Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey ...

“Tintern Abbey” is a complex meditation on the value of nature as a source of healing and philosophical wisdom, yet Wordsworth repeatedly questions the veracity and durability of this belief. The poem vacillates between overt affirmations of nature’s restorative, edifying power, and muted voicings of uncertainty as to whether nature will ever “betray / The heart that loved her” (125-126). While the poem celebrates nature’s role as a secular medium of salvation and suggests that the epiphanies it gives rise to can form the basis for his mature philosophy—one that approaches pantheism in the poem—Wordsworth remains troubled by the loss of the direct, unthinking pleasure he once enjoyed in nature, which he now recognizes as a source of renewal. Ultimately, Wordsworth turns toward his sister Dorothy for that renewal, finding mirrored in her “wild” eyes his former enthusiastic response to the picturesque and sublime scenery, a movement that betrays the underlying anxiety of the poem. The rhetorical strategy of “Tintern Abbey,” its shifts and countershifts as the poet seeks to reconcile himself with the process of aging, suggests that Wordsworth is not unqualifiedly certain that nature alone—or the philosophical mind—has fully compensated him for the loss of his youthful, unconscious exultation in Nature’s embrace.

In the second verse paragraph, the speaker associates natural beauty, particularly his memories of the Wye, with a state of elevated perception that transforms us into a “living soul” (47) and enables us to “see into the life of things” (50). After describing the psycho-physical process by which this transcendent state of aesthetic experience arises, the speaker momentarily voices a misgiving before reiterating how important the memory of the Wye river landscape has been to him, validating his moments of visionary insight: “If this / Be but a vain belief, yet oh! How oft […]” (51-52). Experiences of distress (“the fretful stir / Unprofitable, and the fever of the world” [54-55]) have revealed nature’s transformative, recuperative power for the soul, and the impressions aroused by revisiting the Wye activates those memories, enabling the speaker to reconstruct his former selves, finding continuity within discontinuity: “With many recognitions dim and faint, / And somewhat of a sad perplexity, / The picture of the mind revives again” (61-63). The revisited natural landscape is a touchstone in which healing, memory, beauty, and aesthetic converge, enabling the poet to retrace his own evolution from boyhood through youth to adulthood in the nurturing protection of a sacred location.

At several points in the poem, Wordsworth reaches beyond claims for the restorative, recreational effects of nature toward a statement of belief in a metaphysical presence suffusing the sublime objects of our sense perception. The central passage of the poem expresses a creed of faith in an immanent natural power, “[w]hose dwelling is the light of setting suns, / And the round ocean, and the living air, / And the blue sky, and in the mind of man: / A motion and a spirit, that impels / All thinking things, all objects of all thought, / And rolls through all things” (99-104). On the basis of his felt experience of this presence, disturbing and sublime at the same time, the speaker grounds his continuing love of nature, recognizing in it “and [in] the language of the sense, / The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, / The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul / Of all my moral being” (110-113).

The passage also underscores the contribution of the mind in co-creating the world we perceive—“the mighty world / Of eye, and ear,—both what they half create, / And what perceive” (107-109). Nature, as perceived, is not static and objective; external appearances are receptive to the subjective consciousness of the perceiver, which selectively (and unconsciously) imposes form, mood, organization, and meaning upon the sensory tableau assembled by eye, ear, and the other senses. In later life, Wordsworth recounted that, as a boy, he was often at pains to distinguish the external world as existing outside of himself, a participation mystique in which the boundaries separating the self and nature dissolve.

Wordsworth’s faith in nature’s efficacious power, however, is challenged by the effects of time, the awareness of mortality, and the experience of human suffering. This is the great, fertile tension that generates “Tintern Abbey.” On the one hand, the beautiful forms of nature evoke aesthetic responses and emotional sensitivities that may influence moral character and induce a trance-like state of transcendence. Recalling memories of his first visit to the Wye landscape, the speaker notes, “I have owed to them / In hours of weariness, sensations sweet / Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart, / And passing even into my purer mind / With tranquil restoration” (27-31). Natural beauty composes the soul and soothes the distressed mind, while it invites a meditative contemplation that transforms ordinary consciousness, yielding heightened awareness and insight: “that serene and blessed mood / In which the affections gently lead us on / Until […] 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” (42-50).

This state of enlightened repose, however, depends on the refraction of external sensory impressions through the suitably organized, refined, and mature mind. As a youth, the speaker’s relationship with nature was hardly “serene”; rather, passionate and avaricious, with “no need of a remoter charm, / By thought supplied, or any interest / Unborrowed from the eye” (83-85). Its “aching joys” and “dizzy raptures” (86-87) were overwhelming in their visceral force, and the thrust of the poem’s argument is to claim that the loss of this ecstatic, bodily communion with nature has been abundantly recompensed by the speaker’s philosophical understanding of nature’s meaning for him. The paradox is that what he has lost in intensity of feeling has been replaced by the adult knowledge of its significance; as he has been “humanized” and diminished by suffering, he has realized the deeper moral and mystical import of his attachment to nature.

Wordsworth’s acquaintance with human suffering has irrevocably modulated his experience of the beauties of nature: “For I have learned / To look on nature, not as in the hour / Of thoughtless youth, but hearing oftentimes / The still, sad music of humanity, / Not harsh, nor grating, though of ample power / To chasten and subdue” (90-95). Other lines in the poem speak explicitly of the “harsh” and “grating” effects of human life and society: “the din / Of towns and cities” (26-27), “evil tongues” and “the sneers of selfish men” (131-132), fever, darkness, loneliness, grief, fear, and pain. Such language suggests that the “still, sad music of humanity” is an aestheticized abstraction, an idealization of human suffering that the speaker feels compelled to minimize as he strives for a philosophical reconciliation with the loss of his youthful enthusiasm. The experience and knowledge of suffering must be “subdued”—defended against—to sustain his faith that “Nature never did betray / The heart that loved her” (125-126).

Remarkably, Wordsworth does not end the poem with his profession of faith in nature as “the guardian of my heart, and soul / Of all my moral being” (112-113), turning instead to his sister as a source of regeneration and comfort. Even if hard-won philosophical consolation proves fragile, his beloved sister stands as an avatar of his previous self, in which he can behold again what he once was. Dorothy channels Wordsworth’s youthful ardor and untroubled passion for nature; through her voice and “wild eyes” he seeks to relive vicariously the appetite and ecstasy he formerly enjoyed in its embrace. Her “wildness” reflects the “wild secluded scene” around them; assimilating Dorothy to Nature, Wordsworth embraces both with renewed devotion and confesses his “holier love,” imagining his sister will reenact his own evolution and recollect their visit with healing consolation amid times of distress after he has gone. In the poem’s much debated turn to Dorothy, nature worship, and the education of the self through nature, becomes a communal value that poet and sister, in their mutual love for each other and for the natural landscape, share as a consolation against mortality.