ABSTRACT

After she left the Christian faith in 1842, Eliot1 began to consider sympathy, rather than organized religion, as a way of living a moral life. Throughout the 1840s and 1850s, she developed her religious views and eventually settled into a belief in sympathy as a substitute for religion. Much has been said about Eliot’s religious views and her concept of sympathy but rarely in relation to her poetry. She wrote religious poems throughout her life. As a young evangelical Christian, she relied on religious terminology and Christian teachings to convey orthodox religious views; and as an apostate, she relied on the same religious language and doctrine to convey unorthodox religious views. It may seem contradictory for an unorthodox believer to rely on religious language and doctrine; however, by the time Eliot began her poetry-writing career, she had successfully fashioned an image of herself as a sage by appropriating such modes of expression. Writing as a venerable poetess, Eliot voiced her belief in the sacred value of sympathetic relationships through religious rhetoric. In this chapter, I address the religious element of Eliot’s poetry by discussing the cultural environment in which she lived, her religious upbringing, her conversion from Christianity to a religion of sympathy, and her assimilation of new religious ideas in her poetry with the help of the poetess tradition. I will analyze “Mid the Rich Store of Nature’s Gifts to Man” and “O May I Join the Choir Invisible” to reveal Eliot’s poetry as the site of her conversion from orthodox religious views to belief in the sacred value of sympathetic human interaction.