Tintern Abbey (Criticism)

Criticism

Derek Furr

Derek Furr is a freelance writer and has taught composition and literature courses at the University of Virginia and at Virginia Commonwealth University. In the following essay, Furr discusses psychological changes over time, the importance of nature in the meaning of life, and Wordsworth’s plea to his sister — and the reader — to remember him.

Imagine yourself five years from now. You’ ve received an invitation to your high school reunion and, feeling a little anxious and nostalgic, you arrive early to walk around your old stomping grounds. You wander into the empty gym, where you played your first varsity ball game; you sit in the back of your old chemistry class, staring at a board that once held puzzling equations; you stroll through a courtyard where you held the hand of someone you thought you couldn’ t live without.

Slowly you recollect how you felt as a teenager, how you saw the world around you — who was important, what made a difference. Doubtless you’ ll carry both fond and troubling memories of high school, and when you return, both will re-surface at the sites where they originated. But when five years have passed, the emotions of your teen years may prove difficult to recover. Revisiting your past, you may be surprised not so much by the changes in your old school — the gym will be in the same spot, the cafeteria will serve the same mysterious foods. Rather, as you recall your former self, walking through that courtyard, holding that hand, you may be struck — with melancholy and wonder — by how much you have changed.

William Wordsworth returned to the Wye valley in July 1798, five years after he had first toured the region with his sister, Dorothy. As he looks at the valley, through the lens of memory, he sees himself — both as he once was, and as he is now. With his “Lines,” Wordsworth attempts to make sense of the changes he has undergone, and, in the process, he offers some interesting insights into the machinery of memory and the Romantic lyric.

The specific setting of Wordsworth’s poem is clearly important to him. Indeed, in the very title of his poem, he announces the time and place of his return visit, and lets us know where he is positioned in the landscape that he describes. He sits in a specific spot, a “few miles above” an abandoned abbey in the valley of the river Wye; thus he has a broad perspective on the landscape he will describe. As he composes the poem(or so he claims), he is reclined “under [a] dark sycamore.” It is mid-July, the day before Bastille day, and three times in the space of two lines Wordsworth asserts that “five years have past” since he last visited. Those were five tumultuous years in European history and in Wordsworth’s life, and it is as though he has longed to return to this spot above Tintern Abbey. He is nostalgic, in a contemplative, reflective mood.

Like the many topographical or landscape poems that preceded “Tintern Abbey” in the 18th century, Wordsworth’s poem goes on to describe the scene in detail, appealing to our eyes and ears — the sound of “rolling” waters, the sublime impressiveness of “steep and lofty cliffs,” and so forth. But note how often Wordsworth repeats the first person pronoun, “I” — “I hear/ these waters,” “I behold,” “repose,” “view,” and “see.” Wordsworth’s description emphasizes his personal engagement or involvement with the landscape; he is concerned with how the vista affects him. Like wise, we should be concerned with how his point of view affects the vista. Critics have often noted — see, for example, Marjorie Levinson’s Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems — that Wordsworth does not depict the Abbey and the valley as it really appeared in 1798. The abbey was ruined and overgrown, and the valley had been scarred by the industrial revolution. To some extent, Wordsworth sees what he wants to see — an idyllic landscape. Looking down on the valley through the lens of memory, much as you might look back on your old school five years from now, he sees a mixture of the present and the past.

With stanza two, it becomes clear that “Tintern Abbey” is not so much about the landscape of the Wye valley in 1798 as it is about the landscape of memory — Wordsworth’s memory. And that landscape is natural and harmonious. During his five years’ absence from the valley, Wordsworth suggests, the tranquil environs of Tintern Abbey have been constantly present with him, in the “beauteous forms” stored in his memory. Notice the contrasts that Wordsworth establishes between civilization and nature, the “din/Of towns and cities” and the “murmur” of the Wye river, the “fretful stir” and “fever of the world” and the peaceful meandering of the “sylvan Wye!” When Wordsworth has been troubled with the ways of the “unintelligible world,” he asserts, remembering nature has not only brought him peace but has also given him insight “into the life of things.” Through an act of memory — specifically, through reflecting upon natural scenes — Wordsworth discovers a spirit that connects all life.

