35 – Sofia 35

Editorial

A Lyrical Ballad bers but some friends and family and some enquirers, spent a holiday weekend together in Grasmere, the magical spot which Wordsworth described as “a blended holiness of earth and sky”. October weather rather tested thoughts of inherent holiness, the lashing rain wetting our walks and filling Glenthorne Quaker guesthouse with dripping waterproofs and mud-spattered boots — till we woke on the Sunday morning to a dry, white paradise, the lawns and trees and mountains having been painted as we slept with the first deep frost of the coming winter. Some of us ventured out before breakfast to follow the frosted path up to Allen Bank, where the Wordsworths lived between their Dove Cottage and Rydal Mount days, then took the high path to Easedale beck where it is crossed by stepping stones near Goody Bridge. The running water lapped over some stones and frost made the others treacherous.

There were some wet feet. There was also a lot of laughter.

It was a good place to be, at a good time. Exactly two hundred years earlier, in 1798, Wordsworth and Coleridge had published their revolutionary little book of poems, Lyrical Ballads. Both poets, but particularly Wordsworth, were seeking to break with what seemed to them a tired artificiality in the language of eighteenthcentury poetry, but they were also tired of the old subjects of poetry: ancient gods and goddesses, sprites and elves and fairies, classical heroes and diaphanous heroines. Young men at the dog-end of an old century and about to pitch into a new, they under- S ome fifty of us, mainly SOF mem- stood that the gods and sprites and heroes were dead, and that living poetry could no longer be extracted from their corpses. So they wrote their lyrical ballads (which were neither lyrics nor ballads, as the past had understood them) about people: an “idiot boy”, a leech-gatherer, a shepherd and his son, a gypsy woman, an old sea-captain, a “mad mother’, a “little cottage girl”. And when Wordsworth came to write perhaps the greatest epic poem in the English language, The Prelude, it was not about God, or dragons, or occult mysteries, or heroes mighty in battle in this world and the next: it was about human consciousness, a poet’s mind.

On the other side of Grasmere from Glenthorne, past the gift shops, tea shops, coach park and over the arterial road which pumps tourists (like us) into all these shrines to the mega-buck Wordsworth industry, is Dove Cottage and its Wordsworth exhibition, currently focused on Tintern Abbey. Here are displayed all those familiar (and some less familiar) paintings, drawings and etchings of the ruined abbey in the Wye valley: the Turners and Gilpins and Girtins and Palmers. A paradox this, because Wordsworth never wrote a single line about Tintern Abbey. What he did write, of course, was the Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey. A perceptive note in the exhibition suggests that the “above” might be read not only in its literal sense of “a few miles further up the Wye” but also in the sense of Wordsworth’s having moved above and beyond contemplation of the abbey itself. His subject is not a romantically ruined monument to a romanti- ~@ Sea of Faith Winter (December) 1998 No. 35 On Wordsworth’s “religion” A twentieth century Lakeland poet, Norman Nicholson, has this to say about Wordsworth, nature, the mind of man, and Christianity: “Wordsworth’s way [of looking at landscape] involved also a way of look- A Lyrical Ballad 2 ing at man. We need not consider here whether he was a pantheist, or euieeyral itoria whether or not his beliefs were really consistent with the Christianity he professed in his later years. But in order to see that his attitude to Nature involved also his attitude to life, let us take him away from Loughrigg Ah, love, let us be true 6 Terrace and Upper Easedale and place him in the greater context of Dover Beach explored Christendom. For though his philosophy may not be specifically Christian, by John Crompton yet I believe that it can only be fully understood in the framework of Christian morality. | realize that by doing so | am in danger of alienating some of my readers, yet, as my aim here is not to preach Christianity but Born Again — 8 merely to clarify Wordsworth, I will ask them to be tolerant. If they like, Reassessing a familiar idea they may re-interpret, in their own minds, the specifically Christian terms by Stephen Mitchell which I shall use. Thus, when | speak of a sacrament of grace acting through the medium of a physical body (bread, wine, water, a girl, a moun- : What for? 10 tain), they may say to themselves that I really mean that sense of appro- mai Hd at priateness, of rightness, of wholeness, which comes from a complete har- This magazine's future mony or unity between purpose and function, between ends and means, between the mind that acts and the matter that re-acts, between the by David Boulton imagination that shapes and the creation that responds... Digging for the Republic 14 “Wordworth, then, belongs to one of the great Ways of Christian teach- ry ing, the Sacramental Way, or, in the term popularized by Charles Williams, iiaiaiiiiiale the Affirmative Way. It is a wonderful and illuminating phrase. It shows the Celebrating the Diggers’ Spirit other side of the coin; it turns the clouds inside out; it makes some of the by Tony Gosling & Jim Paton darkest caves and corners of religion shine with a blinding light...

