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 Laurence Lerner

That is my apology – if one is needed – for choosing three poems that may
not immediately strike the reader as political. All are sonnets, and all are by the
same author:
Rural Ceremony
Closing the sacred Book which long has fed
Our meditations, give we to a day
Of annual joy, one tributary lay;
This day, when, forth by rustic music led,
The village Children, while the sky is red
With evening lights, advance in long array
Through the still churchyard, each with garland gay,
That, carried scepter-like, o’ertops the head
Of the proud Bearer. To the wide church-door,
Charged with these offerings which their fathers bore
For decoration in the Papal time,
The innocent Procession softly moves: _
The spirit of Laud is pleased in Heaven’s pure clime,
And Hooker’s voice the spectacle approves.
Wordsworth, ‘Rural Ceremony’ is no XXXII of the
Ecclesiastical Sonnets Part III (1822)

Few readers are likely to reel much enthusiasm for this rather humdrum sonnet,
with its laboured opening, its commonplace epithets and its inversion (‘garland
gay’) for the sake merely of rhyme. The poem has no glaring blemishes, and no
obvious reason for being a poem. That it has a political dimension, however, is
suggested by the title of the series, Ecclesiastical Sonnets: most of the poems are, in
one way or another, about ecclesiastical politics.
No doubt Wordsworth thought of this sonnet as non-political, a celebration
of a rustic custom that gave to the church a social function which the villagers en-
joyed. It is a celebration of ordinariness, and that in itself is politically ambivalent:
if ordinary folk are contrasted with great ones (as they often are in Wordsworth)
then the implications are – surely – democratic; but if they are contrasted with
meddling intellectuals (as they also are in Wordsworth!) or with malcontents, then
the implication is conservative. In this sonnet there is no explicit contrast, but cer-
emony is placed in a wider context by the mention of Laud and Hooker, both of
whom are placed on a higher plane: Laud is in Heaven, and Hooker ‘approves’ –
the very last word of the poem turns us from simply enjoying the procession to
reflecting on what it stands for. No-one could regard these two great ecclesias-

use of this approach in discussing Wordsworth’s sonnets, while at the same time abandoning it
when I think it ceases to be helpful.