Tintern Abbey Flashcards
1
Q
Context
A
“Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798”— commonly known as “Tintern Abbey”— is a poem written by the British Romantic poet William Wordsworth. Wordsworth had first visited the Wye Valley when he was 23 years old. His return five years later occasioned this poem, which Wordsworth saw as articulating his beliefs about nature, creativity, and the human soul. “Tintern Abbey” was included as the final poem in Lyrical Ballads, a 1798 collection of poems by Wordsworth and his friend and fellow poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
2
Q
The Restorative power of nature
A
- Despite this, the speaker suggests that time spent in nature has sustained and nourished him, and that it will continue to do so in the future. The speaker recalls how in “hours of weariness” he has remembered the time he spent in the poem’s beautiful natural setting, and this has brought him “tranquil restoration.” This suggests that nature is so powerfully restorative that even the memory of it has the power to calm and nourish the human soul.
- The speaker goes on to say that his current visit to this place will comfort him in years to come. This current visit gives him “present pleasure” as well as “life and food / For future years.” By describing this visit as “food,” the speaker suggests that in the future, remembering his time in this natural setting will nourish and support him. The mere thought of nature, the poem implies, is as restorative as actual food.
- Finally, the speaker suggests that time in nature is replenishing not just for the speaker but for human beings in general. Addressing his sister, the speaker suggests that memories of this natural place are restorative not only for him, but for her as well. The speaker says that if, in the future, she experiences “solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief,” remembering the time they spent together in this place will bring her “healing thoughts,” or comfort her.
3
Q
Awe and the sublime
A
- The Romantic poets were interested in the overwhelming awe and wonder people can experience when encountering the boundlessness of the universe and the natural world. They believed that in experiencing this awe and wonder, one encounters something called the “Sublime”—basically, a sense of infinity and vastness that exceeds rationality or measurement.
- This experience, the thinking goes, can be so overpowering that it can take people “beyond” themselves. In “Tintern Abbey,” the speaker suggests that nature offers access to the Sublime. The immense awe that the speaker feels upon being in this natural setting grants him greater insight into the connection and unity between humanity, the natural world, and the universe. Such feelings, the poem argues, can even allow people to transcend their earthly bodies altogether.
- As the speaker describes the natural world in the beginning of the poem, notice that he does so by describing individual parts of it. There’s an image of a sycamore tree, of smoke rising from the woods, and of some hedges in the distance—yet the landscape is not captured in totality. This suggests that this setting is so vast, so overwhelming, that the speaker can, at first at least, grasp only disparate pieces of it.
- At the same time, this sense of awe and wonder ultimately leads the speaker to observe a sense of unity within the natural world. Those hedges the speaker sees seem to blend together, for example. Later, describing his experience of a “sense sublime,” the speaker takes this initial hint at the connectedness of nature further. He offers a vision of the sun, the ocean, the air, and the sky as integrated, as inherently connected parts of a whole.
4
Q
Perception, creativity and the imagination
A
- Wordsworth and other Romantic poets thought a lot about the nature of the imagination, and especially, with the poetic imagination, or the ability to write and create poems. While “Tintern Abbey” celebrates nature as generally healing and restorative in an increasingly urban world, it also celebrates nature as inspiring and as crucial to creativity. The poem suggests that nature inspires creativity and creative reflection, and that the imagination works actively and dynamically in tandem with the natural world.
- The title of the poem, of course, reveals the role of the natural world in its creation. Specifically, the Wye Valley inspired the poem. Taken more broadly, this suggests that the beauty of the natural world inspires creativity and the writing of poems.
- Finally, the poem’s structure supports this sense of the dynamic between the imagination and the natural world. The poem shifts back and forth between describing the natural landscape and the speaker’s inner experience. These shifts suggest an active, constant movement between the natural world and the working of the speaker’s mind and imagination.
5
Q
Time and Change
A
- “Tintern Abbey” is a poem about nature, but it is also a poem about the speaker’s past, present, and future selves, and about time and change more broadly. Ultimately, the poem suggests that the passage of time leads to loss, but that it also leads to greater understanding of self and of the world.
