Fay, J. (2018). Rhythm and Repetition at Dove Cottage. Philological Quarterly, 97(1), 73-95

Fay, J. (2018). Rhythm and repetition at Dove Cottage. Philological Quarterly, 97(1), 73-95. https://english.uiowa.edu/philological- quarterly/abstracts-971

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RHYTHM AND REPETITION AT DOVE COTTAGE

JESSICA FAY

Abstract

It is well known that William and Dorothy Wordsworth habitually hummed and murmured lines of poetry to themselves and to each other both indoors and while they paced backwards and forwards outside. While this was a lifelong habit for the poet, there are two specific periods at Dove Cottage—the spring and early summer of 1802 and the months following

John Wordsworth’s death in 1805—during which the repetition of verses alongside various types of iterative physical activity may be interpreted as an “extra-liturgical” practice performed to induce and support meditation and consolation. In shaping their own “familiar rhythm[s]”, the Wordsworths are aligned with Jeremy Taylor, whose mid-seventeenth- century writings promoted the cultivation of private, individual repetition and ritual.

Although William and Dorothy act independently of corporate worship in 1802 and 1805, their habits—in sympathy with Taylor’s teaching—reveal a craving for the kinds of structures

William later celebrated in Ecclesiastical Sonnets. Consequently, the apparent disparity between the high-Romantic poet of Dove Cottage and the high-Anglican Tractarian sympathizer of Rydal Mount is shown to be less severe than is often assumed.

“Only because it is regular, does rhythm perform what Wordsworth perceives to

be its functions.”1

In 1845, under the influence of his Tractarian friend Frederick William Faber, William

Wordsworth added a number of new poems to his sonnet series on the history of the Church in England, Ecclesiastical Sonnets.2 These additional poems celebrating a sequence of

Anglican rites—including “The Marriage Ceremony”, “Thanksgiving after Childbirth”

(Churching), “Visitation of the Sick”, and the “Funeral Service”—effectively marked

Wordsworth as an Oxford Movement sympathizer.3 As Stephen Gill has explained,

Wordsworth was cautious not to appear partisan and felt profoundly betrayed when Faber converted to Roman Catholicism; yet Wordsworth’s admiration for the rituals and rhythms of the liturgical calendar (which the Tractarians promoted and revived within the Church of

England) is explicit in the sonnet series as it was originally published in 1822. Poems such as

“The Liturgy” ensured that (in Gill’s words) by “the late 1830s Wordsworth’s commitment to the Church of England was hardly to be questioned”:

YES, if the intensities of hope and fear

Attract us still, and passionate exercise

Of lofty thoughts, the way before us lies

Distinct with signs—through which, in fixed career,

As through a zodiac, moves the ritual year

Of England’s Church—stupendous mysteries!

Which whoso travels in her bosom, eye

As he approaches them, with solemn cheer.

(1–8)4

For those within the protective “bosom” of the Church, knowledge of the “fixed career” of the liturgical cycle tempers “passionate” thoughts and the “intensities of hope and fear”. The emotional equilibrium Wordsworth gains from the regularity of the religious calendar is comparable to that which, in poetry, is provided by metre; “the co-presence of something regular”, as Wordsworth explains in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, keeps excessive feelings under control.5

The “ritual year / Of England’s Church” is laid out in the Book of Common Prayer, which Wordsworth describes in an 1845 revision to the Ecclesiastical Sonnet, “Rural

Ceremony”, as “the precious Book which long has fed / Our meditations” (1–2).6 The Prayer

Book helps nourish “meditations” insofar as its formularies, which follow a diurnal and annual pattern, are themselves structured around familiar refrains. For Victorian Anglicans, these rhythms were important means of controlling excitement (including evangelical fervour) and of assuaging emotional and physical distress, and this function was supported by devotional poetry. The “Advertisement” to John Keble’s The Christian Year, for example, explains that the “chief purpose” of the volume is to advance “that soothing tendency in the

Prayer Book” by bringing readers’ “thoughts and feelings into more entire unison” with it.7 In

1833 Wordsworth gave permission for Ecclesiastical Sonnets to be published as a devotional accompaniment to Keble’s volume and Wordsworth’s mature poetry was valued by his nineteenth-century readers as a source of spiritual succour; for example, Sara Coleridge (the poet’s daughter) annotated her copy of the first edition of The White Doe of Rylstone (1815) explaining that she “used continually to repeat” the first and seventh cantos to herself during

“solitary walks & on [her] sleepless pillow at a time when [she] felt bereaved, aimless, almost hopeless”. Sara repeated these verses in an attempt to “occupy [her] thoughts & keep the tears from [her] eyes”.8 Thus, Sara used lines from The White Doe as many readers used extracts

from Keble’s Christian Year.9 The rhythms created through repetition of poetic phrases are, like the liturgy, a source of stability and consolation.

This all seems rather a long way from prominent images of Wordsworth at the turn of the nineteenth century. The young Wordsworth who set up home at Dove Cottage with

Dorothy in December 1799 was not a “regular churchgoer”; the poetry he composed at this time is neither concerned with the forms of the Church nor is it usually characterized as devotional.10 And yet, as this essay will show, there is a quiet continuity between the routines and activities performed at Dove Cottage and Wordsworth’s later High-Anglican celebration of the forms of the Church. A steady arc may be drawn if, following Geoffrey Hill, we recognize that the rhythms of the Prayer Book are themselves reflective of broader social and personal experience:

The collects of the Anglican Church are composed of liturgical prose; they could

properly be said to possess rhythm, though not metre. Here again, however,

“familiar rhythm” is both liturgical and extra-liturgical, telling of a rhythm of

social duties, rites, ties, and obligations from which an individual severs himself

or herself at great cost and peril, but implying also the natural sequences of

stresses and slacks in the thoughts and acts of a representative human being.11

Referring to Chapter 18 of Adam Bede, Hill extends George Eliot’s phrase “familiar rhythm” beyond the scope of the Prayer Book to draw in the “extra-liturgical” interchange of distress and consolation that is fundamental to human experience. These rhythms, then, are “natural” as well as social and congregational; they are physical, aural, and cognitive.12

It is well known that William and Dorothy Wordsworth habitually hummed and murmured lines of poetry to themselves and to each other both indoors and while they paced

backwards and forwards outside. While this was a lifelong habit for the poet, there are two specific periods at Dove Cottage—the spring and early summer of 1802 and the months following John Wordsworth’s death in 1805—during which the repetition of verses alongside various types of iterative physical activity may be interpreted as an “extra-liturgical” practice performed to induce and support meditation and consolation. In shaping their own “familiar rhythm[s]” outside the auspices of the Book of Common Prayer, I suggest that William and

Dorothy may be aligned with Jeremy Taylor, whose mid-seventeenth-century writings promoted the cultivation of private, individual repetition and ritual. During the Interregnum

(when Taylor was writing), Common Prayer was outlawed by the Puritan authorities and replaced with spontaneous worship. English Romanticism, epitomized by Wordsworth, has been interpreted as the “eventual poetic consequence” of this Puritan “contempt for formalized language”: Romantic “spontaneity” is said to have “reinforced the Puritan antagonism toward set forms [of worship]”.13 However, such conclusions are imprecise and misleading. Although William and Dorothy act independently of corporate worship in 1802 and 1805, their habits—in sympathy with Taylor’s teaching—reveal a craving for the kinds of structures William later celebrated in Ecclesiastical Sonnets. Consequently, the apparent disparity between the high-Romantic poet of Dove Cottage and the high-Anglican Tractarian sympathizer of Rydal Mount is shown to be less severe than is often assumed.

