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Tintern Abbey by William Wordsworth: Summary and Critical Analysis

The poem Lines Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey is generally known as Tintern Abbey
written in 1798 by the father of Romanticism William Wordsworth. Tintern Abbey is one of the triumphs
of Wordsworth's genius. It may he called a condensed spiritual autobiography of the poet. It deals with
the subjective experiences of the poet, and traces the growth of his mind through different periods of his
life. Nature and its influence on the poet in various stage forms the main theme of the poem. The poem
deal with the influence of Nature on the boy, the growing youth, and the man. The poet has expressed
his tender feeling towards nature.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

He has specially recollected his poetic idea of Tintern Abbey where he had gone first time in 1793. This is
his second visit to this place. Wordsworth has expressed his intense faith in nature.

There is Wordsworth’s realization of God in nature. He got sensuous delight in it and it is all in all to him.
Tintern Abbey impressed him most when he had first visited this place. He has again come to the same
place where there are lofty cliffs, the plots of cottage ground, orchards groves and copses. He is glad to
see again hedgerows, sportive wood, pastoral farms and green doors. This lonely place, the banks of the
river and rolling waters from the mountain springs present a beautiful panoramic light. The solitary place
remands the poet of vagrant dwellers and hermits’ cave.

The poem is in five sections. The first section establishes the setting for the meditation. But it
emphasizes the passage of time: five years have passed, five summers, five long winters… But when the
poet is back to this place of natural beauty and serenity, it is still essentially the same. The poem opens
with a slow, dragging rhythm and the repetition of the word ‘five’ all designed to emphasize the weight
of time which has separated the poet from this scene. The following lines develop a clear, visual picture
of the scent. The view presented is a blend of wildness and order. He can see the entirely natural cliffs
and waterfalls; he can see the hedges around the fields of the people; and he can see wreaths of smoke
probably coming from some hermits making fire in their cave hermitages. These images evoke not only a
pure nature as one might expect, they evoke a life of the common people in harmony with the nature.
The second section begins with the meditation. The poet now realizes that these ‘beauteous’ forms have
always been with him, deep-seated in his mind, wherever he went. This vision has been “Felt in the
blood, and felt alone the heart” that is. It has affected his whole being. They were not absent from his
mind like form the mind of a man born blind. In hours of weariness, frustration and anxiety, these things
of nature used to make him feel sweet sensations in his very blood, and he used to feel it at the level of
the impulse (heart) rather than in his waking consciousness and through reasoning. From this point
onward Wordsworth begins to consider the sublime of nature, and his mystical awareness becomes
clear. Wordsworth’s idea was that human beings are naturally uncorrupted.

The poet studies nature with open eyes and imaginative mind. He has been the lover of nature form the
core of his heart, and with purer mind. He feels a sensation of love for nature in his blood. He feels high
pleasure and deep power of joy in natural objects. The beatings of his heart are full of the fire of nature’s
love. He concentrates attention to Sylvan Wye – a majestic and worth seeing river. He is reminded of the
pictures of the past visit and ponders over his future years. On his first visit to this place he bounded
over the mountains by the sides of the deep rivers and the lovely streams. In the past the soundings
haunted him like a passion. The tall rock, the mountain and the deep and gloomy wood were then to him
like an appetite. But that time is gone now. In nature he finds the sad music of humanity.

The third section contains a kind of doubt; the poet is probably reflecting the reader’s possible doubts so
that he can go on to justify how he is right and what he means. He doubts, for just a moment, whether
this thought about the influence of the nature is vain, but he can’t go on. He exclaims: “yet, oh! How
often, amid the joyless daylight, fretful and unprofitable fever of the world have I turned to thee
(nature)” for inspiration and peace of mind. He thanks the ‘Sylvan Wye’ for the everlasting influence it
has imprinted on his mind; his spirit has very often turned to this river for inspiration when he was losing
the peace of mind or the path and meaning of life. The river here becomes the symbol of spirituality.