- Five years have passed since the speaker first visited this landscape, and he details how much he has changed in this time. Some terms the speaker uses to describe his former self are positive. He compares his younger self to a “roe” (a deer) who “bounded” through the landscape. This suggests that his younger self had a kind of freedom, energy, and spontaneity that the older speaker has lost.
- At the same time, however, the speaker suggests that his younger self had a lot of growing up to do. He says that his younger self enjoyed “courser pleasures” and that even “bound[ing]” through the woods, he was “more like a man / Flying from something that he dreads.” This suggests that the speaker’s former self was unsophisticated and fearful, and that he lacked the self-awareness the older speaker now possesses.
- The speaker thus acknowledges what he has lost in growing older, but also celebrates the changes that have come with the passage of time. The speaker admits that in growing older, he has lost the “aching joys” and “dizzy raptures” that he once experienced, the naïve yet exciting emotional highs and lows of youth. Yet he also praises the “abundant recompense,” or compensation, for this loss. With time, the speaker has learned to “look on nature,” and to hear the “still sad music of humanity.” In other words, growing older has helped him to better see and appreciate the beauty of nature and to have greater knowledge of the world, with all of its sadness and human realities. Implicitly, the poem’s emphasis on self-reflection also suggests that the speaker has gained self-knowledge. He is now able to reflect on his past and present selves with insight and composure, rather than “flying,” or running away from, uncomfortable realities.
6
Q
Five years have past; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a soft inland murmur.—Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
A
- The poem’s title reveals that it has a very specific setting: the Wye Valley, on the Welsh side of the River Wye. The title also lets the reader know the context that has led to the poem: a walking tour that Wordsworth took with his sister, Dorothy Wordsworth, in the area. The title even establishes the exact date the poem was written (July 13, 1798)! The title thus grounds the poem in real, lived experience, almost as though it were a diary entry of the speaker.
- Lines 1-5 continue to ground and orient the reader within the landscape and to reveal the speaker’s relationship to it. The speaker begins by saying that it’s been five years since he last visited this spot. He emphasizes how long this time has felt to him by noting that each year has contained both a “summer” and “the length” of a “long” winter. This emphasis is heightened by the speaker’s use of anaphora, as he recounts “Five years … five summers … five long winters.” This repetition establishes that the speaker visited this area before, while also implying that the speaker felt the weight of his absence palpably and repeatedly during that stretch of five years that he was away.
- The opening lines go on to paint a lush visual and auditory picture of the scene, as the speaker notes the sound of rivers and streams flowing down from the mountains, as well as the sight of high, impressive cliffs that he recalls from his previous visit. The speaker once more uses anaphora for emphasis, in this case repeating “again” to remark on how he feels upon re-experiencing this landscape. Where the previous repetition of “five” heightened the reader’s sense of how the speaker experienced his time away, here the repetition of “again” heightens the reader’s sense of the restoration and completeness the speaker feels in returning. This repetition suggests that the speaker recalled these aspects of the landscape many times during his absence, and now experiences a kind of relief in the setting, which is the same as he remembered it.
7
Q
Of sportive wood run wild: these pastoral farms,
Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke
Sent up, in silence, from among the trees!
With some uncertain notice, as might seem
Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods,
Or of some Hermit’s cave, where by his fire
The Hermit sits alone.
A
- After the repetition of “Once again” at the end of line 14, the speaker further describes the indications of human presence that he can see in the valley below him. The “hedge-rows” that he sees are “hardly hedge-rows,” and instead are simply “little lines / Of sportive green run wild.” This suggests that the hedges people have grown almost merge with the natural, wild landscape, to the point that they don’t even really count as human-made hedges! The cutesy, gentle consonance and alliteration of /l/ sounds in “little lines” suggests that they are diminutive and charming. The “pastoral farms,” meanwhile, are “green to the very door,” implying that the farms aren’t dominating the landscape, but living within it.
