William Wordsworth and Nature Mysticism

Adding a little but brilliant piece of poetry to the previous theoretical post.


. . . 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." (Tintern Abbey)

For the whole poem, see Tintern Abbey and for some background and analysis (from which you are free to take only as much as you like, and ignore the rest) see Tintern Abbey analysis.

This poem reminds me, just as psalms and many other poems do, on Schleiermacher's suggestion that poetry and rhetoric are primary expressions of religious feeling, and that theology is "only" secondary.