keen.

(II.XIX. Apology)


GRANT, that by this unsparing Hurricane
Green leaves with yellow mixed are torn away,
And goodly fruitage with the mother spray,
’Twere madness—wished we, therefore, to detain,
With farewell sighs of mollified disdain,
The “trumpery” that ascends in bare display,—
…
Hence, with the spiritual sovereignty transferred
Unto itself, the Crown assumes a voice
Of reckless mastery, hitherto unknown.

(II.XXI. Reflections)


SCATTERING, like Birds escaped in Fowler’s net,
Some seek with timely flight a foreign strand,
Most happy, re-assembled in a land
By dauntless Luther freed, could they forget
Their Country’s woes. …

(II.XXVII. English Reformers in Exile)
HAIL, Virgin Queen! o’er many an envious bar
Triumphant—snatched from many a treacherous wile!
All hail, Sage Lady, whom a grateful Isle
Hath blest, respiring form that dismal war
Stilled by thy voice! But quickly from afar
Defiance breathes with more malignant aim;
And alien storms with home-bred ferments claim
Portentous fellowship. Her silver car
Meanwhile, by prudence ruled, glides slowly on;
Unhurt by violence; from menaced taint
Emerging pure, and seemingly more bright!
For, wheresoe’er she moves, the clouds anon
Disperse; or—under a Divine constraint—
Reflect some portion of her glorious light!

(II.XXVIII. Elizabeth)

…Weep, oh weep,
As good men wept beholding King and Priest
Despised by that stern God to whom they raise
Their suppliant hands; but holy is the feast
He keepeth; like the firmament his ways;
His statutes like the chambers of the deep.

(II.XXXVI. Afflictions of England)

WHO comes with rapture greeted, and caress’d
With frantic love—his kingdom to regain?
Him Virtue’s Nurse, Adversity, in vain
Received, and fostered in her iron breast:
For all she taught of hardiest and of best,
Or would have taught, by discipline of pain
And long privation, now dissolves amain,
Or is remembered only to give zest
To wantonness. –Away, Circean revels!
Already stands our Country on the brink
Of bigot rage, that all distinction levels
Of truth and falsehood,…

(III.III. Charles the Second)


YES, if the intensities of hope and fear
Attract us still, and passionate exercise
Of lofty thoughts, the way before us lies
Distinct with signs—through which, in fixed career,
As through a zodiac, moves the ritual year
Of England’s Church—stupendous mysteries!

(III.XII. The Liturgy)


FROM low to high doth dissolution climb,
And sinks from high to low, along a scale
Of awful notes, whose concord shall not fail;
A musical but melancholy chime,
Which they can hear who meddle not with crime,
Nor avarice, nor over-anxious care.
Truth fails not; but her outward forms that bear
The longest date do melt like frosty rime,
That in the morning whitened hill and plain
And is no more; drop like the tower sublime
Of yesterday, which royally did wear
Its crown of weeds, but could not even sustain
Some casual shout that broke the silent air,
Or the unimaginable touch of Time.

(III.XVI. Mutability)


MINE ear has rung, my spirits sunk subdued,
Sharing the strong emotion of the crowd,
When each pale brow to dread hosannas bowed
While clouds of incense mounting veiled the rood,
That glimmered like a pine-tree dimly viewed
Through Alpine vapours. Such appalling rite
Our Church prepares not, trusting to the might
Of simple truth with grace divine imbued;
Yet will we not conceal the precious Cross,
Like Men ashamed: …

(III.XXI. Continued)


The music bursteth into second life—
The notes luxuriate—every stone is kiss’d
By sound, or ghost of sound…

(III.XXV. The Same)


…Look forth! that Stream behold,
That Stream upon whose bosom we have pass’d
Floating at ease while nations have effaced
Nations, and Death has gathered to his fold
Long lines of mighty Kings—look forth, my Soul!
(Nor in that vision be thou slow to trust)
The living Waters, less and less by guilt
Stained and polluted, brighten as they roll,
Till they have reached the Eternal City—built
For the perfected Spirits of the just!