- Interestingly, the placement of the farms contrasts with the speaker’s orientation to the scene as a whole. The farms are in the valley, on a horizontal plane, and are part of the landscape. The speaker, on the other hand, looks over this scene from a higher vantage point. The spatial relationship of the speaker to the valley implicitly shapes the poem’s representation of the speaker—and, by extension, the poet. The speaker, the poem suggests, is a kind of privileged observer; he occupies a higher space than the landscape he observes, and he can record it in his poetry.
- The stanza concludes with further images of human presence within the scene, this time a different kind of human presence than the “pastoral farms.” The speaker notes “wreaths,” or circles, of smoke rising from the forest. Again, this image suggests that the speaker is above the scene and looking down upon it, since he is implicitly over both the forest and the smoke. But for the first time, the speaker here imagines the people who might live “among the trees” and send up the smoke, and wonders if they are “vagrant dwellers” or a “Hermit,” or religious person, living in solitude within a cave.
- The phrase “vagrant dwellers” and the description that follows of the forest as “houseless,” is the first indication of a less-than-positive aspect of the landscape, as people living within a forest would be homeless. Yet the speaker’s description doesn’t suggest that the people he imagines are impoverished and suffering; rather, they are “vagrant” as though by choice, and they are said to be “dwellers in the houseless woods,” as though they are permanent inhabitants of the landscape.
8
Q
These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and ‘mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
A
- The break in the middle of line 22 dramatizes and lengthens the pause between the two stanzas. At the same time, however, since the reader can implicitly read line 23 as continuing and completing line 22, the two stanzas feel like part of a single, unified, and ongoing thought or utterance.
- The tension between these two effects—between the implied pause and then continuation of the line—could reflect a brief shift in the speaker’s thoughts, as he continues to speak but changes his focus and, to some degree, his rhetorical approach. Here, rather than simply being in the present and recording what he sees and imagines, the speaker recalls how remembering this landscape helped him in the past, during his time away.
- The speaker begins the stanza by describing the aspects of the landscape he has just recounted as “beauteous forms.” The word “forms” suggests the shapes and impressions of the setting, but it is also an allusion to Platonic forms. These were considered to be the most essential and ideal versions of things encountered in everyday life. This allusion suggests that in encountering this natural place the speaker has encountered something more ideal, pure, and true than what he might see in his daily life.
- The speaker develops this idea as he describes his time spent away from this natural place as “lonely” and “’mid the din,” or noise, of “towns and cities.” The noisiness of these urban settings contrasts strongly with the quiet of the current scene, while “lonely” contrasts interestingly with the descriptions of “seclusion” in the natural world—with “seclusion” suggesting a kind of solitude that is isolated but not unpleasant, unlike loneliness.
9
Q
Nor less, I trust,
To them I may have owed another gift,
Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
A
- In the second part of line 36, the speaker starts to describe “another gift” that memories of this landscape have brought him—this one “of an aspect more sublime.” Where the previous lines emphasized acts of the speaker that were “unremembered” and unnamed because they were so small (“little” and “nameless”), here the speaker celebrates an experience that is so big, so profound that it is almost unnameable in its grandeur (this is essentially what the speaker means by calling this gift “more sublime”).
- So what is this gift? A “blessed mood.” That is, remembering this natural place lifts the speaker’s spirits and lightens the heavy “burthen” (or burden) “of the mystery” and “the heavy and the weary weight / Of all this unintelligible world.” The alliteration of /w/ sounds in “weary weight” and “world” helps to slow these lines down, making the reader almost labor through them as the speaker implicitly labors under this burden of the world before thoughts about nature help him feel better.
- Within this mood, the speaker goes on to say, “the breath of this corporeal frame”—that is, the speaker’s body—”And even the motion of our human blood” becomes “suspended” until “we are laid asleep / In body, and become a living soul.” Here, the speaker describes how through remembering time spent in the natural world, he has experienced a form of transcendence, becoming free of the “weight” of the world and even of his own body. The “blood,” which he described previously as feeling and experiencing the “sensations sweet” of the memories, is here “suspended,” or paused in its movement. Breathing, too, is temporarily stopped, and the speaker himself is “laid asleep.” This imagery creates a sense of absolute stillness even as it describes an experience of transformation, as the speaker becomes “a living soul.”
