Tintern Abbey, Whales
By Rev. Paul John Roach
Presented at the 2013 Unity Lyceum on April 5, 2013
The poems of the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth are not sacred texts in the ordinary sense yet they convey, by sheer force of poetic inspiration, a numinous quality better than many scriptures. In the one hundred and sixty three years since his death on St. George’s Day 1850 his star in the poetic firmament has dimmed somewhat; and although we still recall him as one of the major poets we seldom take the time to examine his work in depth. It has been said that the verses he composed in the second half of his life from years forty to eighty and including the ponderous Ecclesiastical Sonnets, are scarcely worth reading in comparison to the poetry of his twenties and thirties. Thus, failing to stop while he was ahead, as it were, his oeuvre is tainted and his reputation diminished.
This is unfortunate because his greatest compositions including the three poems that will be our focus in this paper1 are rightly considered masterpieces of English literature, and although not sacred texts as we have noted, their ringing cadence, often ascending to Biblical heights, their flashes of sublimity, moral import and mystical imagery give these poems a spiritual significance that clearly conveys the sacred in our human experience.
As a boy coming of age in the late 1960’s in Wales, a childhood mystic and lover of Nature myself, I found William Wordsworth an able articulator of the mystic, yet very real, connection between man and Nature and between God Mind and human consciousness.
In the Prospectus to the Recluse, Wordsworth’s never realized magnum opus, he gives us, simply and in a positively forthright way, the philosophical rationale that underlies his poetic vision:
“my voice proclaims
How exquisitely the individual Mind
(And the progressive powers perhaps no less
of the whole species) to the external World
Is fitted: – and how exquisitely, too –
Theme this but little heard of among men –
The external World is fitted to the Mind;
And the creation (by no lower name
Can it be called) which they with blended might
Accomplish: – this is our high argument.”2
In just ten lines our poet has laid out the essentials of Unity’s creative process and the intrinsic interconnection of Mind and matter that is the core of the unitive vision. This was written in 1814 a full seventy-five years before Charles and Myrtle Fillmore began their own exploration of metaphysical Truth.
Not only is the “high argument” of Wordsworth’s poetic accomplishment compatible with Unity and metaphysical teachings I believe it can be argued that there is a thread of influence from Wordsworth and other poets of the Romantic period through the Transcendentalist writers, particularly Emerson, and so to the harbingers of what today is called New Thought. I further suggest that the sublimity of Wordsworth’s poetry in meaning and in sound has a relevance today to the Unity movement in helping us balance Principle with Presence and ground laws and frameworks in devotion and awe.
In the preface to the Lyrical Ballads, the collection of poems by Wordsworth and his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge, first published in 1798, that was intended to be a revolutionary statement of the universality of human emotions, Wordsworth writes that, “poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.”3 I believe that if there is to be real progress on the spiritual path we must make the connection between our heads and our hearts and that devotion to Nature, to each other and to God is the way we avoid the trap of a righteous spiritual materialism. Wordsworth is not advocating emotionalism, of course, and in another part of the preface he bemoans, quite presciently it seems, the exploitive literature and art of his day and the resulting “degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation”.4 I cannot see a day when Unity church attendees begin speaking in tongues and charismatic fervor holds sway. Unity is, after all, centered in the same recollected tranquility of which Wordsworth writes. It is the stillness that gives us capability and it is
“…with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things”5
The words are from Wordsworth’s poem, “Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the banks of the Wye during a tour written in 1798, a poem included in the Lyrical Ballads, and a particular favorite of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Unlike the intentional simplicity of the ballads this poem with its flowing pentameters, copious use of enjambment and almost incantatory assonance, is more sophisticated in theme and structure, yet, at the same time, and this is its genius, takes us on a conversational journey with the writer as if we too were sharing his recollected experience along the sylvan banks of the Wye.
Growing up just forty miles from the setting of this magisterial poem I can attest to the continuing beauty of the scene, a part of Britain that, because of its crags, woods and ruins was becoming a favorite touring spot for those Romantics who were looking at wild Nature as an escape from an increasingly industrialized landscape. Likewise, poets like Wordsworth were seeking meaning in the natural world as a response to the rationalism of the age. They sought a deeper, more mystical order beyond the purely mechanical, where hedge-rows are
“hardly hedge-rows, little lines
of sportive wood run wild:”6
and the green of Nature comes up to the very door of farms lost among the trees.