Just as Wordsworth has returned often to the Wye in memory, so he would recur frequently to this theme in his early and middle-period poetry. “Tintern Abbey” purports to record a moment of revelation, when Wordsworth suddenly realized that nature and acts of memory had given him insight into the life of things. But fond memories alone do not lead him to this discovery. Think again about returning to your high school, several years from now. Your school fight song probably won’ t stir you like it once did. You’ ll probably be more responsible, but also have more responsibilities. Wordsworth waxes melancholy as he recalls how enthusiastic and engaged he was with nature on his previous visit to the Wye. Again he sets up a contrast, here between the pure emotion of youth and the rarefied contemplativeness of adulthood. In lines 76 and following, he mourns the loss of that passionate attachment to nature. However, as a “thoughtless youth,” he maintains, he could not have seen into the “life of things,” for such a discovery requires thoughtfulness, reflection. Perhaps the most important passage in “Tintern Abbey” occurs at the moment that Wordsworth makes his discovery: “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,/Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power/To chasten and subdue.” Wordsworth has lost his youth, has seen five more years of his life pass, has felt the sorrows of others and the “fretful stir” of the world. But becoming acquainted with sorrow and loss has given him the power to sympathize with others and with nature. Note how deliberately the lines are set forth, with measured phrasing and frequent pauses, and how the “music” is carefully qualified. These are “thoughtful” lines, and the spirit that Wordsworth has discovered “impels/All thinking things.”

Up to this point in “Tintern Abbey,” we have watched Wordsworth move from nostalgia for a lost perspective on nature to joy in a new one. Uttered in the present tense, at a specific time and place, “Tintern Abbey” appears to record Wordsworth’s discovery “as it happens.” Robert Langbaum has called such poems a “poetry of experience”; in the Romantic period lyric, Langbaum maintains, the poet always makes a discovery over the course of writing the poem and engaging with his/her subject.

As readers of the poem, we too experience this discovery. In “Tintern Abbey,” there is actually a character who represents us — Wordsworth’s younger sister, Dorothy, who is the “Friend” addressed in the final stanza of the poem. Dorothy’s significance in William Wordsworth’s life and writing cannot be overstated. Their affection for each other was powerful; many have argued that Wordsworth’s “Lucy” poems are actually about his sister. Often she plays the classical role of muse in his verse. And many of his poems, most famously “Resolution and Independence,” are lyrical renderings of Dorothy’s journal entries about experiences she and William shared. In the final stanza of “Tintern Abbey,” we learn that Dorothy is with William(at least in spirit) as he speaks this poem, just as we have been. He sees his former self in Dorothy: “in thy voice I catch/The language of my former heart, and read/My former pleasures in the shooting lights/Of thy wild eyes.” Therefore, he advises her to take his discovery to heart, and in lines that echo a spiritual benediction, instructs her to have faith that nature will always provide solace in hard times and fresh insight into the meaning of life.

Curiously, however, the tone of this final stanza shifts from confidence to anxiousness. Wordsworth’s advice that Dorothy not forget “Nature” shifts to a plea that Dorothy(and perhaps we the readers) not forget him. Note the interplay of “remember” and “forget” in the final lines of Wordsworth’s address. Again, memory is an essential concern of “Tintern Abbey.” How we remember the past was a subject of the early stanzas; why we remember it is a question raised by Wordsworth’s desperate plea “Nor wilt thou then forget.” An important reader of Wordsworth, Paul DeMan, has suggested that in the passing of his youthful frivolity and in the “still, sad music of humanity,” Wordsworth has recognized his own mortality. Perhaps the impetus behind Wordsworth’s final address to Dorothy and to us, therefore, is his desire for a kind of immortality. Just as he would carry the “beauteous forms” of the Wye valley with him always and draw on them for comfort, so he would want Dorothy and us to carry his lines in our hearts and minds. How we remember Wordsworth now differs from how Dorothy and her contemporaries saw him in 1798, and how we will think of him five years from now we will surely differ from how we hold him at present. But “Tintern Abbey” has certainly given Wordsworth a kind of immortality, for neither he nor this poem has yet passed from our culture’s memory.

Source: Derek Furr, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 1997.