10
Q
If this
Be but a vain belief, yet, oh! how oft—
In darkness and amid the many shapes
Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir
A
- This break marks a shift in the speaker’s thinking. In this case, the speaker reflects on the transcendent experience he has just described and poses the possibility that it was just a “vain belief”—or something he believed he experienced only because he wanted to. He then responds to this possibility. Referring to his time spent away from this natural place—and implicitly in urban settings—he comments on “how oft” (or often) he “turned” in spirit to the landscape. That is, he thought about nature a lot while living in the city.
- The speaker clearly has some negative feelings towards urban life, describing his time spent away from nature as time in “darkness and amid the many shapes / Of joyless daylight.” This reference to the “shapes” of urban settings recalls and contrasts with the “beauteous forms” of the natural landscape and their earlier allusion to Platonic, ideal forms.
11
Q
I came among these hills; when like a roe
I bounded o’er the mountains, by the sides
Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams,
Wherever nature led: more like a man
Flying from something that he dreads, than one
Who sought the thing he loved.
A
- Notably, this is the first place in the poem where the speaker uses similes. This use of figurative language follows the metaphors that come just before (in which the speaker implicitly compared his thoughts to “half-extinguished” flames, and the memories of this landscape to food). Here, the figurative language becomes more direct, as the implicit metaphors change to the more explicitly comparative similes. These comparisons are interesting in several ways:
- First, by using similes, the speaker suggests that he can’t describe his past self directly. This could be taken to mean that the speaker’s past self might not have been as fully actualized as his present self, since he must rely on the poetic device of a simile to describe how he once was.
- What the speaker compares his past self to is also important. He says that his young self was “like a roe,” meaning that he once was like an animal that would live within this landscape, not only visit and observe it. This suggests that the speaker’s younger self may have in some way been more in harmony with the natural world, a sense reinforced when the speaker notes that he “bounded … Wherever nature led.”
12
Q
—And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
A
- A dash in the middle of line 95 creates another caesura, another pause, and then the speaker transitions to describing an experience that is a kind of climax of the stanza and even the poem as a whole. “And I have felt,” the speaker begins, recalling the “I have learned” of line 90. This echo suggests that each of the speaker’s insights and experiences has grown and developed from what came before. In this case, his learning to “look on nature” and hear “the still sad music of humanity” has led, he goes on to explain, to a profound experience of insight and understanding.
- The speaker goes on to say that what he has felt is a “presence that disturbs [him] with the joy / Of elevated thoughts.” “Disturbs” here does not mean frightens or unnerves, but rather that this presence shakes the speaker out of his funk. This presence seems to have its own energy and agency—perhaps like the implicit spirit, being, or presence that he suggested inhabited the “sylvan Wye.”
- The phrase “elevated thoughts” contrasts with the speaker’s description of his former self as “thoughtless,” while “elevated” recalls the loftiness of the cliffs within the natural setting the speaker is looking at. The speaker then describes this presence as “a sense sublime,” recalling his use of the word “sublime” back in stanza 2—when he described the experience that led him to a transcendent state.
13
Q
Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye, and ear,—both what they half create,
And what perceive;
A
- Having gained this insight and this vision into a fundamental kind of connectedness in the world and universe, the speaker concludes he loves all parts of the natural world that human beings can “behold” from anywhere on “this green earth.” He loves meadows, woods, the mountains—all of it!
- Similarly, the speaker sustains his use of the word “all” here, suggesting that even when he doesn’t inhabit the state that allows him more elevated or transcendent insight, he loves the “all” of the natural world because of the greater “all” that it contains and implies—the infiniteness of nature and the universe.
The speaker doesn’t just love every part of nature; he also loves the human senses of sight and hearing, as well as their capacity to both observe and “half create.” This is a strange phrase; how can you “half create” something? Perhaps the speaker is saying that he loves being able to perceive—to look at the world—through his eyes, and also recognizes that as an individual, he has a hand in creating, in interpreting, everything he takes in through his eyes and ears. This emphasizes his connection to the natural world, that he, too, is part of this big web of interconnection.