Though the poet has become serious and perplexed in the fourth section the nature gives him courage
and spirit enough to stand there with a sense of delight and pleasure. This is so typical of Wordsworth
that it seems he can’t write poetry without recounting his personal experiences, especially those of his
childhood. Here he also begins from the earliest of his days! It was first the coarse pleasures in his
‘boyish days’, which have all gone by now. “That time is past and all its aching joys are now no more, and
all its dizzy raptures”. But the poet does not mourn for them; he doesn’t even grumble about their loss.
Clearly, he has gained something in return: “other gifts have followed; for such loss… for I have learnt to
look on nature, not as in the hour of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes the still, sad music of
humanity”. This is a philosophic statement about maturing, about the development of personality, and
of the poetic or philosophic mind as well. So now the poet is able to feel a joy of elevated thought, a
sense sublime, and far more deeply interfused. He feels a sense of sublime and the working of a
supreme power in the light of the setting sun, in round oceans and in the blue sky. He is of opinion that a
motion and a spirit impel all thinking things. Therefore Wordsworth claims that he is a lover of the
meadows and of all which we see from this green earth. Nature is a nurse, a guide and the guardian of
his heart and soul. The poet comes to one important conclusion: for all the formative influences, he is
now consciously in love with the nature. He has become a thoughtful lover of the meadows, the woods
and the mountains. Though his ears and eyes seem to create the other half of all these sensations, the
nature is the actual source of these sublime thoughts.

The fifth and last section continues with the same meditation from where the poet addresses his
younger sister Dorothy, whom he blesses and gives advice about what he has learnt. He says that he can
hear the voice of his own youth when he hears her speak, the language of his former heart; he can also
“read my former pleasure in the soothing lights of thy wild eyes’. He is excited to look at his own youthful
image in her. He says that nature has never betrayed his heart and that is why they had been living from
joy to joy. Nature can impress the mind with quietness and beauty, and feed it lofty thoughts, that no evil
tongues of the human society can corrupt their hearts with any amount of contact with it.

The poet then begins to address the moon in his reverie, and to ask the nature to bestow his sister with
their blessings. Let the moon shine on her solitary walk, and let the mountain winds blow their breeze on
her. When the present youthful ecstasies are over, as they did with him, let her mind become the palace
of the lovely forms and thought about the nature, so that she can enjoy and understand life and
overcome the vexations of living in a harsh human society. The conclusion to the poem takes us almost
cyclically, back to a physical view of the ‘steep woods’, ‘lofty cliffs’ and ‘green pastoral landscape’ in
which the meditation of the poem is happening.

The poet has expressed his honest and natural feelings to Nature’s Superiority. The language is so simple
and lucid that one is not tired of reading it again and again. The sweetness of style touches the heart of a
reader. The medium of this poem is neither ballad nor lyric but an elevated blank verse. The blank verse
that is used in it is low-toned, familiar, and moves with sureness, sereneness and inevitable ease. It has
the quiet pulse, suggestive of 'central peace', which is felt in all his great poetry. This is the beauty of
Wordsworth’s language.

***

“Tintern Abbey,” or “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the
Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798,” is a poem by William Wordsworth published in 1798. In the poem,
Wordsworth remembers a walk he took with his sister to the site of the abbey ruins, and the power that
communing with nature has to change our spirits and protect our moral center.

It begins with the speaker explaining that it has been five years since he last took a walk to the location.
He remembers its tranquility and the sound the water made when it ran by. He describes the objects as
he remembers them, the lofty cliffs that inspire a sense of deep seclusion and the sycamore tree that he
leaned against. He imagines the smoke rising in the forest belongs to passing vagrants and their
campfires or from a hermit deep in the woods.

The memories of this place stay with him as he walks down crowded, noisy city streets. These memories
offer a fond sensation of peace. They affect his future deeds even when he doesn’t realize it. He feels
that his experience in this secluded place made him a kinder, more loving person.

He further attributes his lightness of soul to these memories, calling them his access to a spiritual state
in which he becomes “a living soul” with a view into “the life of things.” Although he admits that this
may be a vain supposition, he has still turned to the memory in times of trouble.

Even now, the memory presides over him, and he recalls the experience with bittersweet emotion. He is
not the same person he was when he first visited, no longer a young boy when nature made up his
whole world. However, it has shaped his appetites and passions. He does not mourn the passing of these
times because these gifts of nature allow him to look at things from a wider perspective. They have
returned their gifts to him.

