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" The songs of our ancestors

are also the songs of our children "

The Druid Way

I’d rather be a Pagan!

March 22nd, 2015
Johannes Simon Holtzbecher - Narcissus tazetta

Johannes Simon Holtzbecher – Narcissus tazetta

Happy Spring Equinox! Here’s a fitting poem for this time from the pen of William Wordsworth.
Doesn’t ‘Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers,’ ring truer than ever for us? And ‘I’d rather be a Pagan’!

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.–Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

9 Responses to “I’d rather be a Pagan!”

  1. Let`s be Pagans, Panenteists, happy dreamers who experience in their own ways The Unity! The stars smile at us and the Spring Wind sings our songs of eternal Love to Oneness!
    Happy Spring Equinox!

  2. Only today, when I gently teased my husband about forgetting my Ostara egg – he’s a lapsed Catholic who prefers Easter, he said that I live in a different world, a parallel universe. And he’s right. My Druidic leanings, witchy friends (as he calls them) and Pagan rituals amuse and confuse him, but I’d much rather live in my world than his. I’d much rather be a Pagan.

    • Hi Lisa,
      I took my 92 yr old mum to church today. We were asked to sing Psalm 51. One line says:
      “Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me.”
      I could feel the congregation stumbling over this line – the volume level of people singing this dropped right down.
      We had been asked to sing only up to line 13.
      I looked ahead to read line 14. It read: “Deliver me from bloodguiltiness, O God, thou God of my salvation: and my tongue shall sing aloud of thy righteousness.”
      What can one say?!
      I’d much rather be a Pagan too! 🙂

  3. Hmmm – Not to Christian-bash, but that bit goes right along with ” We are not worthy to gather up the crumbs under thy table” …I recall starting to sort that out as an older child in a very much choir-involved Anglican Episcopal family — and beginning to understand about inequality, the effects of a feudal society and class system, and particularly about misogyny, from a personal perspective. My very deeply secret response at that time, was to believe in fairies and nature spirits, and Greek and Roman Gods and Goddesses, and to escape by myself as often as possible into the woods and fields and out on trails where no one could easily find me. Now I know I’m not the only one. It’s very good to have simpatico company to openly share such inspiration and beauty with!

  4. In other ways too the poem is most fitting for our times, as our species, (or a powerful, wealthy minority of us), continue what initially got it’s start in Wordsworth’s time.

    In Wordsworth’s day, the relatively new and spreading industrial revolution had covered trees, buildings, and the inside of urban dweller’s lungs with soot. Child labour flourished as never before, People died in droves in the Poor House, rich industrialists exploited the labour of the so – called lower classes to increase their huge fortunes, frequently without even paying a living wage. “Empire” was exploding and metastasizing, and wealthy speculators in foreign resources inflicted the same, ore an even worse system of exploitation and abuse on native populations around the globe. I think our times are revisiting many of these evils on our besieged and over-populated planet as the gulf between the ultra rich and the majority of the planet’s people rapidly and almost unimaginably expands.

  5. Thank you for that poem! What a perfect choice. Is “the creed” so outworn today? I believe the pagan creed is more relevant and needed now than ever in the history of the human species. Now we can be a fresh voice speaking for the well being of the planet, it’s creatures and the human race. Happy Spring Equinox! I much rather be a Pagan!

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