Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey

Tintern Abbey, 1993

"Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey on revisiting the banks of the Wye during a tour, 13 July 1798" (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. It was, however, the only poem in Wordsworth's oeuvre of which he did not revise even a word for later publications, saying of it that he never wrote under circumstances more congenial.

Themes and context

"Tintern Abbey" is a poem, by Joel Baetz,of re-visitation, both to the central themes of the Advertisement, and to nature itself. Wordsworth returns to the abbey after a five-year absence, having changed so much that "I cannot paint / What then I was", having then had no knowledge of the sublime, and no "feeling" towards nature. To emphasize the reminiscent quality of the poem, he uses the word "again" repeatedly.

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"), 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..."

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. 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", seeming to hold that mental images of nature can engender a mystical intuition of the divine.

Style and structure

The poem is written in tightly-structured blank verse and comprises verse-paragraphs rather than stanzas. It is unrhymed and mostly in iambic pentameter. Categorising the poem is difficult, as it contains elements of all of the ode, the dramatic monologue and the conversation poem. In the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth noted:

I have not ventured to call this Poem an Ode but it was written with a hope that in the transitions, and the impassioned music of the versification would be found the principle requisites of that species of composition.

At its beginning, it may well be dubbed an Eighteenth-Century "landscape-poem", but it is commonly agreed that the best designation would be the conversation poem.

Lines 1–24

Revisiting the natural beauty of the Wye fills the poet with a sense of "tranquil restoration".

Line 37

By the "sublime", Wordsworth means a type of divine creativity or inspiration. This was a theme much in vogue during the Romantic period.

Lines 35–49

Wordsworth says that the gifts given him by the abbey (such as "tranquil restoration") have in so doing accorded him yet another, still more sublime: it has relieved him of a giant burden – his doubts about God, religion and the meaning of life.

Lines 88–111

After contemplating the few changes in scenery since last he visited, Wordsworth is overcome with "a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused, whose dwelling is the light of setting suns". He is met with the divine as "a motion and a spirit, that impels all thinking things, all objects of thought, and rolls through all things". These are perhaps the most telling lines in Wordsworth's connection of the "sublime" with "divine creativity", the result of allowing nature to become "the anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, the guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul of all my moral being".

Lines 114–160

In the final stanza, Wordsworth addresses his sister, who did not accompany him on his original visit to the abbey, and perceives in the delight she shows at the resplendence and serenity of their environs a poignant echo of his former self.

Bibliography

• Woodring, Carl. "Wordsworth". Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965.

External links

• Wordsworth biography and works
• Online Text of Poem
• An Oxford undergraduate website devoted to the poem