(III.XXVIII. Conclusion)

M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism

M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, W. W. Norton & Co., New York, 1971

M. H. Abrams’s 1971 book Natural Supernaturalism takes its title from the tendency in English and German literature and philosophy of the Romantic period to naturalize Christian modes of thinking. This book centers on Wordsworth because “(as his English contemporaries acknowledged, with whatever qualifications) [he] was the great and exemplary poet of the age” (14). Abrams considers Wordsworth the prime example, and Shelley, Blake, Coleridge, Novalis, Holderlin, Goethe, Schiller, Hegel and Fichte supporting examples, of a kind of thinking, stemming from a Christian tradition, that results in a distinctive relationship to revolution, and in an apparent deletion of God from the classic triangle of God, Mind, and Nature.

Abrams offers a Christian approach to history underlying the Romantic approach to history. Distinctive features of Biblical history are that: 1) it is finite, where events occur only once and in a single temporal span; 2) it has a plot, with a beginning, middle, and end, 3) the plot of Biblical history has a hidden author, 4) change in Biblical history is characterized by abrupt events and turns, and 5) Biblical history is symmetrical, beginning with a paradise and ending with a paradise. The gradual secularization of Western culture has not been the product of the loss of a Christian understanding of history, but of the translation of that understanding in ways which are not obviously Christian. Wordsworth’s narrator in the Prelude and The Recluse, for example, follows a path of growth paralleling the Biblical history of mankind. Before the fall, the narrator is in a state of youthful innocence, united with the natural world. The narrator experiences tremendous growing pains as he is cast out of blissful innocence and develops self-consciousness and a capacity to think analytically. No longer united to nature, the narrator feels isolated and pained. The pains are fortunate and justified, ultimately, because the maturity behind self-consciousness can provide the narrator a means to win back his integrity, reunite with nature, and experience a paradise exceeding the original paradise.

Two features of Biblical history that resonate for Wordsworth, as they have resonated for his poetic and religious predecessors, are the apocalypse and the prodigal return. If the French Revolution and its subsequent failure did not bring about an earthly apocalypse, it brought about a spiritual apocalypse for Wordsworth’s narrator in The Prelude, wherein his very identity is changed from man of action to prophetic poet. The supposition that the world would change as a result of the revolution evolved into the conviction that Wordsworth would change himself. The theme of the Prodigal Son underpinned Wordsworth’s eventual return, a changed man in a changed world, to his home at Grasmere.

In spite of the Romantic deletion of God from the triangle of God, mind and nature, the Romantic relation to Christianity can still be characterized by more commonalities than differences.

“It is a historical commonplace that the course of Western thought since the Renaissance has been one of progressive secularization, but it is easy to mistake the way in which that process took place…The process—outside the exact sciences at any rate—has not been the deletion and replacement of religious ideas, but rather the assimilation and reinterpretation of religious ideas… Much of what distinguishes writers I call ‘Romantic’ derives from the fact that they undertook, whatever their religious creed or lack of creed, to save traditional concepts, schemes, and values which had been based on the relation of the Creator to his creature and creation, but to reformulate them within the prevailing two-term system of subject and object, ego and non-ego, the human mind or consciousness and its transaction with nature. Despite their displacement from a supernatural to a natural frame of reference, however, the ancient problems, terminology, and ways of thinking about human nature and history survived… (13)

“The Prospectus is an instance of the visionary style in which, according to a view until recently current, Wordsworth is held to indulge his penchant for resounding sublimities is hiding logical evasions behind vague phrasing and lax syntax. But let us assume that in a crucial passage so long meditated, so often written, and so emphatically stated, Wordsworth knew what he was saying… (20)

“A. C. Bradley long ago laid down an essential rule for understanding Wordsworth: ‘The road into Wordsworth’s mind must be through his strangeness and his paradoxes, and not round them’ (“Wordsworth”, Oxford Lectures on Poetry, London, reprinted 1950, p. 101)

Not only was Wordsworth the great and exemplary poet of his age, his ambition, at least for The Recluse, was “perhaps the most remarkable, and certainly one of the most grandiose, ever undertaken by a major writer” (19). Wordsworth’s equivalent of hell, a hell within the self, was deeper and darker than the Christian hell, and his conception of heaven was of one capable of producing a more profound joy and satisfaction than the Christian heaven. In justifying human suffering (according to an idea of personal growth), Wordsworth outdoes Milton’s justification of the ways of God to men, because the scope of Wordsworth’s cosmos exceeds that of Milton’s. On Wordsworth’s relation to the canon, he “remarked to Henry Crabb Robinson that ‘when he resolved to be a poet, [he] feared competition only with Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton.’ Of these poets, however, Chaucer and Shakespeare exemplify what Wordsworth called ‘the human and dramatic Imagination’; while it is Spenser, and above all Milton, who exemplify the ‘enthusiastic and meditative Imagination’ against which Wordsworth persistently measured his own enterprise” (22).

