When you hear the Bible echoed in a Romantic poet, expect to find it transformed. I start with a biblical echo in William Wordsworth’s early poem, Descriptive Sketches (1793). In the following passage the speaker rejoices in the “Soft music from th’aëreal summit” (421), and in the absence of man:

1. – And sure there is a secret Power that reigns

2. Here, where no trace of man the spot profanes …

3. An idle voice the sabbath region fills

4. Of Deep that calls to Deep across the hills,

5. Broke only by the melancholy sound

6. Of drowsy bells for ever tinkling round;

7. Faint wail of eagle melting into blue

8. Beneath the cliffs, and pine-woods steady sugh;

9. The solitary heifer’s deepn’d low;

10. Or rumbling heard remote of falling snow.

11. (424–39, emphasis mine)

In the “Deep that calls to Deep across the hills,” a basso continuo over which plays an array of “melancholy” (but not saddening) sounds, Wordsworth recalls the first line of Psalm 42:7 – “Deep calleth unto deep at the noise of thy waterspouts” – while signally omitting its parallel line, in which the sound of waters becomes a vehicle for the speaker’s despondency: “All thy waves and thy billows are gone over me.” Wordsworth’s lines reverse the Biblical dynamic; here inner landscape seems to give way to outer. The deeps that concern him are those of nature, not of human spirit, and they call, but not primarily to us, the speaker’s witness notwithstanding. Whereas Psalm 42 as a whole uses natural imagery to describe, analogically, the individual’s inner striving towards God – “As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God” (v. 1) – Wordsworth, antithetically, describes the elements of nature in relation to one another, “where no trace of man the spot profanes.” In short, Wordsworth turns the Bible on its head.