14
Q
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.
A
- The speaker closes this stanza by praising both nature and “the language of the sense,” or human senses. He does so in some interesting ways:
- First, the speaker uses a metaphor, saying that nature and the senses are an “anchor” or grounding and foundation for his “purest thoughts.”
- He then goes on to personify what lives within nature and the senses as a “nurse,” “guide,” and “guardian” of his heart. In other words, nature and the senses, and the presence that lives within them, nourish and take care of his “heart,” lead him, and protect him.
- Finally, he says that the natural world and the “language of the sense” are actually the “soul” of his “moral being.” This suggests that nature and the senses are in a way, his own soul, or that his soul is part of them. Most importantly, they are also said to be the “soul” of his “moral being,” or of his morality, which is often considered to be a uniquely human trait.
15
Q
For thou art with me here upon the banks
Of this fair river; thou my dearest Friend,
My dear, dear Friend; and in thy voice I catch
The language of my former heart, and read
My former pleasures in the shooting lights
Of thy wild eyes.
A
- The speaker goes on to explain that he wouldn’t let his good spirits “decay” because he isn’t alone in this setting but is there with his sister. In fact, William Wordsworth undertook this walking tour with his sister, Dorothy, who was one year younger than he was.
- As the speaker addresses his sister directly, the poem returns the speaker and the reader to his immediate setting and his immediate moment—the banks of the River Wye, in July 1798. These lines also shift the mode of the poem outward. Up to this point, the poem could be read as a dramatic monologue: the speaker addressing himself, or the reader, about the landscape and his experiences. The exception to this is in the third stanza, when the speaker addressed the Wye valley in apostrophe as “thou.”
- Here, the reader realizes, perhaps for the first time, that the speaker isn’t alone “upon the banks” of the river. His sister has been with him the whole time. This turn to direct address, then, has the effect of making the reader look back over the poem as a whole differently: the reader now can understand the poem as a whole as part of a conversation, a single utterance, addressed, within the moment of the poem, to the speaker’s sister.
16
Q
Therefore let the moon
Shine on thee in thy solitary walk;
And let the misty mountain-winds be free
To blow against thee: and, in after years,
When these wild ecstasies shall be matured
Into a sober pleasure;
A
- Having celebrated the power of nature to protect the speaker and his sister from all the difficulties and immorality of daily life, the speaker expresses the hope that nature will continue to be present with his sister and help her even when he’s no longer around. In expressing this wish, he again uses words and phrases that recall earlier moments in the poem.
- The alliteration of /m/ sounds in “moon,” “misty,” and “mountain” similarly connects these images together, and creates a sense of softness and gentleness within the lines, suggesting that nature will be similarly soft and gentle in its care for the speaker’s sister.
- The speaker then goes on to imagine “after years,” when his sister has grown older and “these wild ecstasies shall be matured / Into a sober pleasure.” Here, the speaker imagines that the sister will go through a similar process of growth and maturation that he has undergone, as his description of her “wild ecstasies” recalls his descriptions of his younger self, and the phrase “sober pleasure” recalls his description of the “still sad music of humanity” that had “ample power / To chasten and subdue” the speaker’s own mindset and inner world. The speaker thus conceptualizes his own process of aging as, implicitly, a universal one, since it is also a process, he says, that his sister will go through.
16
Q
Nor wilt thou then forget,
That after many wanderings, many years
Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs,
And this green pastoral landscape, were to me
More dear, both for themselves and for thy sake!
A
- The closing lines of the poem conclude the speaker’s address to his sister, and restore the speaker, his sister, and his reader to the present moment and landscape.
- The closing description of the landscape here is both familiar and new. It repeats the earlier images of the woods and the “lofty cliffs,” here transposing the word “steep” (previously used for the cliffs) for the woods themselves, to suggest a steep wooded embankment. It also repeats the word “pastoral,” used previously for the farms, and invokes, again, the color green that in the first stanza the speaker said “clad” the orchards and covered the ground around the “farms … to the very door.”