“William Blake, who respected Wordsworth enough to read him closely and take his claims seriously, told Henry Crabb Robinson, in whimsical exasperation, that this passage […when we look/Into our Minds, into the Mind of Man—/My haunt, and the main region of my song.] ‘caused him a bowel complain which nearly killed him.’ ‘Does Mr. Wordsworth think his mind can surpass Jehovah?’ To which the answer is, ‘No, he did not,’ any more than he thought himself a greater poet than Milton. What Wordsworth claims is that the mind of man is a terra incognita which surpasses in its terrors and sublimities, hence in the challenge it poses to its poetic explorer, the traditional subject matter of Milton’s Christian epic. Blake took offense at Wordsworth’s literary enterprise because it paralleled his own, but deviated on its crucial issue of naturalism. For in his Milton (1804-1810) Blake too had undertaken, as the epigraph said, ‘To Justify the Ways of God to Men’ by his own imaginative revision of the doctrines of Paradise Lost. (25)

“the more we attend to the claims of some of Wordsworth’s major contemporaries, in Germany as well as in England, the less idiosyncratic do Wordsworth’s pronouncements seem… radically to recast, in terms appropriate to the historical and intellectual circumstances of their own age, the Christian pattern of the fall, the redemption, and the emergence of a new earth which will constitute a restored paradise. … In his Dejection: An Ode Coleridge wrote that the inner condition of total vitality he called ‘Joy’, … wedding Nature to us, gives in dower/A new Earth and Heaven… Blake prefaced the concluding chapter of Jerusalem with the voice of the Bard arousing Albion from his ‘sleep of death’, so that he may unite with his separate female emanation… The poem closes with the dawn of the ‘Eternal Day’ of a universal resurrection in a restored paradise, … At the conclusion of Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound the regeneration of man in a renovated world has for its central symbol the union of Prometheus and Asia,… In a climactic passage of Holderlin’s Hyperion the young poet-hero, inspired, cries out to ‘holy Nature’... A rejuvenated people will make thee young again, too, and thou wilt be as its bride…Ther will be only one beauty, and man and Nature will unite in one all-embracing divinity. … In one of his Fragments Novalis also stated flatly that all ‘the higher philosophy is concerned with the marriage of Nature and Mind’. The philosopher Schelling looks forward to just such a union between intellect and nature, as well as to the poet-seer adequate to sing this great consummation in an epic poem (29-31)

The Bible’s account of history “has assimilated elements from various environing cultures, but in its totality, and in accordance with the way that the earthly events are successively recalled and interpreted in the later books, it embodies a pattern of history which is profoundly distinctive…as against the Greco-Roman views” (34-35).

“The imagery and themes of the Apocalypse so permeated the depths of Milton’s imagination that he derived as many literary images from the Book of Revelation as from the three Synoptic Gospels together. A similar claim can be make for Spenser” (38).

“…the coming of the new heaven and new earth is signalized by the marriage between Christ and the heavenly city, his bride… The longing of mankind for apocalypse is appropriately expressed as an urgent invitation to the wedding… while those who are destined for the new heaven and earth are represented as guests who have been invited to the wedding feast… roots in the ancient Old Testament concept of marriage as a form of covenant, and the consequent representation of the Lord’s particular covenant with Israel by the metaphor of a marriage between the people and the Lord (Proverbs 2:17; Malachi 2:4-14). By easy metaphoric inference, the violation of this marriage covenant by Israel was figured as her sexual infidelity, adultery, or whoredom with idols and strange gods, of which the condign penalty for the bride is to be divorced from God and sent into exile; although with promise of a future reunion between the repentant and purified nation (or by metonymy, the purified land, or the renovated city of Jerusalem)… (42-43)

“Book I of The Faerie Queene. The prototype for the plot and symbolic elements of this work is the Book of Revelation. The Red Cross Knight escapes the wiles of the false bride, Duessa, the Whore of Babylon; is granted a vision of the New Jerusalem, ‘Whore is for thee ordained a blessed end’; assaults and, after a long struggle, slays the ‘old Dragon’, thereby lifting the long siege of the king and queen (Adam and Eve) and reopening access to the land called Eden; and at the end is ceremoniously betrothed to the true bride, Una, radiant with ‘heavenlie beautie’. In one of its dimensions this ‘continued Allegory, or darke conceit’ signifies the historical Advent of Christ, whose coming victory over the dragon and marriage to the bride will herald the restoration of Eden to all elected mankind; in another dimension, however, it signifies the quest, temptation, struggle, triumph, and redemptive marriage to the one true faith which is acted out within the spirit of each believing Christian. (49)

