"Our Tainted Nature's Solitary Boast"
The Virgin (1821) by William Wordsworth
After the death of his brother and two of his children, William Wordsworth, the great Romantic poet of nineteenth-century England, returned to the Protestant Christianity of his youth.
His 1821 poem “The Virgin” contains a now-famous line that dubbed the Virgin Mary “Our tainted nature’s solitary boast” — a nod to something like her Immaculate Conception, which Catholics celebrate today. In some Catholic circles, this line of poetry has become iconic — it is the title of the chapter on Mary in Bishop Robert Barron’s book Catholicism.
It’s interesting that, very suddenly, the poem’s tone changes. After praising Mary (“purer than foam!”; “brighter than eastern skies!”), Wordsworth stops: “Thy image falls to earth.” This is a reference to the disappearance of Mary from Protestant Christianity. Among the nations of the Reformation, Mary’s exalted and heavenly status has fallen to the earth. She has been humbled and made ordinary, even insignificant. Even in Wordsworth’s Anglo-Catholicism, which was more open to these kinds of things, Marian images were not very common.
And yet Wordsworth reveals his sympathy for the Catholic imagination here, for seeing in Mary the coming together of heaven and earth, “Of mother's love with maiden purity / Of high with low, celestial with terrene!”
On this feast of the Immaculate Conception, Wordsworth’s poem is reproduced below in its entirety.
The Virgin
by William Wordsworth
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!