More Context!

Question 1

What did Wordsworth run from?

Answer 1

Annette and the ideals of the Revolution in France

Question 2

What has he got now that he didn’t before?

Answer 2

A certainty and conviction, contrast between the loneliness and hopelessness of 1973
- strength and connectedness of 1798 that would colour the poem

Question 3

In the poem what does he not mention?

Answer 3

Anything tourists usually mention

- nothing about the great Cistercian Abbey at Tintern

Question 4

What did the Wye remain?

Answer 4

Huge yet hidden

Question 5

What did the poem have its roots in?

Answer 5

Standard eighteenth century loco-descriptive poetry

Question 6

What is Tintern abbey a hymn of

Answer 6

Self love and recognition

- he was w different man, partly thanks to the changes Dorothy and Coleridge had helped him with

Question 7

How is it a rite of passage?

Answer 7

Marks the moment Wordsworth left his youth behind
- transforming, the song of adulthood, exchanging fear for love, anxiety for reassurance. The quivering pleasures of the sublime for the firmness and steadiness of the beautiful

Question 8

How is the poem different to Coleridge poetry?

Answer 8

It’s more singular

• not a journey but an arrival
• begins with Wordsworth taking his position high above the minoring waters and speaking with the authority of man

Question 9

‘Rolling from their mountain -springs’

Answer 9

The quiet inwardness of those distant mountains and the murmuring of the stream are part of the quiet inwardness of Wordsworth himself

Question 10

Sublime

Answer 10

All kind of sublime effects available to him

• the savage cliffs, abandoned monastery
• he drapes them all in something beyond the sublime: the deep consolations of an enveloping nature

Question 11

Nature, in its…

Answer 11

Quietness far more penetrative than any sublime horror, has infected him with kindness

Question 12

How has nature mad him good?

Answer 12

Deep in the unconscious and I remembered parts of his mind

Question 13

What has nature released him from?

Answer 13

His own tendency towards violence, cruelty and pride

Question 14

Nature is not merely…

Answer 14

A moral force but the gateway to eternity and permanence

Question 15

‘We see into the life of things’

Answer 15

Might seem like end of poem
- it isn’t the dialogue continues between mind and world, between the receiving power of the senses and shaping power of the mind

Question 16

Who shaped Wordsworth’s mind?

Answer 16

The great river for allowing his life to be shaped by it in the future

Question 17

Five years before quote

Answer 17

‘More like a man/ flying from something that he dreads’

Question 18

He had been tormented by the sublime world of immanent horror

Answer 18

‘I cannot paint what I was then’

Question 19

Why doesn’t he need the sublime?

Answer 19

Doesn’t need the sublime to feel that he is connected to the underlying reality of things
- that desire for the reality- effect of fear and horror feels like an immaturity - it has been replaced by something else which nature and silver river in its green world has given him

Question 20

For I have learned

Answer 20

To look on nature; not as in the hour’

Question 21

‘A presence that disturbs me with joy’

Answer 21

Lines represent one of the great moments of human consciousness

• a love of humanity in all its quietness and grief
• bonded to the reality of cosmic significance

Question 22

Where does the significance extend?

‘Of something far more deeply interfused’

Answer 22

Both across the vastness of the universe and deep into the mind of man

Question 23

‘Of something far more deeply interfused’

Answer 23

No certainty as to what the ‘certainty’ is but everything is fluid
- joyful but disturbing with a vitality that depends upon that uncertainty

Question 24

What could the ‘something’ be?

Answer 24

Sense of interfusion itself

- total mutual penetration of the whole of being