37 pages • 1 hour read
William WordsworthLines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey ...
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1798A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
The Form of “Tintern Abbey”: Ode or Elegy?
In a note to “Tintern Abbey” in the second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800), Wordsworth remarked that, though he did not venture to call the poem an ode, “it was written with a hope that in the transitions and impassioned music of the versification” would be found the necessary requirements of that genre. Wordsworth alludes to the traditional “sublime” or Pindaric ode, a form characterized by its lofty theme, elegant diction and versification, and alternating structure of turn (strophe) and counterturn (antistrophe), typically in praise of a person, place, or thing. The 18th-century English ode, as exemplified by Thomas Gray’s The Bard and The Progress of Poesy, involves sudden transitions and imaginative leaps of association that yield powerful conceptions beautifully and uniquely expressed, and is a form closely associated with the contemporary vogue for the sublime and 18th-century conceptions of poetic genius.
The informal transitions of “Tintern Abbey’s” verse paragraphs enact a strophic movement in the poem’s divisions: the locodescriptive introduction, which depicts the external scene (strophe), is followed by an interior meditation on the significance of the speaker’s memory of the landscape (antistrophe) in the second paragraph. Lines 51-113, after immediately rejecting a momentary doubt (“If this / Be but a vain belief”), develop the speaker’s philosophical understanding of the trance-like experience of epiphany (“that serene and blessed mood”) he has just described in the second paragraph.
In this second strophic movement, the speaker’s self replaces the landscape as the subject of the poem, as he resurrects the memory of his youthful ecstasy and reconciles with its loss, formulating a creed of nature worship that serves as a reassurance that the continuity of his identity can exist within the discontinuity forced by time. The final verse paragraph consolidates this affirmation as the speaker turns towards his sister in a valedictory gesture. Finding within her “wild eyes” a reflection of his younger self, he imparts to her his mature wisdom, imagining its timely fruition in the future when her mind shall become “a mansion for all lovely forms.” This concluding movement, with its unexpected address to Dorothy—the hitherto unmentioned companion of the speaker—serves as the poem’s epode and marks a widening shift from the speaker’s solitary musing upon himself to an implied social audience.
Many scholars have noted, however, that the odal structure of “Tintern Abbey” and its apparently celebratory theme are undercut by a persistently elegiac tone. Occasionally suppressed, sometimes emerging in direct statement (“Five years have passed”; “I cannot paint / What then I was”; “That time is past”), the poem’s elegiac mood acknowledges, and comes close to lamenting, a profound sense of loss, against which the speaker’s affirmation of nature’s continuing benevolence militates and defends. In her influential study of the poem’s suppression of the contemporary social context surrounding Tintern Abbey and town—the presence of homeless vagrants in the ruined church, the industrial despoliation of the Wye river and the village by mining and ironworks, the privatizing enclosures of surrounding public lands in the interest of agricultural “improvement”—all details missing from Wordsworth’s poem—Marjorie Levinson argues that the poem is actually an elegy, a confession of absence, rather than an odal celebration of a deified presence (namely, the speaker’s identification of nature with God).
New historicist and deconstructive critics have argued that the poem’s elegiac tone reverberates through its omissions, displacements, and aporias. Harold Bloom, for instance, reads “Tintern Abbey” as breaking away from Wordsworth’s intention to write a celebratory poem of salvation through nature and the rehabilitating consolation of philosophy. Bloom locates the work’s greatness, rather, in the speaker’s heroic attempt to master his intense ambivalence, as he rhetorically outmaneuvers the deeply felt experience of the loss of his passionate, Dionysian abandonment in nature.
Repetition
“Tintern Abbey” relies on patterns of verbal and rhetorical repetition as a key structuring device. Wordsworth uses repetition to control the poem’s rhythm, to intensify the speaker’s expression of emotion, and to associate the speaker’s sense of his own subjectivity with the objects of his description. The first verse paragraph exemplifies the masterful and coordinated orchestration of these uses. The repetition of the word “five” three times in the opening lines accentuates the span of psychological as well as chronological time that has passed since the speaker’s first visit to the Wye: “Five years have passed; five summers, with the length / Of five long winters!” (1-2). The repetition of “length” and “long” emphasizes duration while implying the mental stress and endurance of the speaker in the intervening years between his visits to the Wye.
