ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates that, except for one stanza in one poem, all uninhibited prayers in Wordsworth’s prayer-oriented oeuvre are “dramatic.” That is, they employ “the intervention of characters speaking” (Wordsworth’s own definition, given in the Preface to The Excursion). This is illustrated with several “minor Pieces” and, above all, The Excursion (considered are both the 1814 version and the revised version of 1845). The only central persona of this pious “dramatic” poem who is not associated with a single attitude of piety is the “I.” Additionally, analysis of the part the “Author” wrote for himself as the character and the homodiegetic narrator of this poem prompts the inference that devotional passages are not the only type of discourse which Wordsworth was careful not to undersign. The other species of such a discourse is religious debate in general. Whenever religious themes are taken up in The Excursion, the “I’s” functions become purely auxiliary: he hangs the backdrops and operates the spotlights, but he does not direct the spectacle or comment upon its proper themes from behind the scenes. This “dramatic” propriety of the poem, I argue in the conclusion, was probably the chief reason why The Excursion could expand into the most religiously elaborate work in the career of Wordsworth, and why it is the only major poem he managed to complete and publish in his lifetime.