1802: Pacing and Repetition

From the time of the Wordsworths’ arrival at Dove Cottage in December 1799, domestic tasks were entwined with composing, copying, correcting, and reciting verse; Dorothy’s letters and journals were produced in intimate relationship with William’s poetry and John

Wordsworth was also present from January 1800 to help set up their home. When John returned to sea on 29 September, they could not have known that it would be the last time they parted.14

The spring and early summer of 1802 was an unsettled time at Dove Cottage:

William’s prospective marriage promised to irrevocably alter domestic life and although

Dorothy looked forward “with perfect happiness” to the union, she “half [dreaded] that concentration of all tender feelings, past, present, and future which will come upon me on the wedding morning”.15 Before the wedding took place, William and Dorothy visited Annette

Vallon in France and William met his daughter Caroline for the first time; the anticipation and experience of such a meeting was inevitably emotionally fraught. A further source of anxiety was Coleridge: his marital discord, obsession with Sara Hutchinson, and deteriorating mental and physical health found expression in April 1802 in his “Letter to Sara

Hutchinson”.16 In the months before they departed for France in July 1802, I suggest that the

Wordsworths created iterative patterns of sound and movement as part of an attempt to relieve accumulating anxiety.

Images of Wordsworth composing poetry whilst walking have been prominent since the nineteenth century, yet Andrew Bennet has shown that perambulatory recitation, not composition, was more often his activity.17 This conclusion, emphasized within several entries in Dorothy’s Grasmere Journal for March, April and May 1802, suggests that rather than a direct aid to composition, the habit—for both siblings—of reciting verses while walking was often a means of relieving psychological tension or emotional distress.18 For example, the day after they “resolved to see Annette”, they “went to sit in the Orchard … & walked backwards & forwards, we talked about C—Wm repeated the poem [the Cuckow] to me” (82); when “William was not well & [Dorothy] was in low spirits”, they “sate in the

Orchard & repeated the Glowworm & other poems” (88–89); when William “had a bad head

ache owing to his having been disturbed the night before with reading C’s letter”, Dorothy

“Walked backwards & forwards with William—he repeated his poem” (93); when Dorothy

“was very unwell”, they “walked a long time backwards & forwards between Johns Grove & the Lane upon the Turf” (102). In each case, Dorothy’s word “repeated” suggests that the verbal activity of reciting lines over and again matched their iterative pacing to and fro.

The siblings associated such meditative pacing with their brother John. As indicated in “When first I journey’d hither”, it was John who discovered an appropriate “length of open space” in the fir-grove beside Dove Cottage (subsequently named “John’s Grove”) in which to “walk / Backwards and forwards … / In easy and mechanic thoughtlessness” (36–38). John wore a track “around the trees” (57) by pacing,

With that habitual restlessness of foot

Wherewith the Sailor measures o’er and o’er

His short domain upon the Vessel’s deck

While she is travelling through the dreary seas.

(70–74)19

As a mariner accustomed to confined spaces, pacing suited John’s introspective disposition.

Pacing was a means of assuaging his “restlessness of foot” but also—just as William sought to induce “mechanic thoughtlessness” or cognitive emptiness by walking to and fro—it alleviated mental “restlessness”. The final section of the poem (addressed to John) reveals a further effect of this activity: William imagines John to be muttering verses and pacing about

“the Vessel’s deck / In some far region” (108) while, simultaneously, “The fir-grove murmurs with a sea-like sound” and William treads “this path, for aught I know / Timing my steps to thine, and with a store / Of indistinguishable sympathies” (111–14). For William,

pacing about the fir-grove is an expression of affinity with John and a means of feeling close to him while he is at sea. The same is true for Dorothy, who describes “a sweet sea-like sound in the trees” beneath which they “walked backwards & forwards some time for dear John’s sake”.20 Figuring the sounds in the trees as “sea-like” suggests that the siblings telescoped

John’s Grove and the deck of his ship, imaginatively collapsing the space between themselves and their beloved brother as they held him in mind.

Dorothy’s journal offers further evidence to suggest that iterative activity had the potential to effect perception of their physical surroundings: “[w]e could hear the sound of those lesser falls but … could not see them—we walked backwards & forwards till all distant objects except the white shape of the waterfall, & the lines of the mountains were gone” (47).

When iterative movement synchronized with the streaming sound of water, William and

Dorothy reached a state of mental abstraction which effectively enabled them to imagine themselves elsewhere.

A comparable situation is described in “Resolution and Independence” (which was composed in response to Coleridge’s “Letter to Sara Hutchinson”) where the narrator drifts into a half-conscious state while listening to the “Choice word, and measured phrase” (102) of the leech gatherer. The intonation of the utterance (which resembles that of “Religious men” (105)) affects the narrator such that the leech gatherer’s words become an indistinct

“stream”: although “The Old Man still stood talking at my side”, the voice was “like a stream

/ Scarce heard; nor word from word could I divide” (113–15). The opening lines of the poem explain that following a night of rain which “came heavily and fell in floods” (2) the air was filled with the “pleasant noise of waters” (7). As the stream “Scarce heard” (into which the leech gatherer’s words dissolve) merges with this undercurrent of running water, it resembles the muffled “sea-like sound” that William associated with John and that was apt to imaginatively lift him out of present circumstances. The despondency felt by the narrator at

the start of the poem is alleviated as he emerges through this “stream”, vowing to recall regularly the leech gatherer’s pacing “About the weary moors” (137). In this sense, the poem resonates with Psalm 42, which describes a disquieted and downcast soul over whom waters pass as “Flood calls unto flood in the sound of thy heavy shower”.21 The psalmist is subsequently uplifted and receives divine comfort.

In the Hebraic/Christian tradition, the Psalter is “the special locus for the soul in meditation”.22 Psalms are a source of consolation not only based on their content (which tends to move from lamentation to praise of God) but also from the rhythms inscribed within them and the manner in which they are read, sung, or meditated upon. The Psalter received close scholarly attention following the translation into English of Robert Lowth’s Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews (1787); this was accompanied in the 1790s by a lively debate within the Anglican Church about how to best arrange psalms for congregational singing, and the decade also saw the publication of the first histories of monastic chanting.23

In addition to his knowledge of Lowth’s lectures, Wordsworth would have been familiar with

Miles Coverdale’s prose translations of the psalms, which were included in the Book of

Common Prayer and a steady feature of the Anglican worship he experienced as a child and at Cambridge University.24 Coverdale’s psalms are not metrical but they are rhythmical in that they are “pointed”: each verse is divided into two parts by a colon that marks a pause for breath during chanting; the “pointing” thus creates a pivot upon which the psalmist turns, generating aural symmetry. William Romaine’s Essay on Psalmody (1775) explains that in the Church of England psalms “are read in every day’s service, both at morning and evening prayer, and are constantly sung in public worship”.25 But psalms and psalmodic meditation also had a particular presence in domestic households.