Recalling such scenes “mid the din of towns and cities”7 has conjured
“sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind
With tranquil restoration.”8
The marrying here of heart and blood with mind to bring a peaceful restoration is remarkable. It brings to mind Charles Fillmore’s statement that the electrons of Jesus’ blood are now broadcast throughout the universe as life giving, restorative power.9 It is the uniting, in this way, of conception and actuality.
The poem reaches its mystical climax in an impassioned declaration of panentheism, of God in everything, that is more powerful because of its simplicity and the relentless mounting of phrase on phrase, until, with spell-like grace, it is drilled into our souls:
“And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things”10
We cannot read these lines, I believe, without feeling that insistent Spirit at work in the words and in our response to them. Emerson must have had a similar response because in his early masterpiece Nature he writes of this Unity with a clearly Wordsworthian sensibility:
In the woods is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life – no disgrace, no calamity (leaving me my eyes), which Nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, – my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space, – all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God.”11
This is not just Nature mysticism, as profound as that can be. It is an unequivocal affirmation that we are the inlet and outlet of all there is in God. And we celebrate that golden thread of unitive thinking emerging five centuries before Wordsworth in the non-dual wisdom of Meister Eckhart: “The eye with which I see God is the same as that with which he sees me”,12 and now in Wordsworth: “We see into the life of things”,13 and so to Emerson. “I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing. I see all”14 and back to the timeless ‘single eye’ of the Christ.
And yet a shadow falls. Something has been lost. The theme of boyish exuberance decaying into resignation and remembrance is common in many of Wordsworth’s poems. The “wild ecstasies shall be matured
Into a sober pleasure”15, he writes but we are not convinced that these pleasures match the spiritual appetite of former days. Now Wordsworth comes to the woods and streams,
“more like a man
Flying from something that he dreads than one
Who sought the thing he loved”16
The yearning for the joy of eternal youth and youth’s reflection of an immortal bliss somehow just beyond our view, is expressed in a noble and affecting way in Wordsworth’s Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood which he wrote in 1803. It contains some of Wordsworth’s most lyrical poetry and has important correlations to Unity philosophy.
The poem’s opening stanzas recalling the joys of youth immersed in Nature lead us to one of the most famous pregnant pauses in all of literature as the crescendo of reminiscence is stilled and we are confronted with the questioning impotence of loss:
“And the Babe leaps up on his Mother’s arm: –
I hear, I hear, with joy I hear!
– But there’s a Tree, of many, one,
A single Field which I have looked upon,
Both of them speak of something that is gone.
The Pansy at my feet
Doth the same tale repeat:
Whether is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?”17
In recent years the Unity movement has grown in its willingness to embrace loss and the shadow aspects of the human condition. The unrelenting positivity of the old time metaphysicians is now balanced with an understanding that it is healthy to embrace our humanness. The term metaphysical malpractice has been coined to check those who seek to drive a turbo-charged absolutist steamroller over every nuance of our personalities. It is, I believe, through a clear eyed observation of the totality of our Nature, Spirit, mind and body, that we are able to embody the Truth.
Wordsworth ends the Ode with such an embracing tone in a quatrain of benediction and thankfulness that seems tailor-made for liturgical use:
“Thanks to the human heart by which we live
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears”18
The intimations of immortality which fuel the poem’s deepest themes speak to a continuity of life that was very important to The Transcendentalists as well as Wordsworth and so too to the founding leaders of New Thought. Indeed Emerson stated in his journals that the Immortality Ode was “the best modern essay on the subject.”19
And it’s here that Wordsworth is at his most movingly sublime and demands that we quote him at length:
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house began to close
Upon the growing Boy
But He beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature’s Priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away.