- At the same time, the simplicity and broad strokes with which the speaker describes the landscape here recall more closely the description of the transcendent vision he had of nature as a whole, with its “round ocean and … living air, / And … blue sky.” In a sense, this closing image of the immediate landscape is both grounded and transcendent, suggesting that the speaker has integrated his visionary experience and his present reality.
- This shift at the end suggests that, through the process of growth, change, and experience that the poem has described, the speaker has undergone an internal shift into yet another way of being, in which he loves this landscape on its own terms and because of how it will help others. There is a sense, almost, of the speaker fading away here, at the poem’s ending, almost as though he has become, through the course of his poem (and implicitly the course of his life) the kind of “living soul” that he described.
17
Q
The Hermit
A
- At the end of the first stanza, the speaker imagines that the smoke he sees rising from the trees could be from “some Hermit’s cave, where by his fire / The Hermit sits alone.”
- Hermits are, traditionally, religious people, who choose to live in isolation (often in remote places) in order to devote themselves more fully to their religious and spiritual practice. Here, the Hermit can be thought of as a broader symbol of spiritual life and of discarding the trappings of daily, mundane existence. By placing a Hermit within this scene, the speaker implicitly suggests that this natural setting, and the natural world in general, makes a more spiritual life possible.
18
Q
The Mansion
A
The poem introduces another symbol when referring the speaker’s sister’s mind as a “mansion.” While this is a metaphor (her mind is compared to a spacious and beautiful physical place), it is also highly symbolic, since mansions are, of course, symbols of wealth and privilege. This symbol thus works to align some other terms of the poem—in which particular kinds of human thought are described as “lofty” and “elevated”—with an image of literal higher social status and standing. This symbol also stands in for domestic interiors that are refined; it suggests that the sister will likewise be “properly” (according to norms of gender and class) domestic.
19
Q
Form
A
“Tintern Abbey” has 162 lines broken up into five stanzas of varying lengths:
- The poem utilizes what are called verse paragraphs, in which each stanza functions similarly to a “paragraph,” containing a single thought.
- Within the poem, this works to express the sense that the speaker is actually speaking to the reader and to his sister. The stanzas vary in length just as, in speaking, one might pause at different intervals in the conversation—not according to some externally imposed time frame or pattern, but according to the organic and natural pauses that arise between units of thought and speech. In a sense, then, the poem creates a form that reflects the organic and varied “forms” or shapes of the natural world, and the natural progressions of human thought.
- The poem also works in several modes, notably as an ode, a dramatic monologue, and a conversation poem:
- An ode is a poem praising a given subject; “Tintern Abbey” can be read as an ode because the poem as a whole praises the natural world.
A dramatic monologue is a form of in which the speaker reflects on his or her experiences and thoughts dramatically, and apparently to him or herself. Much of “Tintern Abbey” reflects this form, however toward the end of the poem it becomes clear that the poem is actually (or also) a conversation poem. - This last term is one used specifically to describe a group of poems by Wordsworth and his friend, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In a conversation poem, the speaker addresses someone close to him or her in a way that is both informal and serious.
- “Tintern Abbey” is a conversation poem in that it becomes clear, by the last stanza, that the speaker has actually been addressing his sister within the setting, apparently at the moment of the poem’s composition. Thus, the poem can be read as a kind of transcription of an actual conversation or an actual utterance, emphasizing the poem’s natural, immediate quality.
20
Q
Meter
A
- The poem’s use of blank verse has several effects. First, emerging out of a poetic tradition in which strict adherence to meter was the norm, blank verse was seen at the time “Tintern Abbey” was written as a more fluid, natural, and free way of writing poems. This is because, while a poem in blank verse adheres to a metrical pattern, it doesn’t adhere to the rhyming element traditionally associated with that pattern.