Seventeenth and eighteenth-century Christian household manuals encourage their readers to extract phrases from the Psalter for repetition as they go about daily tasks.

Examples that were known to the Wordsworths include William Law’s A Serious Call to a

Devout and Holy Life (1729), which provides instructions on how to chant a psalm and directs its readers to memorize phrases from the Psalter and reflect on them periodically;

William Melmoth’s The Great Importance of a Religious Life Conisder’d (1711) provides prayers to be repeated throughout the day as a means of preventing unchristian behaviour.26

Jeremy Taylor’s Rule and Exercises of Holy Living (1650), which Wordsworth owned and annotated, similarly recommends that “In the midst of the works of thy Calling” Christians should “often retire to God in short prayers and ejaculations … for so thou reconcilest the outward work and thy inward calling … the employment of the Body and the interest of thy

Soul”.27 Taylor advocates “[measuring] the day” by reciting a short phrase “every hour, that the parts and returns of devotion may be the measure of your time” (11). This ensures that for those employed in physical work the day “is as truly sanctified” as it may be for those

“whose time is not filled up with labour and useful Business” (7). Taylor offers lists of biblical phrases to be recited during “all the intervals or void spaces of time” (6).28 As such, he promotes something quite different from congregational chanting or family worship in the home; he describes an individual salutary practice that utilizes short phrases to transform the nature of daily work, freeing the mind from troublesome thoughts and turning arduous labour into devotion. Aiming to form “evenness and tranquillity of spirit” and a “sober, fixed and recollected spirit”, Taylor advises his readers to:

Break your office and devotion into fragments, and make frequent returnings by

ejaculations. … by often praying in such manner and in all circumstances, we

shall habituate our Souls to Prayer, by making it the business of many lesser

Portions of our Time: and by thrusting it in between all our other Employments, it

will make every thing relish of Religion, and by degrees turn all into its nature.

(240)

Repeating scriptural phrases between domestic tasks has the effect of altering the “nature” of words, thoughts, and actions. By this method, a text is kneaded into physical movement until the two activities are indistinguishable and the subject has transcended consciousness of both text and physical work in favour of divine thoughts.

Taylor’s assertion that repetition can alter the “nature” of words resembles

Wordsworth’s argument in the note to “The Thorn” (1800), which urges that words “ought to be weighed in the balance of feeling, and not measured by the space which they occupy upon paper”.29 Words may be repeated without tautology, Wordsworth argues, when the underlying feeling or passion is modified: “virtual tautology is much oftener produced by using different words when the meaning is exactly the same”. The significance of a word can change as it recurs because words are not “symbols” of passion but “things, active and efficient, which are of themselves part of the passion”. Repetition thus has the capacity to capture various shades of the poet’s feeling.30 However, Wordsworth’s comments are not restricted to repetition within texts (as in the example he offers from the Book of Judges or in

Martha Ray’s refrain): in light of the siblings’ habits at Dove Cottage, I suggest that this theory of repetition is also applicable when a word or phrase is extracted from a text for oral repetition by a reader. As Jeremy Taylor notes, verbal repetition of a scripted phrase can refocus thought and emotion.31

The prayerful repetition advocated by Taylor is an Anglicized version of the practice that came to be known as hesychasm. The term comes from the Greek hesychia, meaning

“silence”, and it refers to one who cultivates a meditative disposition. Although the term is predominately associated with Eastern Christianity, the technique has been practised in

various religious and secular contexts since the fourteenth century and continues as an aspect of lay spirituality to the present day. It involves repeating a short phrase or word

(versiculum), often extracted from the Psalter, in order to focus the mind and shut out distracting or painful thoughts. Practitioners of this technique follow the example set by

Jesus, who repeated a phrase from Deuteronomy to guard against temptation in the desert

(Matt. 4:1–11), and also answer Saint Paul’s instruction to “Pray without ceasing” (1 Thess.

5:17). The aim is to empty the mind of discursive thought in order to attain contemplative union with God.32 The hesychast thus moves from meditation (which is a methodical, teachable activity of iterative, attentive thought) to contemplation (a state of mental freedom beyond thought and image).33

When a phrase is continually repeated its lexical meaning is distorted and the utterance collapses into a stream of sound; the aural experience is thus similar to that described by the young poet of “Resolution and Independence”, for whom the leech gatherer’s “Choice word and measured phrase” becomes unintelligible. Hesychast “silence” is, therefore, not actual “silence” but rather an audible murmur that effectively shuts out interior noise and supports meditation. Such slippage between silence and the sotto voce stems perhaps from the monastic tradition where the term in silentio refers to quiet murmuring in submissa or suppressa vox.34 Similarly, psalmody—the activity of singing psalms—generates sound, not silence, but its particular aural quality activates and nourishes meditation by banishing other noises from the mind.

On 4 May 1802, a day on which Wordsworth composed part of “The Leech

Gatherer”, Dorothy performed a version of the activity recommended by Taylor. Dorothy

“repeated verses to William while he was in bed—he was soothed & I left him. ‘This is the

Spot’ over & over again”.35 Given that William was unsettled and sleepless, the lines Dorothy

“repeated”, which come from his manuscript poem “Travelling”, were well chosen.36 Taylor

provides “short Meditations to be used in the Night when we awake” and the first phrase on his list is from Psalm 4: “commune with your own heart upon your bed, and be still. I will lay me down in peace and sleep, for thou, Lord, only makest me to dwell in safety”.37 Capturing the themes of Psalm 4, “Travelling” describes a “bed of heath” (4) in a peaceful woodland

“spot” (1) that is “so sweet a resting place” (5):

Come! —let me see thee sink into a dream

Of quiet thoughts,—protracted till thine eye

Be calm as water, when the winds are gone

And no one can tell whither. …

(6–9)

As Dorothy repeated these lines, they became not just a description of a state of restful sleep, peace, and stillness similar to that depicted in Psalm 4 but a tool for achieving that state. The poem explains that “the air / In the habitual silence of this wood / Is more than silent” (2–4), implying that the wood is usually quiet but also perhaps that its “silence” is enriched by the

“habitual” murmuring of the trees. Like the repetition of psalms in silentio, Dorothy’s refrain contributed to rather than disrupted the calmness of their domestic setting; she created a soothing aural undertone that was “more than silent”. With its celebration of “happy hours”

(10) spent resting in a particular “spot”, the poem’s title seems incongruous; yet just as the

Wordsworths found mental freedom by pacing back and forth, Dorothy’s repetition of these lines simulated motion which helped soothe William’s mind and facilitate mental

“Travelling”. In effect, Dorothy’s activity completed the meaning of the poem.38

Just a few weeks later, on 3 June, when an afternoon of walking about the Tuft Path was curtailed by rain, Dorothy again verbally created a sense of motion, this time by reading

aloud from Milton. A “very affecting letter” from Mary Hutchinson had just arrived when

Dorothy sat “in the window reading Milton’s Penseroso to William”:39

Com pensive Nun, devout and pure,

Sober, stedfast, and demure,

All in a robe of darkest grain,

Flowing with majestick train,

And sable stole of Cipres Lawn,

Over thy decent shoulders drawn.