And fade into the light of common day”20
To create an “uncommon” day, a day filled with possibility and joy, is at the heart of Unity’s endeavors. Daily Word, Silent Unity’s devotional magazine, has been inspiring millions through uplifting statements, affirmations and scriptures since 1924 so that
“Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal Silence”21
and we perceive that all is well and all is connected. As one of my favorite Unity affirmations puts it, “There is no time or space to Spirit.”
“Hence in a season of calm weather
Though inland far we be,
Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither,
Can in a moment travel thither,
And see the Children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore”22
Again we feel the lulling rhythm and gentle sibilance by which Wordsworth conveys his most penetrating insights. It is the calm that allows the vision, and it is a vision beyond time, a supra-natural scene of eternal delight. It recalls another mystic poet of an earlier century, Thomas Traherne, whose visionary landscape shared common elements with Wordsworth.
“The corn was orient and immortal wheat, which never should be reaped, nor was ever sown…Boys and girls tumbled in the street, and playing were moving jewels…I knew not that they were born or should die. But all things abided eternally as they were in their proper places. Eternity was manifest in the light of the day and something infinite behind everything appeared…”23
Yes, here is another skein in the great golden thread of unitive awareness.
The Prelude, or, Growth of a Poet’s Mind is Wordsworth’s most complete attempt to communicate his mystic vision and is told in autobiographical form. He published various versions of this great poem throughout his life but it is the version of 1805 which remains closest to his initial inspiration. The “years that bring the philosophic mind” also brought a deadening of the poetic spark, and although he intended that The Prelude be just that to his epic and philosophical poem “The Recluse” he completed only the second part of The Recluse known as The Excursion.
In both poems the retreat or return to Nature preoccupies the poet’s mind. It is the source of joy and poetic inspiration and seems to hold the key to meaning in the poet’s later years, although this is much overlaid by Wordsworth’s growing conservatism.
The seeking of solace and inspiration in Nature is, of course, a central theme in the writings of the Transcendentalists and Henry Thoreau’s experiments in agriculture and mindfulness at Walden Pond have become iconic of a new age yearning to return to a more pastoral simplicity. The Unity movement saw a similar move back to Nature as Charles and Myrtle shifted their headquarters from urban Kansas City to Unity Farm, which was then far from the suburban sprawl of the metropolis. The grandchildren of Unity’s founders, particularly Rosemary Fillmore Rhea have spoken fondly of the delights of Unity Farm, now Unity Village. The woods were full of wildlife, the rolling hills were idyllic places to explore and it was a perfect place to grow up as a child.
I remember that during my years in ministerial school at Unity Village, tiring of endless study and too much metaphysics I would head out for long walks around the Unity lakes enjoying the woods and the restorative power of Nature.
In many Unity centers there are peace gardens, places of beauty and retreat and I feel that this grounding in Nature owes much to the sensibility of Charles and Myrtle but also to the influence in New Thought of the Transcendentalists and so back to the Romantic Movement’s uplifting of Nature and to the particular vision of Wordsworth himself.
I encourage us all as Unity students to stay close to this heritage. To touch the earth and feel the presence of the divine in Nature is the antidote to an overly heady metaphysics which ultimately does not feed our souls.
In Book V of the Prelude there is an elegiac passage that begins:
“There is a Boy: ye know him well ye cliffs
And islands of Winander!”24
This boy, another lover of Nature, died in childhood but his memory stands like a symbolic representation of Wordsworth’s own kind of death, the fading of the visioning gleam.
“Pre-eminent in beauty is the vale
Where he was born and bred: the churchyard hangs
Upon a slope above the village-school;
And through that churchyard where my way has led
On summer-evenings, I believe that there
A long half-hour together I have stood
Mute – looking at the grave in which he lies!”25
Nature cannot be divorced from human concerns. They are intimately connected, the “external World is fitted to the Mind”26
“For I have learned
To look on Nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity.”27
These words from Tintern Abbey, together with the many poems Wordsworth wrote is about the downtrodden and the poor, and his early support of the French Revolution, convey a passion for justice and equality that again found champions in the Transcendentalist visionaries, the civil disobedience of Thoreau being of particular note, and in the all-embracing, universalist teachings of New Thought.
