![Tintern-abbey-by-william-havell](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b5/Tintern-abbey-by-william-havell.jpg)
''Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey'' is a poem by
William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth (7 April 177023 April 1850) was an English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their joint publication ''Lyrical Ballads'' (1798).
Wordsworth's ' ...
. The title, ''Lines Written'' (or ''Composed'') ''a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798'', is often abbreviated simply to ''
Tintern Abbey
Tintern Abbey ( cy, Abaty Tyndyrn ) was founded on 9 May 1131 by Walter de Clare, Lord of Chepstow. It is situated adjacent to the village of Tintern in Monmouthshire, on the Welsh bank of the River Wye, which at this location forms the bor ...
'', although that building does not appear within the poem. It was written by Wordsworth after a walking tour with his sister in this section of the
Welsh Borders
The Welsh Marches ( cy, Y Mers) is an imprecisely defined area along the border between England and Wales in the United Kingdom. The precise meaning of the term has varied at different periods.
The English term Welsh March (in Medieval Latin ...
. The description of his encounters with the countryside on the banks of the
River Wye
The River Wye (; cy, Afon Gwy ) is the Longest rivers of the United Kingdom, fourth-longest river in the UK, stretching some from its source on Plynlimon in mid Wales to the Severn estuary. For much of its length the river forms part of Wal ...
grows into an outline of his general philosophy. There has been considerable debate about why evidence of the human presence in the landscape has been downplayed and in what way the poem fits within the 18th-century
loco-descriptive genre.
Background
The poem has its roots in Wordsworth's personal history. He had previously visited the area as a troubled twenty-three-year-old in August 1793. Since then he had matured and his seminal poetical relationship with
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (; 21 October 177225 July 1834) was an English poet, literary critic, philosopher, and theologian who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poe ...
had begun. Wordsworth claimed to have composed the poem entirely in his head, beginning it upon leaving Tintern and not jotting down so much as a line until he reached
Bristol
Bristol () is a city, ceremonial county and unitary authority in England. Situated on the River Avon, it is bordered by the ceremonial counties of Gloucestershire to the north and Somerset to the south. Bristol is the most populous city in ...
, by which time it had just reached mental completion. Although the ''
Lyrical Ballads
''Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems'' is a collection of poems by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, first published in 1798 and generally considered to have marked the beginning of the English Romantic movement in literatur ...
'' upon which the two friends had been working was by then already in publication, he was so pleased with what he had just written that he had it inserted at the eleventh hour as the concluding poem. Scholars generally agree that it is apt, for the poem represents the climax of Wordsworth's first great period of creative output and prefigures much of the distinctively Wordsworthian verse that was to follow.
The poem is written in tightly structured
decasyllabic
Decasyllable (Italian: ''decasillabo'', French: ''décasyllabe'', Serbian: ''десетерац'', ''deseterac'') is a poetic meter of ten syllables used in poetic traditions of syllabic verse. In languages with a stress accent (accentual v ...
blank verse
Blank verse is poetry written with regular metrical but unrhymed lines, almost always in iambic pentameter. It has been described as "probably the most common and influential form that English poetry has taken since the 16th century", and P ...
and comprises
verse paragraph
Verse paragraphs are stanzas with no regular number of lines or groups of lines that make up units of sense. They are usually separated by blank lines. It stands for a group of lines in a poem that form a rhetorical unit similar to that of a pros ...
s rather than
stanza
In poetry, a stanza (; from Italian language, Italian ''stanza'' , "room") is a group of lines within a poem, usually set off from others by a blank line or Indentation (typesetting), indentation. Stanzas can have regular rhyme scheme, rhyme and ...
s. Categorising the poem is difficult, as it contains some elements of the
ode
An ode (from grc, ᾠδή, ōdḗ) is a type of lyric poetry. Odes are elaborately structured poems praising or glorifying an event or individual, describing nature intellectually as well as emotionally. A classic ode is structured in three majo ...
and of the
dramatic monologue
Dramatic monologue is a type of poetry written in the form of a speech of an individual character. M.H. Abrams notes the following three features of the ''dramatic monologue'' as it applies to poetry:
Types of dramatic monologue
One of the mo ...
. In the second edition of ''
Lyrical Ballads
''Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems'' is a collection of poems by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, first published in 1798 and generally considered to have marked the beginning of the English Romantic movement in literatur ...
'', Wordsworth noted:
"I have not ventured to call this Poem an Ode but it was written with a hope that in the transitions, and the impassioned music of the versification, would be found the principle requisites of that species of composition."
The apostrophe at its beginning is reminiscent of the 18th century
landscape-poem, but it is now agreed that the best designation of the work would be the
conversation poem
A conversation poem is a genre in English poetry growing out of the close co-operation between Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth in the late 1790s. The name is applied particularly to the group of poems by Coleridge known as the Conver ...
, which is an organic development of the loco-descriptive. The silent listener in this case is Wordsworth's sister
Dorothy
Dorothy may refer to:
*Dorothy (given name), a list of people with that name.
Arts and entertainment
Characters
*Dorothy Gale, protagonist of ''The Wonderful Wizard of Oz'' by L. Frank Baum
* Ace (''Doctor Who'') or Dorothy, a character playe ...
, who is addressed in the poem's final section. Transcending the nature poetry written before that date, it employs a much more intellectual and philosophical engagement with the subject that verges on
pantheism
Pantheism is the belief that reality, the universe and the cosmos are identical with divinity and a supreme supernatural being or entity, pointing to the universe as being an immanent creator deity still expanding and creating, which has ex ...
.
Outline of themes
The poem's tripartite division encompasses a contextual scene-setting, a developing theorisation of the significance of his experience of the landscape, and a final confirmatory address to the implied listener.
