Thus for her, the poem's many biblical allusions may have seemed insignificant. As such, it is a solution we might prefer to believe only an older and more conventional William Wordsworth would dare offer.
Immortality is rooted in duality, in division.
But then, so is the act of writing poetry. It is as a poet that Wordsworth best understood the act of creation. Wordsworth, we recall, had a devout mother, attended church school as a boy and compulsory Chapel at Cambridge, and was intended for the clergy. I suggest, instead, that Wordsworth, in the context of this poem, regarded the smoke and the vagrants as elements of the landscape. Yet this is neither the first nor the last time that he undercuts his own declaration of faith.