ABSTRACT
Composed late November or December 1811. The poem celebrates a fine Sunday (11. 28–9) in early winter (11. 6–7: ‘even when the frost has torn / All save the ivy’); these conditions seem best met by 22 or 29 December, both of which followed several days of frost, though snow had fallen on the hill-tops before mid-December (L i 200). It is too close to Southey’s work both in matter and manner to belong to the following winter, which S. spent at Tanyrallt. S. had learned from William Calvert that Southey’s beliefs had changed, so that ‘He to whom Bigotry Tyranny and Law was hateful has become the votary of these Idols … The Church of England it’s Hell and all has become the subject of his panygeric’ (to Elizabeth Hitchener, 15 December 1811, L i 208), but though disappointed in Southey’s reasoning-powers S. found much that was congenial in his notions of Deity: ‘he says I ought not to call myself an Atheist, since in reality I believe that the Universe is God. -I tell him I believe that God is another signification for the Universe … Southey agrees in my idea of Deity, the mass of infinite intelligence’ (to Elizabeth Hitchener, 2 January 1812, L i 215). Thus the poem castigates Southey for his tergiversation (39–42) but adopts a similar view of natural religion to that expressed by Southey in The Chapel Bell’ (1793), ‘Written on Sunday Morning’ (1795). and Joan of Arc iii 359, 389–91 (1796 edn): Gods priest-created, are to me unknown … ‘Twas Nature taught my early youth Religion-Nature bade me see the God Confest in all that lives, and moves, and is.
