Friday Poetry - May 4

Thus I fared,

Dragging all passions, notions, shapes of faith,

Like culprits to the bar, suspiciously

Calling the mind to establish in plain day

Her titles and her honours, now believing,

Now disbelieving, endlessly perplex’d

With impulse, motive, light and wrong, the ground

Of moral obligation, what the rule

And what the sanction, till, demanding proof,

And seeing in everything, I lost

All feeling of conviction….

 

I like these words from William Wordsworth’s The Prelude 1805 Book X (889-99) where he expresses the detrimental effects of rationalism.