ABSTRACT
The book’s argument concerning the absence of God in the works of Wordsworth opens with a reflection on the poet’s “theology of the Future Encounter,” revolving around his phenomenally plentiful (though lesser known) poetry which engages the themes of death and life after death. The God projected in this category of Wordsworth’s works wafts the spirits of the dead to “raptures,” and “joys,” and “glory.” But He remains at a safe distance from the “I”: the distance which separates the afterlife from a professional writer engraving an epitaph. The God invoked in Wordsworth’s “poetry of the grave” is, from the perspective of the epitaph-writer, still absent, not present yet; the meeting evoked in this “poetry of eternity,” remains, from the point of view of the speaker, a future encounter. On the other hand, in what I label Wordsworth’s “theology of Past Encounters,” which relates to his best-known works, esp., the “Immortality Ode” and The Prelude, God is already absent, not present anymore. Meeting Him was the experience of childhood. But Wordsworth’s child (unlike Vaughan’s) does not realize it is living in “a pastoral paradise.” The realization comes later, too late: when childhood is over, paradise lost, and when those meetings become bygone encounters, the “things” of the past. The paths of God and man hopelessly miss each other; they cannot meet in the same space and time. The light is admitted when it is extinguished. Only after he loses the “glory” does man recognize that he saw it—once.