David Kelly

David Kelly is a freelance writer and instructor at Oakton Community College and College of Lake County, as well as the faculty advisor and co-founder of the creative writing periodical of Oak-ton Community College. He is currently writing a novel. In the following essay, Kelly states that neatly categorizing “Tintern Abbey” as a statement on the speaker’s love of nature would result in missing out on Wordworth’s ruminations concerning aging, experience, and contemplation.

The speaker of Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” suffers a crisis of faith upon being presented with two different versions of the same reality at once. The first is the reality of a specific physical time and place that the poem tells us he stumbled across on July 7, 1798: the scene that he presents is spoken of as nature, untouched by human will. The second reality is the one that exists in his memory, a scene like that is like the one spread out below him, but changed by his experiences and his ability to transform the original memory with thought. Nature is nature, and exists independently, but the idea of nature can be processed into something greater, even into the idea of God’s existence. The dilemma facing the speaker of this poem is that he can see the value of both forms of reality, and, like a person who bumps into a cow while eating a hamburger, he knows that favoring one over the other is hypocritical(the image of consumption, in fact, plays a key part in the case he makes). Because the reader does not approach the scenic overlook with speaker, finding ourselves there in the first line, and because the poem maintains an even, lofty tone throughout, it is common for readers to look at “Tintern Abbey” as a speech about the speaker’s love of nature. There is a specific setting, though, and there is a conflict, and it takes just a little tolerance and patience to read this piece as a story that is eventually brought to its climax and conclusion.

The poem’s first stanza describes the physical setting for us, but it also establishes a situation: not only is there a place, but a person has returned to the place after five years’ absence, and judging from the exclamation point in the second line, he is excited, maybe even surprised, to be there. Critics have made much of the fact that this first section is about nature, which handily(or maybe unfortunately) leads to the phrase “Return to Nature,” one of the phrases that is used in discussing the Romantic movement that Wordsworth started almost single-handedly, even though it has seldom been meant to imply that someone is literally walking back into a natural setting he has been to before. There is some worth and lots of error in this use of “Return to Nature.” First, he does not “return” in the phrase’s usual sense of immersing oneself in the old life-style, but only walks into it one day. Second, what he encounters is not entirely nature if we take “nature” to mean “untouched by humans,” since the farms and plots and orchards and hedge-rows are all created from human design. Some overly harsh critics have pointed to this as a flaw, as if Wordsworth did not realize that he was tainting his portrait of nature with human things. But Wordsworth never claimed that this section of the poem represents nature, and we can only call it the nature section if we widen our idea of nature to include all things, including homo erectus among them, that are not self-conscious. This would allow room for the hedge-rows, which may well have been planted by people but grew up wildly; the boy in the speaker’s memory, whose “coarser deeds” and “glad animal movements” he later uses to define natural action; and the Hermit, who is given a great deal of attention, being mentioned twice in the last line-and-a-half of the stanza, even though he is never mentioned again. The Hermit — the grown man who fits into nature but not into society — introduces the complication, or plot reversal, at just the point where we would expect to find it if this were a story.

In the next section, the speaker of the poem(who, despite the strong resemblance, is not Wordsworth, in much the same way that the landscape he encounters and the one he remembers are similar but different things) reflects on what a comfort it has been to have a version of this place in his mind. When he is alone, he is able to tap into these “forms,” pulling them out of his mind the way a modern person could pull a photograph out of a purse or pocket or retrieve a computer file. It is the use of the word “forms” that tells us the speaker is aware that it is an abstraction that he is carrying with him from town to town. A strident lover of nature might think it a shame that he has to “settle” for this imitation, but Wordsworth makes a point of mentioning that he gets more from this version than he ever derived from the physical one: these “forms” are responsible for his purity of mind and have prodded him toward “little, nameless, unremembered acts / Of kindness and of love.” This is not the temporary kindness of a person who has rested up with a relaxing nature session, but his mind has actually created goodness and love, synthesized them, using nature’s forms. His mind turns the raw material provided by nature into something like a potion that anesthetizes mind and body, leaving him “a living soul,” able to “see the life of things.” His imitation version of nature, the “unnatural,” intellectual one, turns out to be a more important force for good than the actual version that rests on a few acres of land above Tintern Abbey. The Hermit, who has actual nature at his disposal, sits by the fire for warmth, apparently not quite a living soul himself. If this were the entire story, the cerebral gateway to the soul would clearly be favored over the simple, aesthetically pleasing, physical nature.