Why are so many churches Prom The Lakers (1995): Intellect-Free Zones? 16 Modern theology critiqued cally decaying religion (which is what Grey or Goldsmith would have made of it), it is “the still, sad music of humanity”. It is not the ivy-smothered ghost of a long-dissolved abbey which round ocean, the living air and the blue sky).

Pamela Woof, in her very fine essay in the exhibition catalogue, reminds us that “Wordsworth’s religious sense... by Alison Webster Making our presence felt is the house of God. No! Wordsworth’s comes, we might say, almost entirely in the Churches 18 “spirit that impels all thinking things, out of his personal experience, out of SoF speaking out all objects of all thought, and rolls the way human beings react through- through all things,” is to be found in out their lives in time to places of by Ronald Pearse “the light of setting suns, and the beauty, to loss, and to the love of other round ocean, and the living air, and human beings”. Tintern Abbey is “mov- the blue sky, and in the mind of man”. ing towards the position that Postbag 20 Above all, in the mind of man: for Wordsworth will stress at the end of You're telling us!

Wordsworth, like his contemporary The Prelude that after all the actions, Blake, understood very well that our political and failed actions, and at the gods and spirits reside in the human core of our meditative, suffering, Postscripts 22 breast, and live and move and have their being in the human imagination (as do the light of setting suns, the imaginative individuality, there is love, and this makes for the best society...

One might think of it [Tintern Abbey] by Seafarer Wordsworth on “the Mind of Man” Wordsworth came to believe that the external world of “nature” and “objectivity” only had meaning in terms of the interior life of the beholder. It’s “all in the mind”.

This is how he expressed it in the Preface to The Excursion: ...the Mind of Man — My haunt, and the main region of my song. — Beauty — a living Presence of the earth, Surpassing the most fair ideal Forms Which craft of delicate Spirits hath composed From earth’s materials - waits upon my steps; Pitches her tents before me as | move, An hourly neighbour. Paradise and groves Elysian, Fortunate Fields — like those of old Sought in the Atlantic Main — why should they be ‘ory only as departed things, ‘When wedded to this — ! = un love and holy passion, : shall find these as a poem that grows into an expression of love”.

Where have we heard that before? It so happens that, slung from the ceiling of this same exhibition, is the design for a sculpture celebrating Matthew Arnold’s work, drawing much of its inspiration from his sea poems, including of course Dover Beach — the subject of renewed attention elsewhere in this issue of the magazine. Arnold’s line “Ah love, let us be true to one another” echoes Wordsworth in its conviction that human love and human love alone gives life meaning and purpose in a relentlessly meaningless and purposeless world. Listen to Wordsworth a few years after Tintern Abbey, in Book XIII of the (1905) Prelude: “From love, for here Do we begin and end, all grandeur comes All truth and beauty — from pervading love — That gone, we are as dust.” We should pause, sometimes, before we in Sea of Faith go on about how spanking new we are. Two hundred years ago, before Nietzsche or Arnold or Cupitt, the authors of Lyrical Ballads knew that Almighty God was as dead as Tintern Abbey: himself a nostalgic ruin, a heritage site, maintained in carefully controlled decrepitude to turn a penny or two and to anchor us safely in the past. Postmodernity has merely given the message a new twist, and provided us with a new language in which to express it.

Wordsworth — the radical young Wordsworth, if not the Tory bore he turned into when his muse deserted him in revenge for his later reactionary infidelities — was a_post-Christian.

Lyrical Ballads was the genesis of a post-Christian bible. It was religious faith as a human creation, an act of human imagination, wholly encompassed within the infinite miracle of human consciousness. Tiny Dove Cottage, built to human scale in its “plot of cottage-ground”, with its “hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines of sportive wood run wild”, was one of its cathedrals. Holidaying on the other side of Grasmere Vale, we connected with a part of our past.

We had a good time.