Tintern Abbey - William Wordsworth

Question 1

What is section one about?

Answer 1

-Revisits the beauty of Tintern Abbey > restorative quality
-How it has never left him/ has a power over him to be stored in his memory

Question 2

What is section two about?

Answer 2

-Explores his boyhood
-how he used to experience it and how it has changed
-realisation of how he now sees the abbey

Question 3

What is section three about?

Answer 3

-Conversation with his sister Dorothy

Question 4

What age was he when he wrote this poem?

Answer 4

28

Question 5

What does he articulate in the poem?

Answer 5

-His belief about nature and the human soul

Question 6

What is different about this poem?

Answer 6

-Unedited > Wrote this when and where > free flowing raw emotion

Question 7

Why did Wordsworth want poetry to be closer to the ordinary man?

Answer 7

-Common man
-wanted to share his view with mankind

Question 8

What does he see nature and rural life to be?

Answer 8

-Restorative
-The answer to the corrupting influences of society

Question 9

who heavily influences his works?

Answer 9

His sister Dorothy

Question 10

What poetry collection was this published in?

Answer 10

-Lyrical Ballads > Coleridge and Wordsworth attempt to challenge what they saw as elitist detached, pretentious forms of poetry

Question 11

What events were at the time?

Answer 11

-The French Revolution
-The Industrial Revolution

Question 12

What happened in 1789 during the French Revolution?

Answer 12

-Each person would have equal rights and the power yo participate in governance (FR)

Question 13

Which philosopher did Wordsworth share beliefs with?

Answer 13

-Rousseau > society is essentially corrupting to the human spirit

Question 14

What are the key ideas in the poem?

Answer 14

-Mortality
-Faith/belief/morality
-Nature
-memory
-Family
-Love
-experience

Question 15

What is the key vocab to describe the poem?

Answer 15

-Dramatic monologue
-Landscape poem
-Conversation poem
-Dramatic Lyric
-Blank verse
-Pantheism
-Iambic pentameter/tetrameter

Question 16

What is the significance of the anaphora of “five” in the opening lines of the poem?

Answer 16

-Emphasis on how long the time has felt
-exclamative

Question 17

What is significant of “under this dark sycamore”?

Answer 17

-Biblical allusion
-Idea of divine > reveal of the divine

Question 18

What is significant about “Hermit’s cave, where by his fire/ the Hermit sits alone”?

Answer 18

-Hermit = religious people
-natural setting > natural world makes a more spiritual life possible
-connects to the divine > Ideal in WW eyes

Question 19

Why does Wordsworth repeat “felt”?

Answer 19

-Emphasises how WW feels about and knows his natural place

Question 20

What is significant about “Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;”?

Answer 20

-Parallel syntax > feels this even when not there

Question 21

What does the caesura in “Unassembled pleasures: such perhaps”create?

Answer 21

-Creates tonal shift

Question 22

What does “little, nameless, unremembered, acts of kindness and love” criticise?

Answer 22

-Industrial Revolution
-Importance of the little things
-How life is corrupted by the capitalist needs

Question 23

What does the alliteration of “weary weights” do?

Answer 23

-Slows down makes the reader labour > Suggest how society sis under the burden of the modern worlds and needs to find rejuvenation of nature which helps him cope

Question 24

what does “we are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul” and the Lon g vowel sounds describe?

Answer 24

-Transcendence becoming free from the burden of the world > spiritual awakening
-Profundity of speaker’s experience

Question 25

What does the line shift in “We see into the life of things./ If this…” explore?

Answer 25

Shift in thinking

Question 26

What does “In the darkness and amid the many shapes of joyless daylight” explore?

Answer 26

-Overwhelmingness seen through the consonance harshness
-Negative feelings to urban life contrast to the earlier feelings from nature

Question 27

What technique is “My spirit turned to thee!”?

Answer 27

-Apostrophe > personifies the landscape

Question 28

What does the metaphor “With gleams of half-extinguished thought, with many recognitions dim and faint” explore?

Answer 28

-Idea of external flames > religious
-Thoughts recollections > seem to him now like candles/ flames > ignites passion within him

Question 29

What is significant about “That in this moment there is life and food for future years”?

Answer 29

The natural world is fundamental to human life and existence > reminder that the destruction of landscape is destroying human life
-Nature is needed for people to sustain themselves physically and spiritually

Question 30

What is the form of the poem?

Answer 30

-stanzas vary in length just >Speaking/conversation like
- pause at different intervals in the conversation > organic and natural pauses that arise between units of thought and speech.
-creates a form that reflects the organic and varied “forms” or shapes of the natural world, and the natural progressions of human thought.

Question 31

What is the meter of Tintern Abbey?

Answer 31

-Blank verse - unryhmed Iambic pentameter

Question 32

What does Blank verse create in the poem?

Answer 32

-closer to ordinary human speech > conversational > addressing the reader directly.
-In 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.

Question 33

What is the rhyme scheme?

Answer 33

• assonance and consonance create the intricate pattern of sound repetition instead of rhyming > musicality to the poem