:Lines 1–49
Revisiting the natural beauty of the Wye after five years fills the poet with a sense of "tranquil restoration". He recognises in the landscape something which had been so internalised as to become the basis for out of the body experience.
:Lines 49–111
In "thoughtless youth" the poet had rushed enthusiastically about the landscape and it is only now that he realises the power such scenery has continued to have upon him, even when not physically present there. He identifies in it "a sense sublime/ Of something far more deeply interfused,/ Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns" (lines 95–97) and the immanence of "A motion and a spirit, that impels/ All thinking things, all objects of all thought,/ And rolls through all things" (lines 100–103). With this insight he finds in nature "The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,/ The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul/ Of all my moral being" (lines 108–111).
:Lines 111–159
The third movement of the poem is addressed to his sister Dorothy, "my dearest Friend,/ My dear, dear Friend," as a sharer in this vision and in the conviction that "all which we behold is full of blessings". It is this that will continue to create a lasting bond between them.
Literary and aesthetic context
Having internalised the landscape, Wordsworth claimed now "to see into the life of things" (line 50) and, so enabled, to hear "oftentimes/ The still sad music of humanity" (92-3), but recent critics have used close readings of the poem to question such assertions. For example, Marjorie Levinson views him "as managing to see into the life of things only 'by narrowing and skewing his field of vision' and by excluding 'certain conflictual sights and meanings. Part of her contention was that he had suppressed mention of the heavy industrial activity in the area, although it has since been argued that the "wreaths of smoke", playfully interpreted by Wordsworth as possible evidence "of some Hermit’s cave" upslope, in fact acknowledges the presence of the local ironworks, or of charcoal burning, or of a paper works.
![Iron forge at tintern](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f2/Iron_forge_at_tintern.jpg)
Another contribution to the debate has been Crystal Lake's study of other poems written after a visit to Tintern Abbey, particularly those from about the same time as Wordsworth's. Noting not just the absence of direct engagement on his part with "the still sad music of humanity" in its present industrial manifestation, but also of its past evidence in the ruins of the abbey itself, she concludes that this "confirms Marjorie Levinson‘s well-known argument that the local politics of the Monmouthshire landscape require erasure if Wordsworth's poem is to advance its aesthetic agenda."
The poems concerned include the following:
* 1745. Rev. Dr.
Sneyd Davies
Sneyd Davies (30 October 1709–20 January 1769) was an English poet, academic and churchman, archdeacon of Derby from 1755.
Life
He was born on 30 October 1709 at Shrewsbury, Shropshire, where, at St Mary's Church, he was baptised the next day. ...
, Epistle I
"Describing a Voyage to Tintern Abbey, in Monmouthshire, from Whitminster in Gloucestershire"* About 1790. Rev. Duncomb Davis
* 1790s. Edmund Gardner
* 1796.
Edward Jerningham
Edward Jerningham was a poet who moved in high society during the second half of the 18th century. Born at the family home of Costessey Park in 1737, he died in London on 17 November 1812. A writer of liberal views, he was savagely satirised later ...
, "Tintern Abbey"
* About 1800. Rev.
Luke Booker
Rev. Luke Booker (20 October 1762 – 1 October 1835) LL.D., FRLS was an English Anglican clergyman, poet and antiquary, with a long list of published sermons and poetry. As a cleric he was strongly linked with the town of Dudley, then an excla ...
"Original sonnet composed on leaving Tintern Abbey and proceeding with a party of friends down the River Wye to Chepstow"
As the boat carrying Sneyd Davies neared Tintern Abbey, he noted the presence of "naked quarries" before passing to the ruins, bathed in evening light and blending into the natural surroundings to give a sense of "pleasurable sadness". The poem by Davies more or less sets the emotional tone for the poems to come and brackets past and present human traces far more directly than does Wordsworth. His fellow clergyman Duncomb Davis, being from the area, goes into more detail. After a historical deviation, he returns to the present, where
::… now no bell calls monks to morning prayer,
::Daws only chant their early matins there,
::Black forges smoke, and noisy hammers beat
::Where sooty Cyclops puffing, drink and sweat,
following this with a description of the smelting process and a reflection that the present is more virtuous than the past. He anticipates Wordsworth by drawing a moral lesson from the scene, in his case noting the ivy-swathed ruin and exhorting,
::Fix deep the bright exemplar in thy heart:
::To friendship’s sacred call with joy attend,
::Cling, like the ivy, round a falling friend.
Similar reflections appear in the two contemporary sonnets. For Edmund Gardner, "Man’s but a temple of a shorter date", while Luke Booker, embarking at sunset, hopes to sail as peacefully to the "eternal Ocean" at death.
[Booker's sonnet appeared i]
Charles Heath's guide to Tintern Abbey
/ref> The action of Wordsworth's poem therefore takes place in an already established moral landscape. Its retrospective mood draws on a particularly 18th century emotional sensibility also found in Edward Jerningham's description of the ruins, with their natural adornments of moss and 'flow'rets', and reflected in J. M. W. Turner
Joseph Mallord William Turner (23 April 177519 December 1851), known in his time as William Turner, was an English Romantic painter, printmaker and watercolourist. He is known for his expressive colouring, imaginative landscapes and turbulen ...
's watercolour
Watercolor (American English) or watercolour (British English; see spelling differences), also ''aquarelle'' (; from Italian diminutive of Latin ''aqua'' "water"), is a painting method”Watercolor may be as old as art itself, going back to t ...
of them. Wordsworth's preference in his poem is for the broader picture rather than human detail, but otherwise it fits seamlessly within its contemporary literary and aesthetic context.
References
Bibliography
* Durrant, Geoffrey. ''William Wordsworth'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969)
External links
Wordsworth biography and works
{{William Wordsworth
Poetry by William Wordsworth
1798 poems