Com, but keep thy wonted state,

With eev’n step, and musing gate,

And looks commercing with the skies,

Thy rapt soul sitting in thine eyes:

There held in holy passion still,

Forget thyself to Marble, till

With a sad Leaden downward cast,

Thou fix them on the earth as fast.

(31–44)40

In the context of their broader habits of pacing and repetition, the decision to read “Il

Penseroso” (1645) on this occasion was not a straightforward example of familial reading aloud. In the poem, Milton calls upon Melancholy, personified as a “pensive nun” whose gifts are “Contemplation” (54) and “Silence” (55), to be the companion and ruling influence of his life. The nun’s devotional routine pivots around her “eev’n step, and musing gate”—a collocation which elides distinctions between somatic and mental activity—yet Milton

emphasizes the stillness of her gaze. Through regulated movement about the garden, the nun reaches a state of contemplation and her eye is held still by “holy passion”. That is to say, the nun exemplifies the state that is both desired within “Travelling”—where the speaker hopes to release the addressee from melancholy thoughts and make his eye “calm as water”—and achieved through Dorothy’s soothing recitation of “Travelling”. In reading Milton’s iambic octosyllabic couplets aloud when rain forced an end to outdoor walking and the arrival of

Mary’s letter had “affecting” consequences, Dorothy offered an apt literary model for perambulatory meditation while simultaneously providing an aural alternative to pacing along the Turf Path.

In adopting the role of the chantress (the regular metre a substitute for regulated movement), Dorothy again supported her brother by acting in sympathy with Taylor’s instructions: “When you have observed any considerable wandering of your thoughts, bind yourself to repeat that Prayer again with actual attention, or else revolve the full sense of it in your spirit, and repeat it in all the effects and desires of it” (238). Wandering is very different from pacing back and forth: it is more characteristic of Milton’s wayward Eve than of his pensive nun. Ever since Dorothy had read Milton’s sonnets aloud on 21 May, William had developed a “habit” of repeatedly revolving his thoughts within the sonnet form rather than allowing “any considerable wandering” in the blank verse of The Recluse and it was around this time that he began to associate the figure of a nun with enclosed poetic space:41

Nuns fret not at their Convent’s narrow room;

And Hermits are contented with their Cells;

And Students with their pensive Citadels:

Maids at the Wheel, the Weaver at his Loom,

Sit blithe and happy; Bees that soar for bloom,

High as the highest Peak of Furness Fells,

Will murmur by the hour in Foxglove bells:

In truth, the prison, unto which we doom

Ourselves, no prison is: and hence to me,

In sundry moods, ’twas pastime to be bound

Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground:

Pleas’d if some Souls (for such there needs must be)

Who have felt the weight of too much liberty,

Should find short solace there, as I have found.

(1–14)

Given that Wordsworth found “solace” in various other forms of iterative activity at this anxious time, “Nuns fret not” implies that sonnet writing is a further example of his pursuit of contemplative freedom. The iterative work of “Maids at the Wheel, the Weever at his Loom”, as well as the murmuring of bees “by the hour in Foxglove bells” produce susurrating sounds.

As Taylor advises workers to regularly murmur to themselves in order to turn their task into an act of devotion, so the whirr of the spinning wheel and the hum of the loom are comparable to the sound of the sotto voce hesychast refrain that sustains meditation and eventually enfranchises a troubled mind. At the loom, repetitious cadences free the worker from focusing on humdrum exertion or the constraints of space; in the convent or hermitic cell, repetition of the Divine Office has the same effect. The students’ “Citadels” are

“pensive” but being inside such a “narrow room”—like the sonnet form itself—does not have to be oppressive or arduous once the inhabitant reaches the cognitive freedom that can result from iterative patterns of sound and motion.

These associations are borne out in examples of the siblings’ own behaviour. For example, in a journal entry for Christmas Eve 1802 Dorothy states that she had “been beside

[William] ever since tea running the heal of a stocking, repeating some of his sonnets to him, listening to his own repeating, reading some of Milton’s & the Allegro & Penseroso” (134–

35). Producing a running stitch involves passing the needle in and out of the fabric along a set line, and “running” also implies a movement that “revolves or turns on or as on an axis” (in this case, the axis of the heal).42 Dorothy’s needlework and poetic recitation are mutually supporting; that is to say, the rhythm of the verses runs into the rhythm of the needlework until a household task becomes a “pastime” and the iterative stitch synchronizes with

Milton’s and Wordsworth’s prosody. Similarly, Dorothy reported that:

In wet weather [William] takes out an umbrella, chuses the most sheltered spot,

and there walks backwards and forwards, and though the length of his walk be

sometimes a quarter or half a mile, he is as fast bound within the chosen limits as

if by prison walls. He generally composes his verses out of doors, and while he is

so engaged he seldom knows how the time slips away, or hardly whether it is rain

or fair.43

Referring to William’s “chosen limits” as “prison walls”, Dorothy alludes to “Nuns fret not” and implies a comparison between the strictures of the sonnet form and the length of space in which he is “fast bound” as he walks. The iterative activity loses its onerousness (“the time slips away” as if it is a “pastime”) while, perhaps aided by the sound of water as well as his own murmuring voice, William focuses his mind and disregards inclement surroundings.

Moreover, the track he walks is, like the psalms, “pointed”; with each about-turn, a pivot or pause for breath is incorporated into the measured pattern of steps. In this context, William’s

composition of numerous sonnets during the unsettled months of 1802 may be seen as an aspect of the siblings’ broader patterning of soothing repetitious activity. As Wordsworth later demonstrates via the form as well as the content of his Ecclesiastical Sonnets, being caught within a prescribed “zodiac” is reassuring rather than oppressive. Habits of pacing and sonneteering are poetic rather than devotional but they are, nonetheless, means of inculcating that “evenness and tranquillity of spirit” prescribed by Taylor.

Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Living (1650) was published during a period in which the Book of Common Prayer was outlawed. In January 1645, the Puritan authorities banned the Prayer

Book and issued instead A Directory for the Publique Worship of God, which forbade the use of all prescribed prayers and offered guidelines within which ministers could preach and pray spontaneously. This repeal of formularies was compounded in 1647 when all Christian festivals were abolished.44 Puritans regarded attachment to the Prayer Book as idolatry and believed that formal prayer stifled the activity of the Spirit; only extemporaneous effusion revealed the true condition of the heart.45 Following the Restoration of King Charles II the

Prayer Book became compulsory in every parish yet dissenting advocates of Free Prayer continued to consider ritual and scripted liturgy as superstitious, authoritarian, and a means of stultifying the outpourings of the soul. In particular, Dissenters despised repetition. Isaac

Watt’s Guide to Prayer (1715), for example, claims that repetition threatens to undermine the intense feelings from which true prayer originates, while John Phelps attacks the repetition within set prayers for being “totally subversive” of emotional spontaneity and sincerity.46 In other words, for these advocates of Free Prayer, repetition is always tautology.47

Taylor was writing, therefore, in a context in which the physical ritual and familiar language of Christian worship were prohibited. In this light, when Taylor recommends repetition of biblical phrases in Holy Living, he offers Christians deprived of liturgical forms an alternative source of rhythm and regularity, and a means of anchoring emotion. Taylor’s

Apology for Authorized and Set Forms of Liturgie (1649) challenged the Puritan notion that

“[a]ffective or emotional prayer cannot be expressed through the medium of a scripted liturgy” and his argument is underpinned by an understanding of the kinship between poetry and prayer.48 Using the psalms as a starting point, Taylor identifies poetry as a phenomenon that manifests rather than inhibits the work of the Spirit. Formal prayer, like poetry, is produced when human reason co-operates with the Spirit and, once shared, it is a foundation for community cohesion. By contrast, extemporaneous prayer involves an overbalance of the fancy; it feeds individualism and social disintegration. As David Gay writes: “Far from controlling or confining the inspiration of the spirit, liturgy, no less than poetry, is imaginative writing that complements and sustains community”.49 There is no distinction, for

Taylor, between the composition of poetry and the composition of liturgical texts. By this logic, in the absence of the Prayer Book, there is no reason why poets (and devotional writers such as himself) cannot furnish Christians with texts that provide ritual stability and promote virtuous behaviour. The Wordsworths’ practises at Dove Cottage in the spring and summer of

1802 amount to the same thing: familiar poetic phrases and aural and physical rhythmic activity provide the assurance and stability that in other periods of his life Wordsworth found in the Anglican Liturgy.50

1805: “something inexpressibly soothing”

When William and Dorothy pace about “John’s Grove”, repeating poetic phrases and imagining their thoughts and steps synchronizing with their absent brother’s, they generate a sense of community that many Victorian Anglicans felt they gained through the Book of

Common Prayer. Frederick William Faber, for example, asserts that “We all of us have surely

had seasons of trial and weariness when our spirits would have fainted within us, had we not known of a certainty how many brothers there were treading the same path, using the same prayers, and thinking the same holy thoughts as ourselves”.51 Faber is, of course, speaking metaphorically but pacing to and fro whilst murmuring verses was John Wordsworth’s particular habit; “treading the same path” became a way of feeling close to him when he returned to sea and, in the wake of John’s death on 5 February 1805, his siblings nurtured these iterative habits as a means of remembrance and consolation. In the first days of her bereavement, for example, Dorothy’s reaction was to repeat to herself “a thousand times” what were reportedly John’s last words: “The will of God be done”.52 Perhaps the best- known poetic expression of William’s grief is “Elegiac Stanzas, Suggested by a Picture of

Peele Castle in a Storm” (composed in 1806) and—as noted by Edward Wilson—the final stanza contains an allusion to 1 Thessalonians 4:13, a passage that is referenced in the collect at the graveside in the “Order for the Burial of the Dead” in the Book of Common Prayer: “O merciful God … who also hath taught us, by his holy Apostle Saint Paul, not to be sorry, as men without hope, for them that sleep in him”.53 Yet in terms of affective patterns of consolation, William’s poem “The Solitary Reaper” reveals more pertinently and complexly the rhythms of the siblings’ mourning.

“The Solitary Reaper” appears in Part III of Dorothy’s Recollections of a Tour Made in

Scotland, on which she started work on 11 April 1805. The third and final part of the journal has a different purpose and emphasis from the first two, which Dorothy began in the autumn of 1803 and which are frequently concerned with the domestic labours of women she met during the tour. Recollections was originally composed to amuse Dorothy’s friends and relations, and throughout Parts I and II she sportively compares the cleanliness of the kitchens, the quality of the food and cooking, the state of the linen, and so on with her own standards of housekeeping.54 However, after she learned of John’s death in February 1805,

Dorothy felt she would not “be able to get on with [finishing] it at all”.55 She inserted a note at the head of Part III explaining her struggle to continue, resolving from then on to:

only attempt to give you an idea of those scenes which pleased us most, dropping

the incidents of the ordinary days, of which many have slipped from my memory,

and others which remain it would be difficult, and often painful to me, to

endeavour to draw out and disentangle from other thoughts.56

Dorothy’s grief was profound. Memories of John permeated everything she did and wrote at this time; any recollection of Scottish domestic habits would be entangled with thoughts of her own home which was now bereft. Dorothy confessed to Jane Marshall that she could

“turn to no object that does not remind me of our loss. … he loved our cottage, he helped us to furnish it, and to make the gardens—trees are growing now which he planted”.57 Only after

Dorothy had completed the first fair copy of the Recollections did William compose the poems that were incorporated into it, including “The Solitary Reaper”. These poems and the places or people they memorialize, like the third part of the journal, are inflected by personal desolation.58

Dorothy notes that “The Solitary Reaper” was “suggested to William by a beautiful sentence in Thomas Wilkinson’s ‘Tour in Scotland’”:

Passed a female who was reaping alone: she sung in Erse as she bended over her

sickle; the sweetest human voice I ever heard: her strains were tenderly

melancholy, and felt delicious, long after they were heard no more.59

The poem’s appearance within Recollections, however, provides a more intimate context for

William’s verse. In the entry for 13 September 1803 (in Part III of the text), Dorothy recalls that “It was harvest-time, and the fields were quietly—might I be allowed to say pensively?—enlivened by small companies of reapers. It is not uncommon in the more lonely parts of the Highlands to see a single person so employed”.60 Earlier that day, Dorothy had encountered an old paralytic widow whose many children were all either “dead or in foreign countries”; Dorothy recalled her own tiredness on that occasion, noting that her “limbs were a little stiff” from extensive walking, which perhaps made her observation of the lame woman keener.61 However, Dorothy’s melancholy reflection on the “troublesome” life of the woman, written after John’s death, becomes tinged by her own loss. The widow’s grief and physical struggle also underscores the melancholy of the solitary reaper (who is imaginatively extracted from the group of reapers William and Dorothy saw that afternoon) and these two women frame the day’s entry in the Recollections.

“The Solitary Reaper” depicts a “Highland Lass! / Reaping and singing by herself” (2–

3) and entreats the reader to “listen! for the Vale profound / Is overflowing with the sound”

(7–8). The speaker listens as “the plaintive numbers” of the song “flow” (18) until he has had his “fill” (29) and then carries the music in his heart “Long after it was heard no more” (32).

