Faith & Spirit Quote by Coventry Patmore

Patmore’s line dangles a spiritual dare: make your desire “wild and incredible,” and heaven itself becomes oddly eager to deliver. The hook is the reversal. Conventional piety treats extravagant wanting as suspect, a quick route to pride or disappointment. Patmore flips that caution into a theology of audacity, where the magnitude of longing is not a liability but a kind of credential.

The key turn is the conditional: “if you will have it so.” God’s willingness is almost procedural, but only once the speaker has done something interior and absolute. That phrasing smuggles in a Victorian preoccupation with will, discipline, and the moral seriousness of choice. It’s not a blank check for whim; it’s an argument that desire, properly willed, is the channel through which grace moves. Patmore courts paradox: the divine is “prompt,” yet the trigger is human resolution. You can hear an echo of the era’s devotional psychology, where faith is less passive assent than an act of attention and consent.

As a poet associated with Catholic sensibility and domestic mysticism, Patmore is also defending the legitimacy of intense, even excessive, yearning. “Wild and incredible” doesn’t just mean unlikely outcomes; it signals desires that break polite social scale. The subtext is that spiritual life shouldn’t be trimmed to what seems reasonable. Wanting big, here, becomes a form of reverence: you honor God by refusing to imagine God as small.