The reader only giving this poem casual attention might think the writer is following a loose, impromptu structure, as if all of his attention was put into choosing the right words and images and he paid no attention to how one idea floated into the next. Presenting this as an argument, though, Wordsworth keeps careful control of the balance, never tipping too far to one side without leaning back to the other. As a story, he allows the intellectual form of reality to triumph briefly before its fortunes reverse, allowing actual reality to shine again. This is why it is more effective to let the poem break from the pattern that would seem obvious — having the speaker describe the landscape, then what he used to be, and only then consider how those days effected his later life. Wordsworth instead presents his material as landscape, later life, and then boyhood activity, and the overall effect is that he is able to keep both versions of nature almost equal in their righteousness.

Just when it seems as if the speaker has forgotten the debt that his soul’s enlightenment owes to actual experience, lines 58 through 111 blend intellectual enlightenment with “the sense sublime” that his youthful excitement gave him “[o]f something far more deeply interfused”: an understanding that goes beyond his own soul to the Soul of the entire universe. His intellect has given him the ability to become better in many ways, but now, upon revisiting his leaping and bounding and “dizzying raptures,” he realizes thgat the mind needed more than the forms of nature to build off of, it also needed the experience of oneness with nature in order to know what to build. In this sense, “Tintern Abbey” distinguishes itself from poems that mourn but then accept losing the freedom of childhood: it starts with a sense in the early passage that those glorious days are gone, but in the climax realizes that they are a necessary fuel, that memories alone are liable to use up the “presence” that gives them power. Standing on a bluff and looking down at familiar territory, the speaker realizes that he has found “food / For future years,” which he had not felt the need for until he once had “an appetite” for nature, swallowing forms and color and sound before he knew what to do with them. When he grew older and moved away from this feast of the senses, “other gifts” developed, giving him “abundant recompense.” And so, the speaker is able to comfortably bring together the version of the Wye river valley that he carries with him in his head with the physical version that he had left behind but now faces again. By admitting that experience does not end in youth but is important throughout life, and holding on to the unavoidable truth that the mind will turn experience into thought as one ages, he is able to put both on equal footing in the service of whatever it is “that impels all thinking things, all objects of thought, and rolls through all things.”

So the struggle between youth and age ends in a stalemate, with the poet praising the better points of each, which is sensible and comforting enough but not satisfying to the reader’s hunger for drama, which Wordsworth used to draw her or him into the poem in the first place. As noted earlier, the poem starts, not just with a physical location, but with a situation, but both of these are abandoned in the huge middle stretch while the speaker settles his problem intellectually. In the end, he brings us back to the place and time we started at and he introduces us to a previously unmentioned character, the speaker’s sister. In a mild sense, this gives some sort of justification to his long, self-involved speech, as if the poet realized that the speaker was too caught up in declaring his philosophy and decided, after the fact, to turn it into advice to someone who would soon face the same problem. To this extent, the sister’s role is too little and too late, even a little embarrassing if we take up the title’s invitation to see this as a slice of Wordsworth’s real life and realize that his “wild eyed” sister Dorothy would have been twenty-seven. It makes more sense to look at the sister character as just a representative of youth, a way of bringing to life the characteristics that the speaker uses to define his own youth. With this reading, the sister’s introduction is just where it should be, a way of bringing narrow Youth and diffused Age, subjectivity and objectivity, together for a talk about what they have in common. As it turns out, the common denominator is Nature, both in experience and in contemplation, and Wordsworth’s advice to young and old is that we all had better appreciate it.

Source: David Kelly, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 1997.

What Do I Read Next?

• William Wordsworth, A Biography: Hunter Davies provides an excellent recent life of Wordsworth with sparse discussion of the works themselves but many colorful anecdotes that illuminate the poet’s character.
• Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and His System of the World: Though the proofs themselves are hard for the layman to follow, Newton’s prose introduction sheds fascinating light on the man, his ideas, and his conception of their impact.