Tintern Abbey (poem)
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"Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey on revisiting the banks of the Wye during a tour, 13 July 1798"[1] (often abbreviated to "Tintern Abbey", "Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey" or simply "Lines") is a poem by William Wordsworth.Tintern Abbey is an abbey abandoned in 1536 and located in the southern Welsh county of Monmouthshire. The poem is of particular interest in that Wordsworth's descriptions of the Banks of Wye outline his general philosophies on nature.
It also has significance as the terminal poem of the 1798 edition of Lyrical Ballads, although it does not fit well into the titular category, being more protracted and elaborate than its predecessors.
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[edit]Themes and context
"I cannot paint/ What then I was," Wordsworth writes, reflecting and almost puzzling over his "boyish days" when the natural world of Tintern Abbey was to him an unmixed "passion" and a "feeling" that had no need of "any interest/ Unborrowed from the eye." Yet the poet insists that age compensates for this loss of thoughtless passion by giving him instead a sense of the sublimity of nature, of "something far more deeply interfused," and here the poem seems in a sense to grope for God, invoking a "spirit" that "rolls through all things."
The poem has its roots in history. Accompanied by his sister Dorothy (whom he addresses warmly in the final paragraph as "thou my dearest Friend, / My dear, dear Friend"[2]), Wordsworth did indeed revisit the abbey on the date stipulated after half a decade's absence. His previous visit had been on a solitary walking tour as a twenty-three-year-old in August 1793. His life had since taken a considerable turn: he had split with his French lover and their illegitimate daughter, while on a broader note Anglo-French tensions had escalated to such an extent that Britain would declare war later that year. The Wye, on the other hand, had remained much the same, according the poet opportunity for contrast. A large portion of the poem explores the impact of preterition, contrasting the obviousness of it in the visitor with its seamlessness in the visited. This theme is emphasized from the start in the line "Five years have passed..."[3]
Although written in 1798, the poem is in large part a recollection of Wordsworth's visit of 1793. It also harks back in the imagination to a time when the abbey was not in ruins, and dwells occasionally on the present and the future as well. The speaker admits to having reminisced about the place many times in the past five years. Notably, the abbey itself is nowhere described.
Wordsworth claimed to have composed the poem entirely in his head, beginning it upon leaving Tintern and crossing the Wye, and not jotting so much as a line until he reached Bristol, by which time it had just reached mental completion. In all, it took him four to five days' rambling about with his sister.[4] Although Lyrical Ballads was by then already in publication, he was so pleased with this offering that he had it inserted at the eleventh hour, as the concluding poem. It is unknown whether this placement was intentional, but scholars generally agree that it is apt, for the poem represents the climax of Wordsworth's first great period of creative output and prefigures much of the distinctively Wordsworthian verse that followed.
Although never overt, the poem is riddled with religion, most of it pantheistic. Wordsworth styles himself as a "worshipper of Nature" with a "far deeper zeal / Of holier love",[5] seeming to hold that mental images of nature can engender a mys