Wordsworth’s verse, composed only months after John’s death, may be seen to incorporate imagery from Psalm 23 (“The Lord is my Shepherd”), in which an overflowing cup is a metaphor for the abundance of God’s provision and consolation for those who mourn. Lines from Psalm 23 were often selected as a hesychast refrain and just three weeks after “The

Solitary Reaper” was composed Dorothy confided to Lady Beaumont that she had been using the poem as a meditative aid:

There is something inexpressibly soothing to me in the sound of those two Lines

Oh listen! for the Vale profound

Is overflowing with the sound—

I often catch myself repeating them in disconnection with any thought, or even, I

may say, recollection of the Poem.62

In this context, lines of the poem become not merely a reflection on the plight of the reaper but also part of Dorothy’s attempt to subdue personal sorrow.

The poem’s narrator is moved by the singing but he cannot understand the reaper’s language: “Will no one tell me what she sings?” (17), he asks. He speculates that this

“melancholy strain” (6) tells of “battles long ago” (20) or perhaps of some “Familiar matter of today? / Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain, / That has been, and may be again!” (22–24).

The “strain” is not affective because of its content (Wordsworth would not have understood the Gaelic language of the song in any case) but rather because its sound touches the listener at an emotive, non-linguistic level. As its specific content is indeterminable, the tonal quality of the song encapsulates all manner of sadness including that of the lame widow, of William, and of Dorothy.

William had only witnessed this particular reaper via the passage in Wilkinson’s manuscript (the fields that he and Dorothy saw were “quietly … enlivened” by groups of reapers). Wilkinson’s prose memorialized a song that continued to exist for him “long after it was heard no more”; in turn William felt the affective quality of the song and recreated it, imaginatively, as he converted Wilkinson’ prose into verse. The letter to Lady Beaumont

(quoted above) suggests that the passion of the Highland girl, who sings in a language that is not understood for its semantic content, eventually passed through Wilkinson and William, to

Dorothy. While the poem asks the reader to “listen!” to an inaudible song and hence to imagine the singer’s melancholy tones, Dorothy goes further. As she murmured the refrain

over and again, the lexical meaning of the phrase dissipated into a stream of sound. In her grief, Dorothy thus transformed lines of the poem back into a version of the reaper’s indeterminate lamentation: murmuring lines inflected by a biblical song, she found herself in a state approaching psalmody. As the reaper “cuts, and binds the grain / And sings a melancholy strain” (5–6), her rhythmic body-language is inextricable from the song that consoles her. Dorothy’s psalmodic repetition of lines from the poem, as she goes about domestic tasks, is an almost unconscious activity occurring “in disconnection with any thought”; she thus emulates the reaper’s practice of singing to release her mind from the hardship of work in the field. The practice enables Dorothy to perform domestic work without making painful associations between the house and John. As Jeremy Taylor suggests, melding physical work with verbal repetition of poignant phrases has the effect of elevating the mental and spiritual state of the worker. The same principle applies in “Nuns fret not”, where humming and murmuring sounds make a “pastime” (10) of arduous repetitive labour.

In August 1805 (before Wordsworth composed “The Solitary Reaper”), Dorothy had not known “when the day will come that I shall find solace in murmuring to myself these lamentations for [John’s] loss, but I trust it will come; for William is comforted in that manner, and I already love at times to hear him repeat these verses [“To the Daisy”], and others which John particularly delighted in”.63 In the context of the habits established at Dove

Cottage, the implication is that William repeated the elegies he wrote for John—and others of

John’s favourite poems—in a psalmodic way; this reassured Dorothy just as her repetition of

“Travelling” had soothed him in 1802. Murmuring verses focuses William’s memories of his deceased brother and helps control his grief; Dorothy was right to trust that with time she too would be comforted by words that were then a source of pain. Once they are open to this meditative process, the thoughts and feelings attached to lines of verse may be realigned. This

is possible because repetition is not always tautology: words can be repeated with new inflections.

The pain associated with certain poems can be alleviated on a metrical level too. In the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth explains that if the “images and feelings” conveyed in poetry “have an undue proportion of pain connected with them, there is some danger that the power may be carried beyond its proper bounds”: in such cases,

the co-presence of something regular, something to which the mind has been

accustomed in various moods and in a less excited state, cannot but have great

efficacy in tempering and restraining the passion by an intertexture of ordinary

feeling, and of feeling not strictly and necessarily connected with the passion.64

Where there exists an overbalance of pain, the regularity of metre has the effect of

“tempering and restraining the passion”, making difficult thoughts and feelings more bearable. As Ruth Abbott has convincingly argued, moreover, Wordsworth’s statement that metre “[throws] a sort of half-consciousness of unsubstantial existence over the whole composition” may be interpreted to mean that metre gives verse a kind of “consciousness” or vitality that is independent of its linguistic content.65 The implication is that passion inheres not only in the language of the poem but independently in its prosody.66 Like the cadences of the spinning wheel, for example, regular rhythms are intrinsically soothing.67 Consequently, words subject to repetition—which become rhythmical even when not strictly metrical—may lose their semantic coherence (like Dorothy’s psalmodic refrain or the leech gatherer’s streaming speech) and yet convey consolation or relief. Wordsworth’s poetics may be understood, in this context, as liturgical. Whether or not he attends church and whether or not the subject is explicitly religious, Wordsworth’s commitment to the vital, levelling “co-

presence of something regular” is aligned with the principles that underpin iterative scripted prayer.

Rather than making extemporaneous ejaculations in times of distress, William and

Dorothy repeat texts in order to inhibit the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”, opting for a controlled way of working through their emotions.68 By contrast, the extemporaneous outpouring of the Spirit is discomforting and interpretations of

Wordsworth’s poetics as an extension of Puritan Free Prayer appear inaccurate. The rhythms created at Dove Cottage in 1802 and 1805 had the same consolatory efficacy as those of that

“precious Book which”, Wordsworth admitted in an 1845 revision to Ecclesiastical Sonnets,

“long has fed / Our meditations”.69

University of Bristol

1 David Perkins, “Wordsworth, Hunt, and Romantic Understandings of Meter”, JEGP, 93 (January 1994): 7. 2 Stephen Gill, “Wordsworth and ‘Catholic Truth’: The Role of Frederick William Faber”, Review of English Studies, 45 (May 1994): 214. Faber wrote to John Keble on 12 November 1842: “I have also persuaded [Mr Wordsworth] to compose some fresh sonnets for the Eccles: Sketches, owning more explicitly our debt to the papacy”. B. W. Martin, “Wordsworth, Faber, and Keble: Commentary on a Triangular Relationship”, Review of English Studies, 26 (November 1975): 436. 3 Kirstie Blair notes that Protestants were particularly wary of Churching and the Visitation of the Sick based on what was perceived to be their popish character. Tractarians, by contrast, promoted these rites. See Form and Faith in Victorian Poetry and Religion (Oxford U. Press, 2012), 92. 4 Gill, “Wordsworth and ‘Catholic Truth’”, 204–5. See also Stephen Gill, Wordsworth and the Victorians (Oxford U. Press, 1998), 40–80. Quotation of “The Liturgy” is taken from Sonnet Series and Itinerary Poems, 1820–1845, ed. Geoffrey Jackson (Cornell U. Press, 2004), 194. 5 The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Symser, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974), 147. 6 Sonnet Series, 195. 7 John Keble, The Christian Year: Thoughts in Verse for the Sundays and Holydays Throughout the Year (Oxford, 1827), i–ii. 8 Sara Coleridge’s marginalia is transcribed in Peter J. Manning, “The White Doe of Rylstone and Later Narrative Poems”, in The Oxford Handbook of William Wordsworth, ed. Richard Gravil and Daniel Robinson (Oxford U. Press, 2015), 274. Robert M. Ryan explores “the remarkably large and ecumenical congregation of [Victorian] believers who considered Wordsworth their priest, prophet, or spiritual director” in Charles Darwin and the Church of Wordsworth (Oxford U. Press, 2016), 8. 9 John Henry Newman, for example, reported in 1828 that “during the acuteness of her … spasms” his dying sister “received great comfort from being able to repeat to herself Keble’s hymns”. See Kirstie Blair, “Keble and The Christian Year”, in The Oxford Handbook of English Literature and Theology, ed. Andrew W. Hass, David