The most detailed development of spiritual eschatology, however, is to be found not in the allegorists, but among the writers whom we know as Christian mystics… often in sensuous imagery suggested by the Song of Songs… death and renovation of the old self by means of a ‘spiritual marriage’ of the soul as sponsa Dei to Christ as Bridegroom, in a unio passionalis which sometimes is set forth in metaphors of physical lovemaking, or even of violent sexual assault (Donne, Batter my heart, three-personed God)… The violence of a wrathful but loving God, the conflict with the forces of evil embodies in one adversary, the destruction of the created world in an immense conflagratio (a detail from 2 Peter 3:10) in order to make it new (Revelation 21:5 Behold I make all things new), and ultimate marriage with the Bridegroom, represented as a rape of the longingly reluctant soul—all these elements, which had long since become commonplaces of Christian devotion. (50-51)

Paul, at Damascus, and Augustine, outside Milan, both “internalized the theater of events from the outer earth and heaven to the spirit…in which there enacts itself, metaphorically, the entire eschatological drama of the destruction of the old creation, the union with Christ, and the emergence of a new creation…here and now, in this life” (47).

“Francis Bacon’s views on progress are especially relevant, because he was held in extraordinary esteem by Wordsworth, and by Coleridge and Shelley as well…Like the early Christian apologists, Bacon saw the cyclical theory as the specific enemy of his mission: “By far the greatest obstacle to the progress of science” is the despair engendered by the supposition… He undertakes, on the contrary, ‘to give hope’; in this task ‘the beginning is from God,’ as is its destined end… Bacon’s scheme is that of the readily possible (or as he suggests in the passage I have quoted, the providentially necessary and inevitable) advance in man’s mastery over nature… The fall, Bacon says, had a double aspect, one moral and the other cognitive, for man ‘fell at the same time from his state of innocency and from his dominion over creation. Both of these losses however can even in this life be in some part repaired: the former by religion and faith, the latter by arts and science.’ Man’s cognitive fall was occasioned by the loss of ‘that pure and uncorrupted natural knowledge whereby Adam gave names to the creatures according to their propriety,’ and this loss represented a divorce and separation of mind from nature, or (in terms of the mental powers involved) of the empirical sense from reason. (59-60)

“Oliver Cromwell himself expressed his persuasion that ‘I am one of those whose heart of God hath drawne out to waite for some extraordinary dispensations, according to those promises that hee hath held forth of thinges to bee accomplished in the later time, and I canott butt thinke that God is beginning of them’ (64)

“The concept and conduct of local rebellion against an oppressive individual or group or nation have doubtless occurred at all times and in all places. But peculiarly Western, and relatively recent, are the doctrine and trial of a total revolution, which is conceived to possess many, or all of these attributes: (1) the revolution will, by an inescapable and cleansing explosion of violence and destruction, reconstitute the existing political, social, and moral order absolutely, … (2) bring about abruptly… the shift from the present era of profound evil, suffering, and disorder to an era of peace, justice, and optimal conditions for general happiness; (3) it will be led by a militant elite… (4) it will by irresistible contagion spread everywhere… (5) its benefits will endure for a very long time, perhaps forever” (62).

“If we nonetheless remain unaware of the full extent to which characteristic concepts and patterns of Romantic philosophy and literature are displaced and reconstituted theology…that is because we still live in what is essentially, although in derivative rather than direct manifestations, a Biblical culture, and readily mistake our heredity ways of organizing experience for the conditions of reality and the universal forms of thought” (65-66).

The Prelude is a fully developed poetic equivalent of…the Bildungsroman (Wordsworth called The Prelude a poem on ‘the growth of my own mind’) and the Kunstlerroman (Wordsworth also spoke of it as ‘a poem on my own poetical education’” (74).

