“([T]hanks to the good God / That made us)”

The characteristic of Wordsworth’s treatment of religion highlighted in this chapter is what I call allusiveness—a trait that can be captured by clashing two statistical considerations. The first is that nearly five hundred poems collected in The Poetical Works of Wordsworth include references to belief. On the other hand, only several dozens of these works can be considered genuinely religious compositions (the chapter provides an exhaustive list of works which I qualify as such). This in effect means that in more than four hundred of his works—in over half of the poems he composed and published—Wordsworth has the tendency to mention the subject rather than take it up. He readily enters the religious milieu but refuses to explore it, which is reflected in the manner in which he organizes and patterns his poetic spaces. One formula he frequently adopts is to place a religious reference somewhere in the opening of a poem’s argument and then drop it after a few lines. The second formula, reserved for longer forms (most spectacularly, The Prelude), is to refer to religion from time to time. The third, by far the most common variant, is to introduce a religious sentiment at a work’s end. The result is that religious faith in Wordsworth’s poetry—early as well as late(r)—tends to be a starting point, or a turning-point, a side-thought, or an after-thought. Only sporadically does it become the real focal point and the central thought of a Wordsworthian composition.