Abstract
Wordsworthian apocalyptics welcome a veritable swarm of biblical ghosts, along with phantoms of religious discourse, which appear often unobtrusively and depart with scarcely a trace, yet which nevertheless “adjust” the texts to accommodate their force and presence. One may wonder, for example, how to make room for the holy ghost—spirit-breeze that comes as a messenger in the opening lines of the Prelude and speaks a blessing on the rededicated poet, or the semidivine cloud that will guide the poet on his way, or the insistent voice of waters heard throughout the works, suggesting the poet’s encounter with the Merkabah, as in “It was an April morning.” Once recognized, such biblical intrusions are impossible to dismiss.
Nothing! thou elder brother even to shade: Thou hadst a being the world made, And well fixed, art alone of ending not afraid
—Rochester, “Upon Nothing”
If nothing is interpreted no thing it turns our to be nothing other than the fullness of being. …
—Mark C. Taylor 205
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Notes
As Robinson explains, All literature can easily be read as apocalyptic, whether because the images of apocalypse have permeated culture so deeply as to be virtually ubiquitous, or because, as Frank Kermode suggests in The Sense of an Ending (1967), the classic narrative structure, rising action—climax—denouement, seems to have been modeled on the apocalypse. Kermode argues, in fact, that narrative literature and apocalyptic are both grounded in a human need for closure, for a “sense of an ending.” (“Literature and Apocalyptic” 360)
A similarly orthodox treatment of the kiddusha and Merkabah appears in the 1850 Prelude (14:181–7), a passage composed perhaps in the period from 1816 to 1819.
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© 2001 Deeanne Westbrook
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Westbrook, D. (2001). Wordsworthian Apocalyptics. In: Wordsworth’s Biblical Ghosts. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780312299330_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780312299330_7
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