Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey ...

The poem’s full title, following the 18th-century tradition of locodescriptive poetry, establishes the occasion of the poem, noting the precise place and time of its composition. Though commonly abbreviated as “Tintern Abbey,” the poem makes no mention of the famous ruined church and its immediate environs, and only a passing reference to the hordes of “vagrant dwellers” (20) that inhabited the ruin, with whom Wordsworth most certainly had contact during his tour of the vicinity with Dorothy. Several New Historicist and political critics, such as Marjorie Levinson, have seized upon this omission, arguing that Wordsworth erases the sociopolitical setting of the poem, substituting an idealized, abstract, pastoral landscape for a politically charged location rife with complex historical significance and unsettling contradictions. For Levinson, “Tintern Abbey” voices Wordsworth’s attempt to escape from cultural values, historical institutions, disturbing facts, and conflicting ideologies—in short, the political moment at hand—to realize an imaginative fiction of memory and desire. Other critics, such as Helen Vendler, argue that such cultural materialist readings, based on mimetic ideals of historical and political factuality, are appropriate for social literary forms like the novel but misunderstand the purpose and character of subjective lyric poetry.

The poem’s opening verse paragraph depicts a pastoral landscape subjected to the idealizing and aestheticizing inclinations of the speaker’s imagination. Verbal repetitions emphasize his excitement and the prolonged gap of time between his visits: After “[f]ive years […] five summers, with the length / Of five long winters!” (1-2), he has returned to view “once again” a “wild secluded scene” (6) of lofty cliffs and midsummer greenery. The speaker’s tone is one of surprise and delight; it is a pleasurable homecoming made more nostalgic by the intervening years since he first came to the Wye valley. His deepening state of aesthetic contemplation unifies the various details of the landscape into an organic whole that effaces the boundaries of domesticity and nature: The “green” plots of cottage-yards “lose themselves” among the surrounding woods, blending harmoniously with the green landscape; the hedge-rows seem endowed with volition and mobility, playfully running wild, and the waters of the Wye entice the speaker’s ear with a “soft inland murmur” (4). His description of the idyllic scene emphasizes unification, connection, and integration—all within a pleasurable seclusion—and a corresponding lack of discontinuity and disturbance.

The speaker feels a sympathetic reverberation with the landscape arising within himself; the “wild secluded scene impress[es] / Thoughts of more deep seclusion” (6-7), and the flow of his associations finds a mirror in the image of the lofty cliffs “connect[ing] / The landscape with the quiet of the sky” (7-8). The “soft inland murmur” of the river is the music of the internal liberation of imaginative energy, proceeding with a momentum echoed by the apparent spontaneity of his description of the scene’s elements. The aestheticizing tendency of the speaker’s depiction erases as well as integrates; he supposes that the wreaths of smoke rising from the landscape might come from unseen vagrants, hidden in the “houseless woods” (20), or, perhaps more appealingly, from a solitary hermit’s cave in which the hermit sits alone by his fire. This concluding image encapsulates the speaker’s imaginative idealization of the total scene, representing in the hermit’s solitary self-reliance the philosophical poet’s retreat from society and return to nature to nurture the creative warmth of the soul.

The first paragraph moves from close description grounded in observable facts toward internal reverie as the objectivity of the scene slides into imaginative abstraction. The smoke wreaths float silently “[w]ith some uncertain notice, as might seem [evidence] / Of vagrant dwellers” (19-20); the tentativeness of the expression underscores the imaginative movement from the actual externality of the landscape to its personal symbolic significance for the speaker. The intensification of the speaker’s excitement modulates as he drifts deeper into imagining the hidden presences within in the scene, quietly resolving in the image of the hermetically contained hermit, a simulacrum of the poet’s ideal self.

In the second paragraph, the speaker turns from observing the external landscape to reflect on how the memory of it has affected him. In the loneliness of noisy towns and cities, the memory of “these beauteous forms” (23) have been a source of restoration and healing. The speaker traces their influence even in his “little, nameless, unremembered acts / Of kindness and of love” (35-36), crediting recollections of the picturesque valley for gently instilling and forming ethical character. More than this, the aesthetic appreciation of nature has induced a singular state of perception, “of aspect more sublime” (38), in which “we are laid asleep / In body, and become a living soul: / While with an eye made quiet by the power / Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, / We see into the life of things” (46-50). This visionary state has also humanized the speaker, enabling an empathetic apprehension of reality, as it lightens the burden of this unintelligible world.

Wordsworth’s attempt to describe nature’s benevolent influence upon the mind, body, and soul reaches for corporeal images that transcend their mere bodily function. The landscape has not been to him as “to a blind man’s eye” (25); rather, it has enabled him to surpass ordinary sight and see into the life of objects themselves. The memory of the Wye landscape has created “sensations sweet, / Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart, / And passing even into my purer mind / With tranquil restoration” (28-31); the prepositions “in,” “along,” and “into” suggest a process of sublimation or incorporation by which sensation and emotion are material transformed into a higher state of soulful tranquility.

