ABSTRACT
This concluding chapter of the book is devoted, fittingly, to Wordsworth’s conclusions—or else, the poet’s art of “religious postscripts.” I argue that Wordsworth’s favourite method of organizing his poetic spaces was to conclude otherwise secular compositions with a religious sentiment. This is illustrated, most of all, with Wordsworth’s sonnets, the poet’s favourite genre. Referencing a number of compositions, early and late(r), from a variety of collections, I work out the patent Wordsworthian formula for how to make a sonnet—which is to follow a secular octave with a religious sestet, or to introduce a turn to religion somewhere in the sestet, for example, in the final tercet, or in the penultimate (or the last) line. Supposedly, the postponement of the turn till the conclusion should be, like in the Shakespearean pattern, an element of surprise. But in a sonnet by Wordsworth, the turn to God or other “religious sentiment” in the end does the opposite: it comes as the obvious, the predictable, the most expected. The chapter also contrasts Wordsworth’s original compositions with his translations from Michelangelo, and incudes a slightly tongue-in-cheek reflection on the “recyclability” of Wordsworth’s sestets (illustrated by an experiment with swapping the sestets of “In the Woods of Rydal” and “Composed on a May Morning”).
