“Wisdom and s/Spirit of the universe[!]”

The chapter argues that the most distinct characteristic of the religious signposting in Wordsworth’s poetry is indeterminacy. At a number of critical junctions, this signposting is downright illegible. This is illustrated through an attempt to trace the chronology of the poet’s conversions to (and from) pantheism and to Christianity by way of juxtaposition of “Tintern Abbey”—versus the 1798 and 1799 Prelude—versus “Ode. Intimations of Immortality”—versus 1805 and, finally, 1850 Prelude. Sometimes a line that is drawn with a hesitant hand, or a line which is not drawn at all, makes the emergent picture blurry. On other occasions, the problem is that there are too many lines in one part of the picture and too few in another. This latter point is argued with the help of a curious statistical detail, namely, the fact that Catholic figures appear much more commonly and persistently in Wordsworth’s poetry than the figure of Christ. The absence of Christ, or more precisely, the vagueness of his presence, has been regularly pointed out in critical reflection on The Excursion. I contribute to this discussion by evidencing that the same applies to all Wordsworth’s writings—his minor poetry, his works in prose, as well as the 1850 Prelude: Christ is present in only four lines of this nearly 8,000-line long autobiographical poem, revised over the period of several decades with the intention of imposing upon it a specifically Christian idiom and frame of mind.