Conversely, the trance-like state of heightened perception, in which aesthetic cognition merges into a spiritual mode of knowing, occurs when “the motion of our own blood / Almost suspended, we are laid asleep in body, and become a living soul.” Characterized by a sense of harmony and joy, this organic, holistic perception suspends the distinction of mind and body and suggests an ambiguous, if ephemeral, integration of subject and object. At the same time, reflecting on his memories arouses feelings of “unremembered pleasure” (32); the beauty of nature is mediated by the mind and imagination, which confer greater significance upon it through the association of memory, experience, and desire.

The third paragraph sounds an important transitional note, dismissing the speaker’s momentary doubt and reaffirming his confidence in nature’s transforming influence. Having staked his philosophical claim to nature’s regenerative power, Wordsworth defends himself against the possibility it may be merely a delusion by recalling how often he has turned to the memory of the Wye in times of distress. By sheer force of repetition he dispels that uncertainty, gaining strength in his recourse to recollections of the landscape as a mental sanctuary from “the fretful stir / Unprofitable, and the fever of the world” (54-55). Apostrophizing the river as “O sylvan Wye! thou wanderer thro' the woods” (58), the speaker consecrates his surroundings as the abode of a personified protective spirit of the place, a genius loci.

This intensification of the speaker’s emotion leads to the poem’s central passage, in which he reflects nostalgically on his earlier passionate absorption in nature and the mature philosophical love that has come to substitute for that vanished ecstasy. Both his historical and present selves converge at this pivotal moment in an act of the imaginative will: “The picture of the mind revives again: / While here I stand, not only with the sense / Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts / That in this moment there is life and food /For future years” (63-67). Memory and the compensation of the imagination are the twin themes of this paragraph; the “aching joys” and “dizzy raptures” that the speaker enjoyed as he romped through this scenery five years ago are “no more” (86-87), but their loss has been compensated for by a deeper sense of human suffering and frailty, and he has come to look on nature while hearing the “still, sad music of humanity” (93), a chastening and subduing influence.

His earlier visceral appetite for the beautiful and sublime in nature, desiring nothing more than thoughtless sensation, has changed to a more sober appreciation counterbalanced by awareness of mortality, disillusion, and sorrow. The speaker works out the problem of the continuity of the self in terms of nature’s privileged presence in his existence; the elegiac tone of “That time is past, / And all its aching joys are now no more” (85-86) gives way to the soberly triumphant tone of the succeeding lines in which he describes the “other gifts” that have appeared as “abundant recompence” (88-90) for the loss of youthful rapture. Knowledge of suffering has humanized him, and he has come to sense a divine immanence in nature, a “motion and a spirit, that impels / All thinking things, all objects of all thought, / And rolls through all things” (102-104).

This intuition of a pseudo-pantheistic presence pervading nature and humankind grounds his continuing love for the beauties of the natural world, which is the co-creation of nature and the mind, acting to mediate and synthesize the raw data of sense impression. In a profession of secular faith, the speaker moves from a personal mystical experience to a claim of universal significance, recognizing in nature “the nurse, / The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul / Of all my moral being (111-113). The continuity and ubiquity of this sublime “presence” anchors the continuity of the speaker’s identity, which has been threatened by the disrupting force of time and awareness of mortality.

The concluding paragraph marks another shift, introducing the poet’s sister, a previously unknown witness to the scene and sharer in his love for nature. Apostrophizing her as “[m]y dear, dear Friend (119), the speaker turns from seclusion and philosophical wisdom to the companionship of a loved one for consolation, while assimilating his sister to Nature’s innocent wildness. For the first time in the poem, Nature is apostrophized and personified as feminine, a paragon of loyalty who the poet claims will never “betray / The heart that loved her” (125-126). The “shooting lights” of Dorothy’s “wild eyes” (121-122) mirror the speaker’s former delight in nature; praying that he may behold his former self in her person a little longer, he finds the continuity of his identity figured forth in his beloved sister’s exuberance. Dorothy’s “wild eyes” and “wild ecstasies” (141) echo his earlier response to the “wild secluded scene[,]” and on the basis of this identification, he projects his sister’s mental evolution as paralleling his own.

The poem shifts from the indicative to optative mood, from past and present verb tenses to the future, as the speaker imagines their shared “cheerful faith, that all which we behold / Is full of blessings” (136-137) will sustain Dorothy against the myriad incivilities of social life, when her mind matures to become a “mansion for all lovely forms” (143). The metaphor is doubly significant; Dorothy becomes the repository of the poet’s memory, enabling him to relive past pleasure and his own spiritual awakening guided by nature, while memorializing their visit and his devotion after he has departed. Her memory becomes the living witness of his rededication to Nature and his vocation, a safeguard against his own mortality, in the speaker’s rhetorical gesture of transmission.