He loves nature, and considers it the purest part of himself. It has given him the tools to protect his
moral center from outside influences, and for that he is grateful. Even if he did not feel this way, he is in
high spirits because today he is in the company of his beloved sister who can share nature and inspire
new memories.

He asks that all the natural elements shine on her favorably so that in future years when she is sad or
fretful, she may return again and again to this moment and be healed. Even if he is dead, she might recall
their time together on this day fondly. The power of nature renders the mind impervious to any evil or
frightful influence.
The woods are all the more dear to him because of these memories and now because of his sister’s
presence in them. The memory of pure communion with nature works on the mind even when a child
turns into an adult, and this theme is an important one that runs through most of Wordsworth’s work.

The poem is the first to lay out his belief in this. The subject of memory and its influence on our later life
is one that Wordsworth revisited often. The major theme of the benefits of nature is one examined
throughout the period of Romanticism, a period known for a fascination with major themes of life,
existence, and experience.

For Wordsworth, humans are innately noble of spirit, and this is corrupted the further away we are from
the powerful influence of nature. Artificial conditions and the pain of city life cause people to become
selfish and immoral compared to the experiences of those who spend regular time in the quiet seclusion
of nature.

Another theme is the power of memory. Wordsworth believed in the transformative powers of the
human mind and that humans are equally capable of healing their suffering through the power of their
thoughts.

Childhood is also an important idea in this and many other Wordsworth poems. For him, childhood is a
magical time full of light and innocence. It is our experiences in this stage of our lives that give us the
tools we need to live moral lives as adults. Children develop a deep bond with nature, so much so that
they seem to be part of it. He believed that children had access to a secret divine world that allowed
them to reap the full benefit of their time with nature.

In contrast, the harshness of the adult world, described in lines about the fretful, noisy nature of cities,
can have no mark on the adult experiencing them if he or she has adequate memory of time spent in
nature in childhood.

His transformation from child to adult would not have happened as well without these memories. As he
recalls each part of his walk there, and now recognizes the presence of his beloved sister in making new
memories in nature, we are reminded that nature is a powerful force that can shape our spiritual life into
one that easily communes with the divine.
***

Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood - Summary and Critical Analysis

This poem is apparently and mainly about the loss of the intuitive powers of perceptions and joyful
existence in childhood, but it turns out to be more important about growing up and developing the
poetic, moral and philosophical faculties in the process of losing the primal powers of the child.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

The ode can be divided into three sections for analytical convenience: in the first four stanzas, the poet
mediates on the loss of the divine original vision that the child (Wordsworth) was born with; the second
section from 5th to 8th stanza is an attempt to explain the nature and causes of the loss; the third
section from 9th to 11th deals with the compensating gain of another type of vision, namely the
philosophical vision by the grown-up man or poet. The first stanza begins with a nostalgic meditation on
the loss.

But the poet, while lamenting the loss, describes the childhood world, creating a beautiful image of
childhood life. He used to perceive everything as if they all had “the glory and freshness of a dream”. But
now, the poet says he cannot see anything covered in that heavenly light, and there is nothing glorious
and dreamlike about the world that the grown-up poet lives in. The rainbow does come and go, and the
rose does blossom in as lovely. He changes the subject, with a change in tone, in the next stanza. He
hears all those sounds of the birds and the lamb. But grief comes to his mind when he hears them.
However, there is a thing of reassurance in this stanza: ‘a timely utterance’ of the feeling whether of grief
or joy gives him some consolation, to make the poet somewhat strong to go on with life. When he is
reflecting on the nature with a newly gained mature understanding, he almost feels that the ‘earth is
gay’ once again. Each of the first three stanzas has a mixture of joy and grief, but after having found a
compensation for that loss, the poet is now able to celebrate the spirit of May. He will not fail to
appreciate whatever he can perceive of the nature, which has not changed. The poet sees a tree and a
field; the Garden of Eden and the tree of knowledge, which speak of something that is gone. The poet
makes his best attempts at regaining the same powers of perceptions in these first four stanzas, but he
fails to do so. He can no longer command the beauty-making power form within to go forth from him
and clothe every common sight in celestial light. The first four stanzas are full of agonized questions and
frantic exclamations in the desperate attempt to regain the original powers of intuitive perceptions of
the spiritual aspect of the nature. Stanza four is the climax of this dramatic tension in the mind of the
poet. In short, the feeling of irrecoverable loss predominates this section, despite the outbursts of
momentary joy; the recovery of another mode of experience is yet to be made.

