Tintern Abbey - William Wordsworth Flashcards
What is section one about?
-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
What is section two about?
-Explores his boyhood
-how he used to experience it and how it has changed
-realisation of how he now sees the abbey
What is section three about?
-Conversation with his sister Dorothy
What age was he when he wrote this poem?
28
What does he articulate in the poem?
-His belief about nature and the human soul
What is different about this poem?
-Unedited > Wrote this when and where > free flowing raw emotion
Why did Wordsworth want poetry to be closer to the ordinary man?
-Common man
-wanted to share his view with mankind
What does he see nature and rural life to be?
-Restorative
-The answer to the corrupting influences of society
who heavily influences his works?
His sister Dorothy
What poetry collection was this published in?
-Lyrical Ballads > Coleridge and Wordsworth attempt to challenge what they saw as elitist detached, pretentious forms of poetry
What events were at the time?
-The French Revolution
-The Industrial Revolution
What happened in 1789 during the French Revolution?
-Each person would have equal rights and the power yo participate in governance (FR)
Which philosopher did Wordsworth share beliefs with?
-Rousseau > society is essentially corrupting to the human spirit
What are the key ideas in the poem?
-Mortality
-Faith/belief/morality
-Nature
-memory
-Family
-Love
-experience
What is the key vocab to describe the poem?
-Dramatic monologue
-Landscape poem
-Conversation poem
-Dramatic Lyric
-Blank verse
-Pantheism
-Iambic pentameter/tetrameter
What is the significance of the anaphora of “five” in the opening lines of the poem?
-Emphasis on how long the time has felt
-exclamative
What is significant of “under this dark sycamore”?
-Biblical allusion
-Idea of divine > reveal of the divine
What is significant about “Hermit’s cave, where by his fire/ the Hermit sits alone”?
-Hermit = religious people
-natural setting > natural world makes a more spiritual life possible
-connects to the divine > Ideal in WW eyes
Why does Wordsworth repeat “felt”?
-Emphasises how WW feels about and knows his natural place
What is significant about “Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;”?
-Parallel syntax > feels this even when not there
What does the caesura in “Unassembled pleasures: such perhaps”create?
-Creates tonal shift
What does “little, nameless, unremembered, acts of kindness and love” criticise?
-Industrial Revolution
-Importance of the little things
-How life is corrupted by the capitalist needs
What does the alliteration of “weary weights” do?
-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
what does “we are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul” and the Lon g vowel sounds describe?
-Transcendence becoming free from the burden of the world > spiritual awakening
-Profundity of speaker’s experience
What does the line shift in “We see into the life of things./ If this…” explore?
Shift in thinking
What does “In the darkness and amid the many shapes of joyless daylight” explore?
-Overwhelmingness seen through the consonance harshness
-Negative feelings to urban life contrast to the earlier feelings from nature
What technique is “My spirit turned to thee!”?
-Apostrophe > personifies the landscape
What does the metaphor “With gleams of half-extinguished thought, with many recognitions dim and faint” explore?
-Idea of external flames > religious
-Thoughts recollections > seem to him now like candles/ flames > ignites passion within him
What is significant about “That in this moment there is life and food for future years”?
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
What is the form of the poem?
-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.
What is the meter of Tintern Abbey?
-Blank verse - unryhmed Iambic pentameter
What does Blank verse create in the poem?
-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.
What is the rhyme scheme?
- assonance and consonance create the intricate pattern of sound repetition instead of rhyming > musicality to the poem