- Wordsworth was interested in writing poems closer to ordinary human speech, so by discarding the element of rhyme, the poem sounds and feels almost conversational, as though the speaker is addressing the reader directly. In fact, within the poem the speaker addresses his sister, so the mode of conversation and human speech is important to both the poem’s form and its meaning.
- These disruptions register as pauses in the speaker’s thoughts, but at the same time emphasize the poem’s underlying music and pattern, since the reader, accustomed to the meter of the preceding lines, automatically reads on to reach the truncated lines’ metrical conclusion. Implicitly, this aspect of the poem suggests that its underlying music, like the harmony in the natural world that it describes, is powerful enough to withstand disruptions and divergences and even gaps of space or time within the speaker’s, and the reader’s experience.
21
Q
Setting
A
- There are several settings, and several ways to understand setting, within “Tintern Abbey.” The most obvious setting is the one the title establishes: the Wye Valley, on the banks of the River Wye, in Wales. This area is home to the ruins of Tintern Abbey, built in 1131 and abandoned in the 16th century when England converted to Protestantism under Henry VIII. Interestingly, although the Abbey is mentioned in the title, nowhere in the poem does the speaker actually describe it, focusing instead on the natural attributes of the surrounding landscape. In a way, the poem as a whole is entirely about this setting, as it explores how a beautiful natural landscape can rejuvenate and restore the human soul.
- At the same time, the poem incorporates other settings, which are juxtaposed with the beauty of this natural place. The speaker recalls time spent in urban towns and cities, and through his descriptions makes these settings palpable and present. He also imagines a time in the future when his sister may live alone in an unknown setting, yet within her mind will continue to be able to return to this one.
22
Q
Literary context
A
- Wordsworth wrote “Tintern Abbey” in 1798 and included it as the final poem in the collection Lyrical Ballads— a landmark collection of poems published with his friend and fellow poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, that same year. In fact, Wordsworth is said to have so valued “Tintern Abbey” that he halted the publication of Lyrical Ballads, which was already in process, to be able to include the poem as its final piece.
- In their thinking, they drew on the work of the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who emphasized the value of the individual human being, and whose writings helped to influence the French Revolution. These tenants became the central guiding principles of Romanticism, a movement that sought to emphasize the beauty, purity, and grandeur of the natural world and value human experience up to that point excluded from “high art,” including rural life and working-class realities.
- On its own terms, and as part of a collection that established the beginning of the Romantic Movement, “Tintern Abbey” has had a lasting influence on British and American literature. Its views of nature and of rural life as restorative, and its implicit view of the poet as an inspired, privileged observer, have continued to shape approaches to poetry and literary criticism well into the 20th century and even today.
23
Q
Historical context
A
- Beginning in 1789, the French Revolution involved the uprising of the French working class and poor against the monarchy and the system of monarchical power. It brought with it a vision of true democracy, in which each person would have equal rights and the power to participate in governance. By 1798, at the time “Tintern Abbey” was written, France had seen the rise of the Paris Commune and the Reign of Terror, and by 1804 Napoleon would declare himself Emperor, overturning the principles of liberty and freedom that had guided the original uprising. Yet the French Revolution had a lasting change on the European political landscape. It signaled the beginning of the end of absolute monarchies as a system of governance in Western Europe, and ushered in republics and liberal democracies as political systems.
- These democratic values were important to Romanticism. In turning away from art that only represented bourgeois and wealthy ways of life, these writers and artists, including Wordsworth, sought to celebrate the human life and dignity of those who had conventionally been disregarded, including people living in rural settings and the working poor.
- Secondly, “Tintern Abbey” was written during the Industrial Revolution, a time when rural areas throughout Europe were being transformed into centers of industrial production. In emphasizing the natural world and rural life in their poems, the Romantic poets, including Wordsworth, expressed their resistance to these industrial changes. They viewed nature and life in rural settings as more simple and pure than urban life and urban society, and they shared with Rousseau the belief that society is essentially corrupting to the human spirit. Within the poem, the speaker sees the Wye Valley as a place that is still pure, untouched, and intact. He celebrates the restorative power of this landscape, and implicitly seeks to preserve it.