The narrator experiences these growing pains in both in beautiful and fearful settings. Fearful settings, quite interestingly, such as “Mountains and other wild, waste places were the product not of divine benevolence but of human depravity, for they had been wreaked by the wrath of a just God at the original fall of man, in Eden, or alternatively (in some commentators, additionally) they had been effected by the devastating flood with which He punished the all-but-universal corruption of mankind” (99), according to Thomas Burnet’s The Sacred Theory of the Earth, a book whose author was often compared to Milton and who was esteemed by Coleridge.

“John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography is an austerely secular account of his intellectual development…introduction to Wordsworth’s collective Poems of 1815. These were ‘a medicine,’ says Mill, ‘for my state of mind,’… Especially important was the Intimations Ode… ‘I found the he too had had similar experience to mind; that he also had felt that the first freshness of youthful enjoyment of life was not lasting; but that he had sought for compensation, and found it, in the way in which he was now teaching me to find it. The result was that I gradually, but completely, emerged from my habitual depression, and was never again subject to it’. (136)

‘when William James fell into a spiritual crisis, it was ‘the immortal Wordsworth’s Excursion’ which helped rescue him. (138)

“The apologue of the Prodigal Son was a special favorite among Neoplatonic theologians…The basic categories of characteristic post-Kantian philosophy, and of the thinking of many philosophical-minded poets, can be viewed as highly elaborated and sophisticated variations upon the Neoplatonic paradism of a primal unity and goodness, an emanation into multiplicity which is ipso facto a lapse into evil and suffering, and a return to unity and goodness” (166-169).

Abrams provides a useful classification of Romantic-era philosophy as (1) “self-moving and self-sustaining…a dynamic process which is driven by an internal source of motion to its own completion”; (2) “in no way random, nor [permissive of] any essential options”; (3) “primarily a metaphysics of integration, of which the key principle is that of the ‘reconciliation,’ or synthesis, of whatever is divided”; (4) epistemological and cognitive “to an extraordinary degree…even though [it] undertook to account for the totality of the universe”; and (5) linked with literature as “at no other place and time” (172-192).

“After Kant and Schiller it became a standard procedure for the major German philosophers to show that the secular history of mankind is congruent with the Biblical story of the loss and future recovery of paradise; to interpret that story as a mythical representation of man’s departure from the happiness of ignorance and self-unity into multiple divisions and conflicts attendant upon the emergence of self-consciousness, free decision, and the analytic intellect; to equate the fall, so interpreted, with the beginning of speculative philosophy itself” (217).

“Holderlin… Late in 1795 he drafted a Preface to his novel-in-progress Hyperion, which summarized the intention of the work as it then stood… which turns out to have been a necessary departure on the way back to a higher reunion… ‘We all pass through an eccentric path, and there is no other way possible from childhood to consummation’ … But as in Schiller, so in Holderlin, absolute unity between the self and severed nature is an infinite goal…it can be ever more closely approached but never entirely achieved… (237-238)

“While Romantic poets agree in the use of ‘love’ to signify the spectrum of attraction and relationship, they differ markedly in their choice of the specific type of relationship which serves as the paradigm for all other types. In Coleridge, for example, friendship tends to be the paradigmatic form, and he represents sexual love as an especially intense kind of confraternity. Wordsworth’s favored model is maternal love, and the development of relationship in The Prelude is from the babe in his mother’s arms to the all-inclusive ‘love more intellectual’, which is higher than any love that ‘is human merely.’ In Holderlin all human relations, including sexual love, are largely subsumed under the agape, or primitive Christian love feast, as the elemental form. ‘A vision that haunts all Holderlin’s poetry,’ Ronald Peacock has said, is that of ‘the community, a people having common bonds and a common speech, gathered together to celebrate in a poetic festival its gods’… What makes the fusion of all affinities into love especially conspicuous in Shelley (as, among German poets, in Novalis) is that his persistent paradigm is sexual love, with the result that in his poetry all types of human and extrahuman attraction—all forces that hold the physical, mental, moral, and social universe together—are typically represented…erotic attraction and sexual union. (297-298)

“For Karl Marx the course of history has been an inevitable movement from a prehistoric stage of primitive communism through progressive stages, determined by altering modes of production, of the division and conflict of classes. This movement will terminate (after the penultimate stage of capitalism shall have played out its fate in total revolution) in return to communism, but in a mature form which will preserve the productive values achieved during the intervening stages of development” (313).

“In Catholic France the Revolution, conceived mainly in terms of the rationalism of the Enlightenment, had been grounded on a supposedly empirical science of history and of man… Most English radicals, on the other hand, were Protestant Nonconformists, and for them the portent of the Revolution reactivated the millennialism of their left-wing Puritan ancestors in the English civil war” (330-331).