The repetition of the adverb “again” similarly foregrounds the significance of the speaker’s return to this landscape and suggests the depth of his emotional investment in this special location, an investment he later equates with religious feeling. In hearing, beholding, and seeing these beautiful sounds and forms “[o]nce again,” the speaker suggests his return to the Wye river valley takes on the power of a ritual reenactment, charged with an aura of devotion and consecration, an idea the speaker’s confession of faith in Nature in the fourth paragraph of the poem makes explicit. Verbal repetitions unify the scene he depicts and embody the speaker’s internalization of the landscape: “Once again / Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs, / Which on a wild secluded scene impress / Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect / The landscape with the quiet of the sky” (4-8). As he surveys the scenery, external objects outwardly reflect the corresponding intensifying and harmonious integration of his imagination; the secluded landscape induces a deeper meditative seclusion. Repetition serves to slow down the speaker’s visual survey; his eye lingers on scenic details as the meditative process deepens and finds reverberations between the external tableau and the internal world.
The speaker’s aesthetic reconstruction of the landscape effaces some significant distinctions as it unifies. The cultivated “plots of cottage-ground” are “green,” “los[ing] themselves” among the woods in a monochromatic homogeneity that erases boundaries separating human habitation and nature. To the 28-year-old speaker, the “hedge-rows” are “hardly hedge-rows”; rather “little lines / Of sportive wood run wild […]” (15-16). The immediate disqualification of the noun creates an impression of spontaneous immediacy and free-flowing association; simultaneously, it marks the erasure of property divisions and the sociopolitical implications of the material symbols marking those divisions. Hedge-rows commonly demarcate property boundaries; the effect of Wordsworth’s description is to naturalize the man-made divisions of the landscape to compose a harmonious, disinterested, aesthetic whole that functions as an idealized mirror of the soul. The alliterations of the last phrase (“little lines / Of sportive wood run wild”) substitute an aestheticized, imagistic arabesque for the actual hedge-rows, endowing them with an animal mobility that evades the confines and fixities of human regulation. This tightly woven pattern of repetition and aestheticization idealizes and purifies the landscape for the speaker’s specific appropriation of it through memory. At the same time, it retards the rhythm of the verse, prolonging the speaker’s dramatization of his act of perception, as his eye and ear are saturated by the landscape and his consciousness registers intimate, elusive connections between the inner and the outer world.
Verbal repetition also serves as an index of the speaker’s deepest emotional attachments in the poem: to the solace he has found in the restorative memory of his first visit to the Wye valley (“how oft […] How oft […] How often”), as recalled in the second paragraph, and to his “dearest Friend,” his sister, in the conclusion. In Dorothy he finds the echo of “[t]he language of my former heart, and […] / [m]y former pleasures” (120-121). The repetition of the temporal adjective emphasizes the central crisis of the poem, the gulf between his current and former selves, and expresses the powerful pull of nostalgia compelling his prayer that he might “yet a little while” behold his former self in her “wild eyes” and voice. Similarly, a condensed catalog of cumulative negatives signals the darker social dimension against which the speaker defends himself: “neither evil tongues / Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men, / Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all / The dreary intercourse of daily life” (131-134). The alliteration and alternating dactyls and iambs of these lines convey through the halting, disjointed rhythm of the verse the disagreeableness and monotony of the unpleasant social encounters they describe.
The Verse Paragraph
The reader who experiences Wordsworth’s poem as a moderately-paced narrative may find that the verse paragraphs and the individual lines are key elements that progress the reader forward. Unlike stanzas, which often have fixed meters and rhyming patterns in a fixed set of lines, verse paragraphs that are characteristic of free verse are not beholden to such organizational rigor. The freedom of the verse paragraph form allows the speaker of the poem to encourage the reader’s attention forward; in combination with the length of “Tintern Abbey,” the unstructured verse paragraphs discourage the reader from looking backwards in the poem to find meaning, emphasizing the risky nature of nostalgia and the speaker’s preferred orientation towards the future.
Though the spaces in between the verse paragraphs do not offer the reader much respite while reading the poem, they do provide the reader with a sense of engaging with the speaker—and with the poem itself. Though brief, the pauses invite the reader to consider the imagery contained in the previous verse paragraph of the poem as well the themes and ideas repeated throughout. The pauses between verse paragraphs function as opportunities for engagement and interaction with the poet. They occur throughout the poem at four separate points, and emphasize the speaker’s message regarding the superiority of human interaction over the solitary experience of ruminating on one’s position in a natural environment. Though the learning one can receive from nature is meaningful, the structure of the poem suggests that a collaborative nature of dialogue can provide readers with much richer fodder for wisdom and joy.
Related Titles
By William Wordsworth
