UNIT -1

Tintern Abbey
-William Wordsworth

About the author:

Wordsworth was one of the most influential of England's Romantic poets. William Wordsworth
was born on 7 April 1770 at Cockermouth in Cumbria. He began to write poetry while he was at
school, but none was published until 1793. In 1795, Wordsworth received a legacy from a close
relative and he and his sister Dorothy went to live in Dorset. Two years later they moved again,
this time to Somerset, to live near the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who was an admirer of
Wordsworth's work. They collaborated on 'Lyrical Ballads', published in 1798. Wordsworth's
most famous poem, 'I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud' was written at Dove Cottage in 1804. In
1802, Wordsworth married a childhood friend, Mary Hutchinson. In 1842, he was given a
government pension and the following year became poet laureate. Wordsworth died on 23 April
1850 and was buried in Grasmere churchyard. His great autobiographical poem, 'The Prelude',
which he had worked on since 1798, was published after his death.

About the poem:

The poem Lines Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey is generally known
as Tintern Abbey written in 1798 by the father of Romanticism William
Wordsworth. Tintern Abbey is one of the triumphs of Wordsworth's genius. It may
he called a condensed spiritual autobiography of the poet. It deals with the
subjective experiences of the poet, and traces the growth of his mind through
different periods of his life. Nature and its influence on the poet in various stage
forms the main theme of the poem. The poem deal with the influence of Nature on
the boy, the growing youth, and the man. The poet has expressed his tender feeling
towards nature. He has specially recollected his poetic idea of Tintern Abbey
where he had gone first time in 1793. This is his second visit to this place.
Wordsworth has expressed his intense faith in nature.

There is Wordsworth’s realization of God in nature. He got sensuous delight in it

and it is all in all to him. Tintern Abbey impressed him most when he had first
visited this place. He has again come to the same place where there are lofty cliffs,
the plots of cottage ground, orchards groves and copses. He is glad to see again
hedgerows, sportive wood, pastoral farms and green doors. This lonely place, the
banks of the river and rolling waters from the mountain springs present a beautiful
panoramic light. The solitary place remands the poet of vagrant dwellers and
hermits’ cave.

Analysis of the poem :

The poem is in five sections. The first section establishes the setting for the
meditation. But it emphasizes the passage of time: five years have passed, five
summers, five long winters… But when the poet is back to this place of natural
beauty and serenity, it is still essentially the same. The poem opens with a slow,
dragging rhythm and the repetition of the word ‘five’ all designed to emphasize the
weight of time which has separated the poet from this scene. The following lines
develop a clear, visual picture of the scent. The view presented is a blend of
wildness and order. He can see the entirely natural cliffs and waterfalls; he can see
the hedges around the fields of the people; and he can see wreaths of smoke
probably coming from some hermits making fire in their cave hermitages. These
images evoke not only a pure nature as one might expect, they evoke a life of the
common people in harmony with the nature.

The second section begins with the meditation. The poet now realizes that these
‘beauteous’ forms have always been with him, deep-seated in his mind, wherever
he went. This vision has been “Felt in the blood, and felt alone the heart” that is. It
has affected his whole being. They were not absent from his mind like form the
mind of a man born blind. In hours of weariness, frustration and anxiety, these
things of nature used to make him feel sweet sensations in his very blood, and he
used to feel it at the level of the impulse (heart) rather than in his waking
consciousness and through reasoning. From this point onward Wordsworth begins
to consider the sublime of nature, and his mystical awareness becomes clear.
Wordsworth’s idea was that human beings are naturally uncorrupted.

The poet studies nature with open eyes and imaginative mind. He has been the
lover of nature form the core of his heart, and with purer mind. He feels a sensation
of love for nature in his blood. He feels high pleasure and deep power of joy in
natural objects. The beatings of his heart are full of the fire of nature’s love. He
concentrates attention to Sylvan Wye – a majestic and worth seeing river. He is
reminded of the pictures of the past visit and ponders over his future years. On his
first visit to this place he bounded over the mountains by the sides of the deep
rivers and the lovely streams. In the past the soundings haunted him like a passion.
The tall rock, the mountain and the deep and gloomy wood were then to him like
an appetite. But that time is gone now. In nature he finds the sad music of
humanity.