In the unitive vision there is no hierarchy. The idealism that infused Wordsworth’s enthusiasm for the egalitarian struggle of the early years of the French Revolution is in part informed by the philosophical Idealism of Platonic thought and its 18th century interpreters notably Kant, Locke, and the English philosopher David Hartley whose doctrine of vibrations and associations greatly influenced Wordsworth. The same twin virtues of individualism and self-trust stemming from a deep seated belief in the immanence of the divine in the mind of man are, likewise, essential ingredients in the ideas of Emerson and the other Transcendentalist writers. The explosive and transformative affirmation, ‘I am a child of God and therefore I do not inherit sickness’ that shifted Myrtle Fillmore’s world view, thereby restoring her health and in the process helping found a spiritual movement, was the very same trust in the capability of the human spirit as an expression of the Divine.
In his somewhat improbable article, Wordsworth and Emerson: Aurora Borealis and the Question of Influence, Dewey W Hall28 argues that Wordsworth’s influence on Emerson is likened to light and particularly to the northern lights and to their associated electromagnetic effect. He notes that the great chemist Michael Faraday’s Experimental Researches in Electricity had been published in 1839. This subject may more happily be placed in the area of the other great precursors of New Thought: the mental healing movement and the influence of Mesmer, Phineas Parkhurst Quimby and their fascination with mental and etheric vibrations. However, light does figure strongly in both Wordsworth’s and Emerson’s writing. Emerson wrote in his essay Nature:
“The stars awake a certain reverence because
though always present, they are inaccessible, but
all natural objects make a kindred impression, when
the mind is open to their influence.”29
It mirrors in its nesting of the ordinary with the magnificent the opening lines of the Immortality Ode:
“There was a time when meadow, grove and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Appareled in celestial light”30
Light, of course, is a universal image in all religions and spiritualities, yet there is a certain elegance in connecting Charles Fillmore’s fascination with building a Pauline “body of light” in his later years with the celestial light of Wordsworth and the words of Emerson, once again from the essay Nature:
“So intimate is this Unity, that, it is easily seen, it lies under the undermost garment of Nature, and betrays its source in Universal Spirit”31
The undermost garment of Nature and the most high and unknowable Truth of the Godhead are one. But Truth, intuitively felt, is so often lodged in intellect and its bedfellow concept. Wordsworth’s, at first reluctant, and then resolute acceptance of the loss of the primary spark and vision that inspired his greatest poetry, is his own particular tragedy but also a warning to us to keep our awareness fresh and new.
This is the central meaning in the term New Thought. New Thought is mostly ancient wisdom – a contemporary expression of the timeless unitive vision as we have noted. What makes it truly new, though, is its focus on the truth that the mind is endlessly renewing itself. Each moment offers a new choice and in the eternal present the Cosmic Christ of Revelation declares to our hearts:
“Behold I make all things new.”32
How to maintain that freshness and that immediacy? Most movements and denominations begin with incredible energy and vigor. Some were mocked by outsiders for their quaking and shaking but these monikers were later adapted as badges of honor. Early Methodism, for example, was known for its fervor and intent upon direct experience. But after years or centuries such movements lose their visionary sparkle and enter a stage of codified goodness. What is in store for Unity? It has, as yet, no dogma or doctrine. Its principles are general and universal enough to allow for many interpretations. Yet they are principles and appeal to the commonsensical and rational part of our being. When divorced from feeling, Nature and the heart, they become dry and fruitless things.
In my twenty-five years as a Unity minister one of the most difficult tasks has been helping facilitate the journey from conceptual knowledge to direct experience. Our egoic minds can fool ourselves that we have taken this journey even when it is obvious to others that this is not the case. What’s the antidote for this self-deception? My answer would be to remain humbly teachable, open to wonder and in awe of the mysterious power of God. I have been encouraged by recent trends in Unity to unite feeling with thought and Paul Hasselbeck’s guidebook to Unity philosophy is tellingly entitled “Heart Centered Metaphysics”.