Jasper, and Elizabeth Jay (Oxford U. Press, 2007), 608–9. Lucy Newlyn’s William and Dorothy Wordsworth: All in Each Other (Oxford U. Press, 2013), 301–4 notes that reciting poetry had a palliative effect during Dorothy’s illness. 10 Dorothy explains to Catherine Clarkson in 1806 that “we are become regular churchgoers”: The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Middle Years pt. I, 1806–1811, ed. Mary Moorman (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969), 136. (Hereafter MY i.) William Ulmer’s The Christian Wordsworth, 1798–1805 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001) makes the case for the poet’s faith. 11 Geoffrey Hill, “Redeeming the Time”, in Collected Critical Writings, ed. Kenneth Haynes (Oxford U. Press, 2008), 93. 12 Eliot, for example, describes the pattern of standing, sitting, and kneeling during Thais Bede’s funeral as well as the “rich chant” of Joshua Rann’s intonation of the collect. Adam Bede’s cognitive and interpersonal “stresses and slacks” are cognates to the rhythms of the liturgy: Adam Bede, ed. Valentine Cunningham (Oxford U. Press, 1998), 198–99. 13 Ramie Targoff, Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England (Chicago U. Press, 2001), 87. 14 Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life (Oxford U. Press, 1989; repr. 1990), 183. 15 The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: the Early Years, ed. Chester L. Shaver (Oxford: Clarendon 1967), 377. (Hereafter EY). 16 Gill, A Life, 205–9. There is little solid evidence of how they felt about the French visit. Coleridge’s letter is dated 4 April; he read it to the Wordsworths on 21 April: see Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1956), 790–98. 17 Andrew Bennett, Wordsworth Writing (Cambridge U. Press, 2007), 19–41. 18 Ibid., 27. 19 Unless otherwise stated, all subsequent quotation of Wordsworth’s poetry is from Poems, in Two Volumes, and Other Poems, 1800–1807, ed. Jared Curtis (Cornell U. Press, 1983). Testament to the importance of pacing, the first section of Wordsworth’s 1807 collection was dedicated to “The Orchard Pathway”: “Orchard Pathway, to and fro, / Ever with thee, did I go”. See Poems, in Two Volumes, 63. 20 The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals, ed. Pamela Woof (Oxford U. Press, 2002), 72. 21 W. T. Allison, “The Nature Poetry of the Psalms”, The Biblical World, 30 (August 1907): 114. 22 Harold Fisch, Poetry with a Purpose (Indiana U. Press, 1990), 106–7. 23 Ryan Haas explores this debate as a context for Wordsworth’s response to Tintern Abbey in “Wordsworth and the Monks of Tintern Abbey”, Modern Philology, 114 (August 2016): 82–105. 24 The influence of the psalms on Wordsworth’s poetry has not received sustained attention. Allusions are scattered throughout his writings: in The Borderers, for example, Herbert refers to Psalm 136: “There is a psalm that speaks / Of the tender mercies of God, which with Matilda / I used to sing” (3.3.8–10) and to Psalm 102 in “remembering him who feeds / The pelican and ostrich of the Desert” (3.3.94–95). The Borderers, ed. Robert Osborn (Cornell U. Press, 1982), 190 and 198 respectively. 25 An Essay on Psalmody (London, 1775), iii. Romaine’s purpose is to promote greater care in psalm-singing. 26 William Law, A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life. Adapted to the State and Condition of All Orders of Christians (London, 1729), 228, 252 and 262–80. William Melmouth, The Great Importance of a Religious Life Consider’d. To Which Are Added Some Morning and Evening Prayers (London, 1711). Wordsworth refers to these popular works in a letter of 5 June 1808: MY i., 249. 27 Jeremy Taylor, The Rule and Exercises of Holy Living (1650), 23rd ed. (London, 1719), 7; Chester L. Shaver and Alice Shaver, Wordsworth’s Library; a Catalogue (New York: Garland, 1989), 254. 28 Lists of recommended psalms appear in Holy Living, 41, 46–49, and 293–95. 29 Lyrical Ballads, and Other Poems, 1797–1800, ed. James Butler and Karen Green (Cornell U. Press, 1992), 351. 30 Ibid. 31 William Hazlitt acknowledges the shades of meaning within written language in “On the Difference between Writing and Speaking”, The Selected Writings of William Hazlitt, ed. Duncan Wu, vol. 8, The Plain Speaker (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1998), 259–60: “The whole of a man’s thoughts and feelings cannot lie on the surface, made up for use; but the whole must be a greater quantity, a mightier power, if they could be got at, layer under layer, and brought into play by the levers of imagination and reflection”. 32 Dirk Krausmuller, “The Rise of Hesychasm”, in Eastern Christianity, ed. Michael Angold, vol. 5 (Cambridge U. Press, 2006), 101–26; Kallistos Ware, “Act out of stillness”: The Influence of Fourteenth-Century Hesychasm on Byzantine and Slav Civilisation (Toronto: The Hellenic Canadian Association of Constantinople and The Thessalonian Society of Metro Toronto, 1995). I use the term “hesychasm”, then, to denote a version of meditative, centring prayer that dates back many centuries and has informed diverse spiritual and therapeutic practices.