The Nicene Creed I grew up reciting

Nicene Creed: The First Council of Nicaea was a council of Christian bishops convened in Nicaea in Bithynia (present-day İznik in Turkey) by the Roman Emperor Constantine I in 325 CE. The Council was historically significant as the first effort to attain consensus in the church through an assembly representing all of Christendom.

The Nicene Creed was adopted in the face of the Arian controversy. Arius, a Libyan preacher, had declared that although Jesus Christ was divine, God had actually created him, and there was a time when he was not. This made Jesus less than the Father and contradicted the doctrine of the Trinity. [3] Arius's teaching provoked a serious crisis.
The Nicene Creed of 325 explicitly affirms the divinity of Jesus, applying to him the term "God". The 381 version speaks of the Holy Spirit as worshipped and glorified with the Father and the Son. The Athanasian Creed describes in much greater detail the relationship between Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The Apostles' Creed, not formulated in reaction to Arianism, makes no explicit statements about the divinity of the Son and the Holy Spirit, but, in the view of many who use it, the doctrine is implicit in it.

The Nicene Creed I grew up reciting, according to wikipedia, is a 1973 draft for an ecumenical version.
The version of the Roman Missal used in the United States was prepared before the 1975 ICET (International Consultation on English Texts) text of the Creed was decided: it contains an earlier (1973) ICET draft. The points (apart from an American spelling) where it differs from the later version, used by the Catholic Church elsewhere, are here indicated in italics.
"Of one Being with the Father" (1975) replaced "one in Being with the Father" (1973), which, when spoken, could be confused with "one, in being with the Father".
"He became incarnate from the Virgin Mary, and was made man" (1975) replaced "He was born of the Virgin Mary, and became man" (1973): neither Greek "σαρκωθέντα" nor Latin "incarnatus" means "born", and the 1973 text linked hominization ("became man") with birth ("he was born").
"He suffered death and was buried" (1975) replaced "he suffered, died, and was buried" (1973): "παθόντα" in Greek and "passus" in Latin are indicative of a suffering demise; but the 1973 draft inserted an extra verb, "died", not present in the original Greek or Latin.

We believe in one God,
the Father, the Almighty
maker of heaven and earth,
of all that is seen and unseen.
We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
the only Son of God,
eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made,
one in Being with the Father.
Through him all things were made.
For us men and for our salvation
he came down from heaven
by the power of the Holy Spirit
he was born of the Virgin Mary, and became man.
For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate;
he suffered, died, and was buried.
On the third day he rose again
in fulfillment of the Scriptures;
he ascended into heaven
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead,
and his kingdom will have no end.
We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of Life,
who proceeds from the Father and the Son.
With the Father and the Son he is worshiped and glorified.
He has spoken through the Prophets.
We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church.
We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.
We look for the resurrection of the dead,
and the life of the world to come. Amen.



Apostles' Creed: The title, Symbolum Apostolicum (Symbol or Creed of the Apostles), appears for the first time in a letter from a Council in Milan (probably written by Ambrose himself) to Pope Siricius in about 390: "Let them give credit to the Creed of the Apostles, which the Roman Church has always kept and preserved undefiled". But what existed at that time was not what is now known as the Apostles' Creed but a shorter statement. (The legend that this creed, the forerunner and principal source of the Apostles' Creed, had been jointly created by the Apostles under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, with each of the twelve contributing one of the articles, was already current at that time.) While the individual statements of belief that are included in the Apostles' Creed – even those not found in the Old Roman Symbol – are found in various writings by Irenaeus, Tertullian, Novatian, Marcellus, Rufinus, Ambrose, Augustine, Nicetus, and Eusebius Gallus, the earliest appearance of what we know as the Apostles' Creed was in the De singulis libris canonicis scarapsus ("Excerpt from Individual Canonical Books") of St. Priminius, written between 710 and 714.

Apostles' Creed, Catholic:
1. I believe in God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth.
2. I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord.
3. He was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary.
4. He suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried.
5. He descended into hell. On the third day he rose again.
6. He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
7. He will come again to judge the living and the dead.
8. I believe in the Holy Spirit,
9. the holy catholic Church, the communion of saints,
10. the forgiveness of sins,
11. the resurrection of the body,
12. and life everlasting.
Amen.