Mysticism in Wordsworth’s Poetry

William Wordsworth was the supreme pioneer and founder with Coleridge of the English Romantic Movement that momentous and epoch-making movement that broke the cult of dry, sterile rationalism in English poetry and ushered in a new era by establishing and vindicating the primacy and sovereignty of intuition and imaginative vision in literature as well as in life.

Romantic imagination, as conceived and cultivated by the Romantic poets like Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake and Shelley, etc., is something unique and unparalleled in its kind. It is essentially what Joubert called “the eye of the soul.” It is not a playful will-o’-the-wisp - not the vague, frivolous, capricious fancy indulging in utopian reveries or fairyland fantasies. It is that sublime and crowning faculty of human spirit through which we can penetrate the ultimate mysteries of human life, of the soul of man as well as of the cosmos. It is that by which we may be able, to quote the pregnant lines of Blake,

“To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.”
–Auguries of Innocence

In the Romantic viewpoint, imagination is the only way of perceiving and realizing the one in the many, the abiding behind the flux, the infinite behind the finite, the eternal behind ephemeral, and the transcendent behind the immanent. And thus William Blake, the great Romantic poet and visionary, aptly observed: “One power alone makes a poet – imagination, the Divine vision.” Romantic vision upholds and vindicates the ultimate priority and ascendancy of imagination over the logical and speculative reason of the human mind while not denying or belittling the limited value and utility of the latter in human life. It cherishes the view that there are higher realms of experience, ultimate verities of life and baffling phenomena of the universe which the frail, finite human reason cannot explore and comprehend or only do it too inadequately and imperfectly. And it is only the imagination which can offer fleeting flashes of profound and penetrating insight into the heart of the reality. Imagination based on direct intuitive insight or flashes of immediate awareness is a faculty that transcends but does not reject the reason and intellect of man. Emphasizing the supreme importance and power of imagination. Wordsworth very perceptibly says:

“…..Imagination, which, in truth,
Is but another name for absolute power
And clearest insight, amplitude of mind,
And reason in her most exalted mood.”
–Prelude, Book IV

While reason divides, disrupts and dissociates things, imagination links, unifies and binds them together. Thus in sharp contrast to the Cartesian metaphysics of Descartes which maintains a dichotomy between matter and spirit, microcosm (man) and macrocosm (universe), the Romantic imagination finds in the entire universe – between the sentient living beings as well as inanimate objects, a bond of all-embracing unity, solidarity and fellowship. Another distinctive feature of the Romantic imagination is the experience of owe, wonder, ecstasy or rapture and reverence aroused in the perceiver’s mind when it contemplates and communes with the things of the universe. Such awe­ inspiring or rapturous supernatural (or numinous) experience is a vital factor in Romantic experience and the prime source of its vitality and intensity.

William Wordsworth had not only the exalted and inclusive imagination of a great Romantic poet but was also supremely endowed with the illumined spiritual vision of a mystic. In the Wordsworthian mysticism the Romantic imagination found its finest flower, its crowning revelation and consummation. Mysticism is the quintessence of Wordsworth’s poetry, the ultimate and unfailing source of its inspiration.

Mysticism, broadly defined, is a state of sublime imaginative and spiritual experience in which one has direct, immediate and intuitive perception of an all-embracing infinite and eternal reality – the immanent-transcendent Absolute Being underlying and pervading but also transcending the sensible material universe. It is the sense of “God in all” and “all in God.” It is this sense of one ultimate Divine principle permeating all things and all life of the universe as well as guiding, cherishing and sustaining them that inspires the mystic to conceive the vision of the ultimate divine unity of the universe, of all life. Mystic imagination sees a living relationship between the soul of man and the soul of the universe – a vision of cosmic unity, fraternity and fellowship.

The mysticism of Wordsworth is something unique in its kind, though it shares some characteristics common to all modes of mysticism. It is a type of Nature-mysticism. Though it hears a certain degree of affinity to Spinozistic pantheism, it is not absolutely alike to it, for unlike the latter it does not regard Nature as the be-all and end-all of the universe or equate and identify it with the Supreme Divine Spirit. Wordsworth’s mysticism also differs from the Neoplatonic mysticism of Plotinus or the Christian mysticism of St. John of the Cross and St. Augustine. But it has something of the sublime beatific vision of Blake or the glowing paradisal vision of Dante. Like all true mystics Wordsworth believes that human life has a divine origin and divine destiny. As he said in his “Ode on Intimations of Immortality”:

“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;
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From Gold, who is our home.”

Man is an essentially divine and immortal spirit, the “Pilgrim of Eternity”, the “Child of Immortality”–such is the fervent and glowing faith of Wordsworth, as of genuine mystics of all ages and climes. He said very aptly: “Our destiny, our being’s heart and home, I Is with infinitude, and only there”; and that “the great thought by which we live” is “infinity and God.”

Wordsworth not only loved Nature but glorified, deified and divinized it. Unlike Shelley who at times spiritualized Nature in the manner of Wordsworth and at other times attempted to intellectualize and conceptualize it – transforming the object of Nature into some dogmatic socio-political doctrine, ideology or an abstract idea, as in “Ode to the West Wind”, Wordsworth’s vision of Nature was constantly and consistently spiritual.

