William Wordsworth “The Virgin”
 
 
Mother! whose virgin bosom was uncrost
With the least shade of thought to sin allied.
Woman! above all women glorified,
Our tainted nature's solitary boast;
Purer than foam on central ocean tost;
Brighter than eastern skies at daybreak strewn
With fancied roses, than the unblemished moon
Before her wane begins on heaven's blue coast;
Thy image falls to earth. Yet some, I ween,
Not unforgiven the suppliant knee might bend,
As to a visible Power, in which did blend
All that was mixed and reconciled in thee
Of mother's love with maiden purity,
Of high with low, celestial with terrene!

Corinna Laughlin's reflection

 
May is Mary’s Month, so this month we’ll be reading poems about Mary, from classic and contemporary poets. For this first week of May, I’ve chosen William Wordsworth’s sonnet, “The Virgin.”
 
William Wordsworth was born in 1770 and died in 1850. There was a lot of sadness in Wordsworth’s life, starting with the death of his parents – he was orphaned by the age of 13. Three of his five children predeceased him. He found his joy in the glorious landscape of the Lake District, where he spent most of his life. That landscape filled his poetry. Wordsworth, with his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge, became one of the great English Romantic poets. They were pioneers of a new approach to poetry, characterized by close observation of the natural world, simpler language, and an emphasis on subjectivity—the interior life of the poet.
 
“The Virgin” is a later poem, part of a sequence of 47 sonnets written in 1821 and 1822, when Wordsworth was in his early fifties. The sonnets tell the whole story of the Christian faith in England. Wordsworth was a staunch Anglican—who would, he said, shed his blood for the Church of England.
 
In this sonnet, Wordsworth expresses great sympathy for Catholic devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary. The poem is addressed directly to Mary. Wordsworth uses ideas and images that recall Catholic beliefs about Mary: she is the Immaculate Conception – in the poem’s most famous line, Wordsworth says she is “our tainted nature’s solitary boast”—the one person free from original sin. The imagery he uses to highlight Mary’s purity—comparisons to the ocean, daybreak, the moon –all resonate with Catholic prayers about Mary, whom we invoke as “Morning Star” and “Star of the Sea.”
 
All of this makes the turn the poem takes halfway through more shocking:  “Thy Image falls to earth.” Wordsworth is talking here about the English Reformation, what has been called “the stripping of the altars,” when statues of Mary and the saints were destroyed in an effort to purify the faith of English Christianity. While later, images of Mary and the saints, and tabernacles, would return to Anglican worship, at the time Wordsworth is writing, that had not yet become common.
 
At the end of the poem, Wordsworth expresses his gentle sympathy with those who turn to Mary in prayer. His language is quite tentative—“some… not unforgiven the suppliant knee might bend,” he says—notice the double negative. Wordsworth understands why we Catholics are drawn to Mary, and perhaps wishes that he, too, could turn to her in prayer. For Wordsworth, Mary is the best of both worlds—she combines a “mother’s love” and “maiden’s purity,” high and low, earthly and heavenly—“our tainted nature’s solitary boast.”