Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey ...

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