This second section is a brief account of growth of man and the loss of the vision; it is based on the
Platonic philosophy of pre-existence and the realm of the pure idea. “Our birth is but a sleep and a
forgetting”, because the soul has its source outside our individual being, and it becomes less and less
accessible to the child as he grows up. We come in a kind of trailing clouds of glory from God, who is our
home: this idea is, however, a rather Christianized version of the Platonic idea of soul. The poet says that
“heaven lies around us in our infancy!” But the shadows of the “prison-house”, or reason that limits
feelings and experience, begin to close upon the ‘growing boy’. Wordsworth says that the earth (nature)
is filled with some blissful pleasures, but it is the grown up man who is incapable of experiencing and
appreciating it fully. The nature, in the sense of ‘the formative influence’ of the natural process of life,
also makes man forget that ‘imperial palace’ from where he came. The next stanza justifies with the
illustration of the child that children have much of the spiritual vision so that they experience life and
nature so fully an intuitively. The child is seen in his own world, living in imagination and in harmony with
all the things of the nature; he is vexed by the kisses of his mother. Indeed, the child’s world of
imagination and intuitive relation with everything is enviable. In stanza 8, the poet addresses to the child
himself and appreciates its powers and greatness, in an almost envious way. He is only trying to ask him
a question: why is the child always trying to grow up? It is indeed true that the child struggles always to
grow up, acting as he does, like adults, imitating whatever frets and furies of life, not understanding the
burden of it all. The poet laments: for soon the child’s soul will have the unbearable burden and the
heavy frost (coldness) of custom or habitualized behavior will fall on him. And it will overpower his
capacity for living through the original vision, and seeing and enjoying the celestial life on all the
common sights around him.

The very first line of the 11th stanza is an exclamation: “O joy! That in our embers…”. The poet is able to
exclaim with a sudden realization that in our embers there is something that does live, that nature which
yet remembers what was so fugitive. Even in adulthood we can if we want and try to, retain or still
cultivate some vision. The adults are also conscious of the fall from the bliss of childhood; they are
always anxious about the vanishing of it and have misgivings about the invisible things, rather than feel
being protected by them. Wordsworth adds other reasons about why he writes these poems: besides
writing about the loss of childhood, he also writes to remember those experiences and to revive them.
The shadowy recollections of childhood life are the fountain light of all our life; though the fountain light
or vision is now not the primary mode of perception, the poet affirms that it is the inner light of ‘all our
seeing’. It is that light, however much is retained, that sustains us, and it is that light that makes our
‘noisy year’ (adult life) seems like moments in the being of eternal Silence. That light reveals the eternal
truths of life, which noting in adult life can destroy. The truth intimated by the celestial spirit of the
nature in our childhood is so persistent that neither society, adulthood, custom and the culture of reason
not grief can abolish or destroy. Thus, in the season of calm weather in old age or moods of tranquility,
even if we are far inland away from the sea of spirit, our souls can see that immortal sea, from which we
came into this world. At such age or mood, we can still travel into the sea of the original spirit; there we
can see the children play on the shore and hear the mighty waters moving in waves forever. The end of
his stanza is all symbolic; it is perhaps thematically the most condensed part of the poem. The poet is
saying that he writes of two kinds of purposes: one is to praise the child, as he has done in the previous
stanza, and the other is to muse about the loss of the vision and thereby to glorify the remaining lights of
the spirits which do still allow us to revive some powers to see and hear the children enjoying the
spiritual world near the sea.

***

“Heaven lies about us in our infancy”

William Wordsworth (1770 - 1850)

Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood

The poet William Wordsworth (1770 - 1850) believes that every human being is a sojourner in the mortal
world, whereas his real home being heaven. In fact, the poet starts with the major premise that men
descend form God. To Wordsworth, God was everywhere manifest in the harmony of nature, and he felt
deeply the kinship between nature and the soul of humankind. Man has his soul which knows no decay
and destruction. But as one is born, one begins to be confined within the flesh. The soul, bound in his
body, can not liberate in his infancy. He trails the clouds of glory, the glory of heaven from which he
emanates:

"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar:

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God, who is our home."

