Wordsworth on the Church of England

Threats come which no submission may assuage,
No sacrifice avert, no power dispute;
The tapers shall be quenched, the belfries mute,
And, 'mid their choirs unroofed by selfish rage,
The warbling wren shall find a leafy cage;
The gadding bramble hang her purple fruit;
And the green lizard and the gilded newt
Lead unmolested lives and die of age.
The owl of evening and the woodland fox
For their abode the shrine of Waltham choose:
Proud Glastonbury can no more refuse
To stoop her head before these desperate shocks --
She whose high pomp displaced, as story tells,
Arimathean Joseph's wattled cells.

. . . . Screams round the Arch-druid's brow the seamew -- white
As Menai's foam; and toward the mystic ring
Where Augurs stand, the Future questioning,
Slowly the cormorant aims her heavy flight,
Portending ruin to each baleful rite,
That, in the lapse of ages, hath crept oe'r
Diluvian truths, and patriarchal lore.
Haughty the Bard: can these meek doctrines blight
His transports?  Whither his heroic strains?
But all shall be fulfilled; -- the Julian spear
A way first opened; and, with Roman chains,
The tidings come of Jesus crucified;
They come -- they spread -- the weak, the suffering, hear;
Receive the faith, and in the hope abide.

--From the Ecclesiastical Sonnets (1821)

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[William Tighe]

What goes around, comes around.