Tintern Abbey

INTRODUCTION
Each great phase of civilization produces not only its particular arts but also its particular ways of looking at the arts. The middle of the eighteenth century is called a period of transition and experiments. The new poetic style came into being with a view that poetry is essentially the imitation of human nature. The romantic poetry reflects some characteristics of the age. Of all the giants of this period, William Wordsworth (1770-1850) born and brought up in the Lake District, is the greatest and senior most of all. He is the high priest of nature. To whom nature means more than she does to any other English poet. Nature, to Wordsworth was every thing.
In 1793, Wordsworth had visited the Wye valley in Monmouthshire near southeastern Wales. He was twenty-three when he made his first tour of the region. Five years later, a more experienced, wearier, more disillusioned man, he returned with his sister Dorothy. He visited a place for four or five days. By this time Wordsworth had been to France. The earlier hopes associated with the Revolution had been shattered and Napoleon had risen in power. The disquieting city of London had none too good and effect on his soul. He and his sister then settled in a country-house in Racedown where he slowly began to recover from his worldly depression. The short stay in the Wye valley came about the end of this period of rejection.
DEVELOPMENT OF THOUGHT
During his stay there Wordsworth visited the ruins of Tintern Abbey, long celebrated for its beauty. The setting of the poem however, is not the Abbey but the valley through which river Wye flows. The “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, on Revisting the Bank of the Wye” appeared in Lyrical Ballads in 1798. These lines, unlike most of the poems in the volume, present no story, and are spoken not through a narrator, but directly by the poet as the expression of his own thought and feeling.
“No poem of mine” Wordsworth said, “Was composed under circumstances more pleasant for me to remember than this. I began it upon leaving Tintern, after crossing the Wye, and concluded it just as I was entering Bristol in the evening, after a ramble of four or five days, with my sister. Not a line of it was altered, and not any part of it written down till I reached Bristol.”
We tend to think of the mode of personal confession as characteristics of Romantic poets, so it is as well to remember that at this stage of Wordsworth’s career a poem of this kind was the exception, not the rule. Just as the ballads in the volume are linked with an older tradition, “Tintern Abbey” is itself a development of the continuing eighteenth century tradition, Chiefly represented by Thomson and Cowper, of the meditative observation of the countryside. What Wordsworth attempts in this poem is to give a more deeply philosophical and unified expression to a mode with which his readers were thoroughly familiar. Though the lines are in the eighteenth century manner, both in subject matter and verse-form, there remains an important difference between the nature poetry of Thomson and Cowper, and Wordsworth’s achievement. The difference can be simply stated in term of Wordsworth’s greater intellectual power. When he describes the valley of Wye on a particular day, he places it in a wider context of space and time. The poem starts with an evocation of past time:
Five years have past; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters!………………………………
…………………………………………………….
With a soft inland murmur.
This quiet opening seems simple enough, but it offers more than a mere statement of the length of time that has elapsed since poet last visited the Wye. The three-fold repetition of ‘five’, combined with the dragging rhythm, creates a felt sense of the weight of time as man experiences it.
Most of the time Wordsworth seems to be discussing the natural scene around Tintern Abbey but the natural scenery that he describes (lines 4-22) is not important for itself, but for what he gets out of it. It is therefore worthwhile to inquire what Wordsworth means by nature. To him, nature means more than just rivers, trees, rocks, mountains, lakes, and so on. He means all these things certainly, but more importantly he means a power, a force, a dynamic principle that animates and moulds with plastic might the physical furnishing of the universe. The point then about a man’s placing himself closely in touch with rural places and things is that there man comes most intimately in touch with this power, this force, this vivifying and regulating principle of life; the reason is that rural places and things have been the least interfered with by the corrupting ambitions of life. For Wordsworth, Nature is good, the city is evil. Tintern Abbey includes these meaning of nature. For him, paradise is a world that can be completely unified and harmonized by the mind, and in the opening passage we witness his imagination imposing that order and harmony on the scene as he observes it. We see for the first time Wordsworth in Tintern Abbey as “a Worshipper of Nature”. Margaret comments, “Though it is not the first poem to show his sense of the importance of natural surroundings, but here we witness his emotional descriptions of the effects of the outer world upon his own inner self; this is the first poem in which he used, with deep feeling, phrases like a “worshipper of nature”, and speaks of the deeper zeal of holier love that he feels for nature”. The basic theme of the poem is the poet’s relationship with nature, and his indebtedness to her. In fact, we know everything about Wordsworth as a poet of Nature from Tintern Abbey. The poem clearly reflects his faith in Nature-namely that ‘Nature never did betray the heart that loved her’. As W. H. Myers comments; “The Lines written above Tinterrn Abbey have become, as it were, the locus classicus or consecrated formulary of the Wordsworthian faith.” The sense of a life that can be gratefully be lived in half-natural paradise has been contrasted with that of the isolated individual:
With some uncertain notice, as might seem
Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods,
Or by some Hermit’s cave, where by his fire
The Hermit sits alone.