Of course, as he grows up, he seems to keep away more and more from the radiance of his original
home:

“Shades of the prison house being to clear

Upon the growing Boy..”

Nevertheless, he still visualizes the divine light and luster and that makes him filled with joy.

The poet is quite an old man. He recollects the experiences of his childhood. When he was a child, he
was as if a sun smiling in the east. But that he is now bent with age, he seems to be a sun on the wane in
the west.Though the poet stands far away from east and looks rather pale, the celestial light of heaven is
perceived by him faintly. :

“The youth, who daily farther from the east

Must trail, still in Nature’s priest,

And by the vision splendid,

Is on his way attended.”

The fact is that to grow in age is to have one’s bond with heaven appears to be one of oblivion – “Our
birth is but a sleep and a forgetting.” At this, point the poet refers to a boy of six. Probably he is Heartley,
Coleridge’s son. It is in the boy that the poet discovers his own childhood. The boy has his toy which he
arranges in his own way, and lies asleep in their midst – “See, where med work of his own hand he lies.”
His mother kisses him, giving expression her unrestrained love for the child, while the Childs father
appreciates the sight with his eyes defusing the diffusing ways of joy:

“I retted by sallies of his mother’s kisses.

With light upon him from his father’s eyes.”

The child imitates the adults around him. So, his game is concerned with the conventional functions
performed by the common people:

“A wedding or festival

A mourning or a funeral

And this now his heart

And unto this he frames his song.”

The child gradually learns the art of speaking imitating the adults being around him. Instead of singing
the glory of God, the child, when grows up speaks of trade and commerce:

“Then will he fit his tongue

To dialogues of business, love, or strife.”

Here Wordsworth seems of to keep in mind the Shakespearean adage that “The world is a stage.” Child is
an actor imitating the gesture of his parent and other grown up person, and the acting goes on from
childhood down to the old age marked by fever and fret:

“Filling from time to time his humorous stage

With all the persons down to palsied Age”

The world is not the real mother of man. She is but his foster mother. Heaven, ‘that imperial palace’ is
his true mother. Since man is brought up by his foster mother who lacks refinement, though not
sincerity, the material objects attract his mind and the result is that he begins to forget his divine
heritage, his original abode:

“The homely nurse doth all she can

To make her Foster-child, her Inmate man,

Forget the glories he hath known,

And that imperial palace whence he came.”

What Wordsworth says about the development of man on earth has much affinity with Blake’s division
of man’s life into too phases- the phase of ‘Innocence ‘and the phases of ‘Experience’. Blake things that
when one have imagination at one’s commend, one becomes visionary, and truth stands revealed to
him. This is the phase of ‘Innocence’. But when imagination deserts man, he is reduced to one suffering
from spiritual blinds. He becomes unable to discern the way of God to man. That the phase of
‘Experience’ Wordsworth, almost in the same vein, distinguishes between childhood and adulthood. The
child is, according to Wordsworth, the best philosopher:

“Thou best philosopher, who yet dost keep

Thy heritage, thou Eye among the blind,

That, deaf and silent, read’st the eternal deep,

Haunted for ever by the eternal mind. ”

Indeed, Wordsworth thinks that the child is the mighty prophet, the seer blessed. But Blake does not say
that ‘innocence’ is the monopoly of the child. It is his idea that when man or a child or an adult, has
imagination at his command, he is in a state ‘innocence’. But Wordsworth excludes those who are far
beyond their childhood. Blake lays stress on imagination, whereas Wordsworth advocates the advantage
of remaining a child.

Coleridge does not agree with Wordsworth on the point that a child is a natural philosopher – a
phenomenon endowed with penetrating vision. Coleridge says unless one is well-read one can not be a
true philosopher. But whatever Coleridge may say, Wordsworth’s ‘ode’ asserts its claim to immortality.
Poetry is, says Wordsworth, the most philosophical of all writings and this ‘ode’ amply confirms the
validity of the observation. It Wordsworth is a poet, he has per-eminently a leaning to philosophy, and
this is what makes the ‘ode’ a metaphysical composition about man’s withdrawal from Heaven with the
bass age of time.