To him the vision of Nature always vouchsafed the vision of the indwelling Divine spirit, the vision of that Cosmic Being, whom Shelley in a true Wordsworthian spirit has described in his illuminating and soul-stirring lines:

“That Light whose smile kindles the Universe,
That Beauty in which all things work and move,
That Benediction which the eclipsing curse
Of birth can quench not, that sustaining Love
Which through the web of being blindly move
By man and beast and earth and air and sea,
Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of
The fire for which all thirst: .....”
–Lament for Adonais

Wordsworth’s worship and adoration of Nature was never inspired by passion for aesthetic beauty, elegance and splendour. All forms and objects, aspects and appearances of Nature ­whether graceful, lovely and magnificent or sombre, awe inspiring and forbidding – alike stirred and stimulated his visionary imagination, for they all of them were to him equally the living emblems and images of the Divine spirit, the hieroglyphics of divinity. How even the dreary, appalling and awesome spectacles of Nature could bring intimations of the Divine Reality and profoundly impress on his mind its sublimity, majesty and grandeur is vividly revealed in one of the celebrated passages of “Prelude” in the description of a scene on the Alps:

“Black drizzling crags that spake by the wayside
As if a voice were in them, the sick sight
And giddy prospect of the raving stream,
The unfettered clouds and region of the Heavens,
Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light–
­Were all like workings of one mind, the features
Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree;
Characters of the great Apocalypse,
The types and symbols of Eternity,
Of first, and last, and midst, and without end.”
– prelude, Book VI

And this passage represents a profoundly moving and glowing description of one of the most memorable of his mystic experiences.

The fundamental traits of Wordsworthian mystic vision is also amply highlighted in those moving lines of his, where he speaks of

“One interior life
In which all beings live with God, themselves
Are God, existing in the mighty whole,
As indistinguishable as the cloudless east
Is from the cloudless West, when all
The hemisphere is one cerulean blue.”
-         From a fragment found in a
Ms. notebook containing Peter Bell

or when he refers to

“…..the sentiment of Being spread
O’er all that moves and all that seemeth still;
O’er all that, lost beyond the reach of thought
And human knowledge, to the human eye
Invisible, yet liveth to the heart;
O’er all that leaps and runs; and shouts and sings,
Or beats the gladsome air; O’er all that glides
Beneath the wave, yea, in the wave itself,
And mighty depth of waters.”
–Prelude, Book II

All objects, high or low, sentient or insentient are to him suffused with the living presence of the Divine and instinct with life and feeling and even with consciousness and will of their own. This is movingly expressed in the following me­morable lines of his– 

“To every natural form, rock, fruit or flower,
Even the loose stones that cover the highway,
I gave a moral life: I saw them feel,
Or linked them to some feeling: the great mass
Lay bedded in a quickening soul, and all
That I beheld respired with inward meaning.”
–Prelude, Book III

It is because of this perception of “One interior life” in all by Wordsworth that even on ordinary and apparently trivial thing of Nature could kindle his vision and fill him with lofty and elevated thoughts–“Trances of thought and mountings of the mind” leading him to the sublimely reverent and profoundly mystic contemplation of the Divine immanent in all creation.

“To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.”
–Ode on Intimations of Immortality

And he says that even the smallest things of Nature seemed infused and irradiated with a paradisal splendour and sublimity.

“The earth, and every common sight
To me did seem
Apparell’d in celestial light.”
(Ibid)

The childhood “Spots of time” with its fits of wild joy, frolic and pastime, so vividly and glowingly depicted by Wordsworth in “Prelude” were also punctuated by fleeting flashes of mystic vision–“Gleams like the flashing of a shield,’ as Wordsworth so exquisitely put it.

Since Nature aroused in Wordsworth’s mind a profound vision of the Indwelling Deity or the “Wisdom and Spirit of the universe” as he calls it in the “Prelude”, he regarded it as the living fountain of his poetic inspiration and of moral and spiritual enlightenment and vision. He acknowledged that he was

“Well pleased to recognize
In nature and the language of the sense
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.

 –Tintern Abbey Re-visited

All objects and things of Nature had for him some sublime and mysterious moral and spiritual message to convey:

“One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good.
Than all the sages can.”            
–The Tables Turned

It is the fundamental faith of a mystic that “the heart of light is the silence.” In the true spirit of a mystic, Wordsworth set a supreme value on silence and contemplative stillness or, as he called it, “wise passiveness” and “meditative peace” and was conscious of its profound and immense spiritual potentialities for bringing him divine revelation and for enabling him to penetrate into the ultimate cosmic mysteries. Amidst his visions of Nature, there came moments of such profound and hallowed stillness of “transcendent peace and silence” as Wordsworth called it that through his imagination Wordsworth attained the highest peak of his mystic vision gaining insight into the heart of reality. It was in moments of “that peace which passeth understanding” that Wordsworth tells us:

“……Gently did my soul
Put off her veil, and self-transmuted, stood
Naked, as in the presence of her Got”
–Prelude, Book IV

In moments of such holy calm and peace, his mind was transport­ed to a state of sublime ecstasy, an ineffable trance-like consciousness.
“Oft in these moments such a holy calm
Would overspread my soul, that bodily eyes
Were utterly forgotten, and what I saw
Appeared like something in myself, a dream:
A prospect in the mind”           
–Prelude, Book V

Emphasizing those moments of sublime stillness and serenity and their inestimable value and significance, Wordsworth in a pregnant and illuminating passage in “Tintern Abbey Re-visited” says:
...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.”

and also in “Ode on Intimations of Immortality”:

“Hence, in a season of calm weather
Though inland far we be,
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither.”