The third section contains a kind of doubt; the poet is probably reflecting the
reader’s possible doubts so that he can go on to justify how he is right and what he
means. He doubts, for just a moment, whether this thought about the influence of
the nature is vain, but he can’t go on. He exclaims: “yet, oh! How often, amid the
joyless daylight, fretful and unprofitable fever of the world have I turned to thee
(nature)” for inspiration and peace of mind. He thanks the ‘Sylvan Wye’ for the
everlasting influence it has imprinted on his mind; his spirit has very often turned
to this river for inspiration when he was losing the peace of mind or the path and
meaning of life. The river here becomes the symbol of spirituality.

Though the poet has become serious and perplexed in the fourth section the nature
gives him courage and spirit enough to stand there with a sense of delight and
pleasure. This is so typical of Wordsworth that it seems he can’t write poetry
without recounting his personal experiences, especially those of his childhood.
Here he also begins from the earliest of his days! It was first the coarse pleasures in
his ‘boyish days’, which have all gone by now. “That time is past and all its aching
joys are now no more, and all its dizzy raptures”. But the poet does not mourn for
them; he doesn’t even grumble about their loss. Clearly, he has gained something
in return: “other gifts have followed; for such loss… for I have learnt to look on
nature, not as in the hour of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes the still, sad
music of humanity”. This is a philosophic statement about maturing, about the
development of personality, and of the poetic or philosophic mind as well. So now
the poet is able to feel a joy of elevated thought, a sense sublime, and far more
deeply interfused. He feels a sense of sublime and the working of a supreme power
in the light of the setting sun, in round oceans and in the blue sky. He is of opinion
that a motion and a spirit impel all thinking things. Therefore Wordsworth claims
that he is a lover of the meadows and of all which we see from this green earth.
Nature is a nurse, a guide and the guardian of his heart and soul. The poet comes to
one important conclusion: for all the formative influences, he is now consciously in
love with the nature. He has become a thoughtful lover of the meadows, the woods
and the mountains. Though his ears and eyes seem to create the other half of all
these sensations, the nature is the actual source of these sublime thoughts.

The fifth and last section continues with the same meditation from where the poet
addresses his younger sister Dorothy, whom he blesses and gives advice about
what he has learnt. He says that he can hear the voice of his own youth when he
hears her speak, the language of his former heart; he can also “read my former
pleasure in the soothing lights of thy wild eyes’. He is excited to look at his own
youthful image in her. He says that nature has never betrayed his heart and that is
why they had been living from joy to joy. Nature can impress the mind with
quietness and beauty, and feed it lofty thoughts, that no evil tongues of the human
society can corrupt their hearts with any amount of contact with it.

The poet then begins to address the moon in his reverie, and to ask the nature to
bestow his sister with their blessings. Let the moon shine on her solitary walk, and
let the mountain winds blow their breeze on her. When the present youthful
ecstasies are over, as they did with him, let her mind become the palace of the
lovely forms and thought about the nature, so that she can enjoy and understand
life and overcome the vexations of living in a harsh human society. The conclusion
to the poem takes us almost cyclically, back to a physical view of the ‘steep
woods’, ‘lofty cliffs’ and ‘green pastoral landscape’ in which the meditation of the
poem is happening.

The poet has expressed his honest and natural feelings to Nature’s Superiority. The
language is so simple and lucid that one is not tired of reading it again and again.
The sweetness of style touches the heart of a reader. The medium of this poem is
neither ballad nor lyric but an elevated blank verse. The blank verse that is used in
it is low-toned, familiar, and moves with sureness, sereneness and inevitable ease.
It has the quiet pulse, suggestive of 'central peace', which is felt in all his great
poetry. This is the beauty of Wordsworth’s language.