33 This ancient distinction underpins Quietism. Jeanne Guyon’s A Brief and Very Easy Method of Mental Prayer (1685) offered unmediated experience of God’s presence to everyone who adopted her methods. Guyon was imprisoned in the Bastille between 1695 and 1703 for publishing this heretical book, which seemed to dismiss the need for ordained ministers and sacraments. See Richard Parish, Catholic Particularity in Seventeenth- century French Writing: “Christianity Is Strange” (Oxford U. Press, 2011), 164–72. 34 Paul Saenger, Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading (Stanford U. Press, 1997), 268. Saenger explains that murmuring or reading aloud was part of the cognitive process necessary to decipher and comprehend scripts before word-separation was introduced. The ancients therefore viewed silent reading with suspicion: given that reading scriptura continua without vocalizing words would have been a much more arduous process than reading aloud, it was assumed that the silent reader desired privacy. 35 Grasmere Journal, 96. 36 DC MS 15, Lyrical Ballads, 307. 37 Taylor, Holy Living, 46. Taylor chooses to quote verses 4 and 9, eliding verses 5–8. 38 I follow Deeanne Westbrook in perceiving the presence of the Bible in Wordsworth’s work as “ghostly”: Wordsworth’s Biblical Ghosts (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 4. I am less concerned with thematic or linguistic allusions to psalms than with ways in which the Wordsworths’ activities emulate psalmody. 39 Grasmere Journal, 105. 40 “Il Penseroso”, in The Complete Works of John Milton, Vol. 3: The Shorter Poems, ed. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski and Estelle Haan (Oxford U. Press, 2015), 32. 41 Coleridge feared that Wordsworth’s “habit” of sonneteering was “hurtful to him” insofar as it distracted him from The Recluse. See Collected Letters of STC, vol. 2, 1013. 42 “running adj.”, sense 6, in Oxford English Dictionary Online http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/168941?rskey=7gTzcQ&result=2&isAdvanced=false#eid. 43 EY, 477. This letter dates from May 1804. 44 Lori Branch, Rituals of Spontaneity: Sentiment and Secularism from Free Prayer to Wordsworth (Baylor U. Press, 2006), 39. 45 Targoff, Common Prayer, 36. 46 Branch, Rituals of Spontaneity, 46–47. Opposition to liturgical repetition continued into the nineteenth century. 47 This is the context in which later eighteenth-century Dissenters emphasized the importance of oratory and elocution. Anthologies such as William Enfield’s The Speaker encouraged reading aloud, while Thomas Sheridan’s Lectures on Elocution (1762) claimed that when communication depends on feeling reading aloud is surpassed by speeches made directly from the heart. (See Frances Ferguson, “Writing and Orality around 1800: ‘Speakers’, ‘Readers’, and Wordsworth’s ‘The Thorn’”, in Wordsworth’s Poetic Theory: Knowledge, Language, Experience, ed. Alexander Regier and Stephan H. Uhlig (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010), 119–38.) The openness, clarity and authenticity that, for Dissenters, was enshrined in the spoken voice was pitched against what were perceived to be the mystifying tendencies of “chaunted” ritualized Anglican worship. This understanding of intonation as an obstacle to clarity is the context in which William Hazlitt noted in “My First Acquaintance with Poets” (1823) that “[t]here is a chaunt in the recitation both of Coleridge and Wordsworth, which acts as a spell upon the hearer, and disarms the judgement” (The Selected Writings of William Hazlitt, vol. 9, Uncollected Essays, 105). As Lucy Newlyn points out at Reading, Writing, and Romanticism: The Anxiety of Influence (Oxford U. Press, 2000), 370, from a Dissenting perspective, the power of enchantment Hazlitt observed in the poets’ styles of incantation places them firmly in the Anglican tradition. (See Hazlitt’s reminiscence of the manner in which Wordsworth and Coleridge repeated their poetry touches on an ecclesiastically contentious issue while implying his suspicion of their aural “spell”. 48 David Gay, “‘Differing Spirits’: Jeremy Taylor on Prayer”, Bunyan Studies, 16 (2012): 91. Taylor follows Richard Hooker who was the first to explore the emotional advantages of Common Prayer as “[compensating] for affective inclinations and weaknesses”. See Targoff, Common Prayer, 48 49 Gay, “‘Differing Spirits’”, 90. 50 As it narrates the history of the Church in England, Ecclesiastical Sonnets omits the Interregnum. 51 Frederick William Faber, The Prayer-Book, a Safeguard Against Religious Excitement (London, 1828), 23. As Joshua King has argued, Keble “provided a means for imagining private and domestic acts of reading as ways of participating in a … national religious community”: “John Keble’s The Christian Year: Private Reading and Imagined Religious Community”, Victorian Literature and Culture, 40 (September 2012): 397. 52 EY, 550. 53 Edward Wilson, “An Echo of St. Paul and Words of Consolation in Wordsworth’s ‘Elegiac Stanzas’”, Review of English Studies, 42 (May 1992): 75. The final line of “Elegiac Stanzas” reads: “Not without hope we suffer and we mourn”. The Wordsworth family Bible, which had belonged to their father, was returned to William and

Dorothy in October 1805. It was later bound with their copy of the Book of Common Prayer (1629). See Duncan Wu, Wordsworth’s Reading, 1800–1815 (Cambridge U. Press, 1995), 23. 54 For example: “I examined the kitchen round about; it was crowded with furniture, drawers, cupboards, dish- covers, pictures, pans, and pots, arranged without order, except that the plates were on shelves, and the dish- covers hung in rows; these were very clean, but floors, passages, staircase, everything else dirty”: Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland, ed. Carol Kyros Walker (Yale U. Press, 1007), 53. 55 Ibid., 162. 56 Ibid. The division of the Recollections into parts is presented clearly in The Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, vol. 1 (London: Macmillan, 1952), 259 and 344. 57 EY, 559–60. 58 Other poems include “Glen Almain” and “The Matron of Jedburgh”. It is estimated that “The Solitary Reaper” was composed on 5 November 1805 (Poems, in Two Volumes, 184). 59 Recollections, 193; Poems, in Two Volumes, 415. Wilkinson’s text was published in 1824 but circulated in manuscript beforehand. 60 Recollections, 193. 61 Ibid., 191–92. 62 EY, 650. On the meditative use of Psalm 23 see Christopher D. L. Johnson, The Globalization of Hesychasm and the Jesus Prayer: Contesting Contemplation (London: Continuum, 2010), 32 and John Chryssavgis, In the Heart of the Desert: The Spirituality of the Desert Fathers and Mothers (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). 63 EY, 617. 64 Prose Works, 147. 65 Ibid. This statement was added in 1802. 66 Ruth Abbott, “Wordsworth’s Prosody”, in The Oxford Handbook of William Wordsworth, 530–31. This is possible because of Wordsworth’s broader thinking about the dissociation of metre from diction. Whilst many of his contemporaries, including Coleridge, saw metre as a promise of a certain type of vocabulary, for Wordsworth, the decision to write in verse rather than prose did not carry any implications for the poet’s lexicon. See Simon Jarvis, “Thinking in Verse”, in The Cambridge Companion to British Romantic Poetry, ed. James Chandler and Maureen N. McLane (Cambridge U. Press, 2008), 111. 67 Jarvis interprets Wordsworth’s sonnet, “Grief, thou hast lost an ever ready Friend”, which laments the loss of domestic spinning wheels, as a commentary on the efficacy of metre to temper excessive joy as well as grief: ibid., 108–9. 68 The phrase comes from the Preface to Lyrical Ballads in Prose Works, 148. For Lori Branch, “the resacrilization of everyday life” is central to Wordsworth’s “project of resisting relentless pressures for its economization and instrumentality”. See Rituals of Spontaneity, 194. Branch bridges the gap between Lyrical Ballads and Wordsworth’s celebration of forms in Ecclesiastical Sonnets by emphasizing his conception of the moral uncertainty of spontaneous sentiment. 69 “Rural Ceremony”, lines 1–2.