The ‘houseless woods’ add a further sense of the paradisal quality of life in the valley, by reminding us of the loneliness and shapelessness which surround it at a distance. The hermit sitting by his fire, alone in his cave, is not a figure to be envied, and the ‘vagrant dwellers’ are shadowy figures outside the ordered seclusion of the valley.
The choice of Miltonic verse is understandable if it is seen that Wordsworth is here creating his own version of paradise, a paradise which he can physically enter only at rare intervals, but which he hopes he can inhabit, at least mentally, at his will.
If ever there was a philosophic poem; Tintern Abbey is one, as it clearly reveals Wordsworth’s mysticism and pantheism. In a famous passage of the poem, the poet suggests that some ascertainable truth is attained by a mystical insight that transcends sense experience.
“…………………..we are laid a sleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy
We see into the life of things.”
Melvin in his book Wordsworth-A Philosophical Approach comments, “This implication is in no way lessened by the poet’s suggestion that these mystical states may be due to the beauteous forms of Nature.
Nor less, I trust.
To them I may have owed another gift,
Of aspect more sublime.
It has always been a tenet of Platonism and neo-Platonism, as well as a favorite doctrine of many mystics, that sensibility to natural beauty leads onward to the beauty and truth that is beyond sense”. He again remarks, “ At the time of composing the poem, Wordsworth was a pantheist, or at least had pantheistic leanings……In its deeper significance, nature meant for him a world soul that includes humanity”.
Wordsworth is as much earnest about the inward world’s extension as he is about the outward world’s capacity to suffer. In Tintern Abbey he speaks of sensations ‘felt along the heart’ and the inward world is a wide coastline; for in the poem, the two face each other like sea and land. Morley writes“ What Wordsworth does is to assuage to reconcile, to fortify. He has not Shakespear’s richness and compass nor Milton’s sublime and unflagging strength, nor Dante’s sense, vivid and ardent force of vision. But he possesses the skill to lead us into inner of settled peace, to touch the depth and not the tumult of the soul, to give us quietness, steadfastness, strength and purpose, whether to do or to endure”.
Like the Lucy poems, Tintern Abbey is personal in feeling, but unlike them it is quite openly and specifically so, and says exactly what and whom it is being personal about. Instead of addressing an unknown girl named Lucy, it addresses “ my dear, dear sister’. Indeed, Tintern Abbey is Wordsworth’s poem to Dorothy in the same way as The Prelude in his poem to Coleridge.
Tintern Abbey may be seen as the classical expression of the English imagination confronted with the disturbing prospects created at the end of the eighteenth century by the ferment of revolution and war, by a growing sense of disenchantment with science, and perhaps most of all by the growth of great commercial and industrial cities. On the one hand it asserts a healthy determination not to lose touch with the traditions of an agricultural society; on the other hand it shows some reluctance to bring the imagination to bear with full commitment on the baffling confusions of the new industrial age. As will be seen, Wordsworth made some effort to come to terms with the city; but on the whole his imagination prefers to dwell on less intractable themes. With this withdrawal from the main stream of national life, poetry became ever less and less significant, and it was the novelists of the nineteenth century—above all George Eliot and Dickens – who provided the fresh imaginative impulse that was needed. For Wordsworth himself, Tintern Abbey, though one of his finest achievements represents only the beginning of an increasing preference for subjects which could not disturb or frighten, and which could not threaten the achievement of ‘a repose that ever is the same’.
Tintern Abbey mirrors patterns of celebrations and reaffirmation in earlier poetry. As C.H.Herford remarks “Wordsworth has written some of the greatest poetry of man, some of the greatest poetry of nature……… He is a poet of man, alone facing the sublimities of nature or of men and women, who are a portion of these simplicities. Men in society, in cities, and the state, he knows them, as a poet he does not know them”.
The poem is a complex one, to understand even with all the information that we possess about what may have been happening in Wordsworth’s mind on July 13, 1798. To Keats it seemed a poem full of dark passages. A close examination of the poem shows that in it Wordsworth was not concerned with offering the final poetic statement of a fully formed philosophical view of life and the universe, unlike Coleridge, who, as Keats knew, was ‘incapable of remaining content with half knowledge’. He was primarily concerned with expressing the complex totality of a mood which included both elements of knowledge and of half-knowledge.
Tintern Abbey is quite unlike both lyrics and ballads in style, for its language is not simple to understand by any standard. In it Wordsworth has not used the language of ‘the middle and lower classes of society’. Words like elevated, sublime, interfused, genial, ecstasy and zeal are certainly not used by the Cumberland shepherd in his daily life. The syntax, too, is as far removed from ordinary conversation as the actual words. In Tintern Abbey we see for the first time what is often labeled the ‘Miltonic’ side of Wordsworth—the long sentences, the lofty emotions, the grand manner. As F.W.Bateson in his book “Wordsworth-A Re-Interpretation” comments “With its long sentences, its involved grammar and its polysyllabic vocabulary it was a form of discourse that abandoned all pretence to being the poetry of the people. But it was a style that came much more easily to Wordsworth, sometimes indeed too easily, and it clearly expressed something fundamental in him that had hitherto been denied an outlet.”