The pure childlike consciousness, emphasized by Jesus as the means to enter the kingdom of heaven, includes emotional even visceral components. Wordsworth states it, almost as a manifesto, in a poem from 1802, the concluding lines of which are included as a superscription to the Immortality Ode:
“My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.”33
A collect from the Book of Common Prayer could not express its declaration of Truth any better. Wordsworth is affirming that there is a harmony in our individual lives, a communion of youth and age alike, that is natural and responsive to God’s beauty and joy.
Henry Thoreau in Walden declares that
“To be awake is to be alive”34
and tells us why he conducted his experiment at Walden Pond:
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”35
A glimpse of the Infinite, often at unexpected moments, and often in Nature, makes us feel alive as if for the first time. We are no longer distracted by circumstance but aware of “the essential facts of life” in a way that is transformative. That has been my experience on the spiritual path, first as a child and then in resonance with the poetry of William Wordsworth and the discovery that he was one, particularly eloquent voice in the golden thread of many such voices. The Principles of Truth underpin these moments of awareness but they cannot supplant them. Wordsworth, Emerson, the Fillmores call us to experience that moment of receptivity to the immanent divine on a daily basis. The poetry of Wordsworth can be a companion in that experience.
To conclude this essay let us return you to Tintern Abbey and meditate on these lines that act as a sacred reflection of our soul’s journey into the solace and harmony of God:
“These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and ‘mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind,
With tranquil restoration: – feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure such, perhaps
As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man’s life,
His little, nameless, unremembered, acts
Of kindness and of love. No less, I trust,
To them I may have owed another gift,
Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world
Is lightened: – that serene and blessed mood
In which the affections gently lead us on, –
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.”36
May the “burthen of the mystery
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,”37
be lightened for you today. May we feel that continuity of understanding from age to age, sparking forth in Wordsworth and Emerson and Unity.
Awakening to this Truth we “become a living soul,” not in name only but in our felt response. We become new and fresh and alive. May the towering sonorities of Wordsworth’s verse, the prayerful “soliloquies of a beholding and jubilant soul,” as Emerson was later to put it in his essay Self-Reliance, may they be our inspiration and reminder that within us is the wisdom and intelligence of God.
From that wisdom heart all guidance flows, and we are, in turn, very much remembered by others for those “little, nameless, unremembered, acts of kindness and of love” that mark us out as true followers of the way of Unity
1. William Wordsworth, Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey on revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798; Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood (1803); The Prelude, or Growth of Poet’s Mind, 1805.
2. William Wordsworth, The Excursion; Preface to the Edition of 1814
3. William Wordsworth, Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, Second Edition 1800
4. Ibid.,
5. William Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey, lines 47-9
6. Ibid., lines 15-16
7. Ibid., lines 25-6
8. Ibid., lines 26-9
9. Charles and Cora Fillmore, Teach us to Pray, Chapter 10 Fulfillment, 1941
10. William Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey, lines 93-102
11. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, 1836
12. Meister Eckhart: Sermons
13. William Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey, line 49
14. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature 1836
15. William Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey, lines 138-9
16. Ibid., lines 70-2
17. William Wordsworth, Immortality Ode, lines 49-57
18. Ibid., lines 204-7
19. Ralph Waldo Emerson: Journals
20. William Wordsworth, Immortality Ode, lines 58-76
21. Ibid., lines 158-9
22. Ibid., lines 165-171
23. Thomas Traherne, Third Century of Meditations
24. William Wordsworth, The Prelude: Book 5 ‘Books’, lines 364-5
25. Ibid., lines 390-7
26. William Wordsworth, The Excursion: Preface to the Edition of 1814
27. William Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey, lines 88-91
28. Wordsworth and Emerson: Aurora Borealis and the Question of Influence: Dewey W. Hall, Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net, 2008
29. Ralph Waldo Emerson: Nature, 1836
30. William Wordsworth, Immortality Ode, lines 1-3
31. Ralph Waldo Emerson: Nature, 1836
32. Book of Revelation, Chapter 21 verse 5
33. William Wordsworth, My Heart Leaps up when I Behold, lines 1-9
34. Henry David Thoreau, Walden 1854
35. Ibid., Walden 1854
36. William Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey, lines 23-49
37. Ibid.,