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“TINTERN ABBEY” STUDY GUIDE
Nature Poetry?
Many people think of Nature when they think of the English Romantic poets. They tend to think
of Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” sometimes called “The Daffodil Poem.”
There are people who like English Romantic poetry because they are concerned about the
environment, because they see congenial sympathetic voices in this age. This view of the
Romantic poets is both helpful and limited. It’s both accurate to say that some of the Romantics
are Nature poets, and it’s also reductive to say that.
Wordsworth once said that his great theme was “the wedding of man and Nature.” Whatever
Wordsworth means by Nature, ultimately his poetry is not just about that. Rather, it’s about
relationships between the world “out there” (the external physical world, which might include
natural landscapes) and the inner world of the mind (including imagination, psychology,
emotion, etc.). The term that he used for this relationship was “wedding.”
You Say You Want a Revolution . . .
We need to remember the importance of revolution in the Romantic era. Although the American
Revolution was significant, it was less important in the imagination of the English Romantics
than the French Revolution. This was in part because France was so close, and in part because
France was a part of the “civilized” world, in contrast to “those barbarian people” living out
there in the wilderness of America.
In France, the leading proponents of revolution tended to be atheists, rationalists, Lockeans. The
Revolution had as its underpinnings a lot of well-worked-out philosophical issues. In England,
you find intellectual gatherings in bookstores to talk about ideas of equality and brotherhood.
The Romantics were a part of that. One of the bookstores attracted people like William Godwin,
the father of Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein.
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But what you find in most of English Romantic poetry does not reflect that kind of philosophical
perspective. Instead, it’s a revolutionary outlook heavily influenced by the Bible. This is a time
in England when there starts to be a lot of radical, non-conformist Protestant sects. They believe
in the tradition of the “Inner Light.” The Romantics pick up that kind of notion and use it not so
much religiously but poetically—to talk about the inner light of the imagination, of the mind’s
illuminating creative powers. The Romantics sometimes figure the poetic imagination as the
light coming from a lamp—it is something like “God” and revelation, but it is the human
imagination.
The whole notion of the spirit world is tied in here. But more specifically, many of the leading
artists in England looked at the French Revolution from the perspective of the Book of
Revelations. And they saw the promise of the French Revolution as fulfilling Biblical
prophecy—the coming of an earthly paradise, a utopia on earth.
Some of the Romantic writers see themselves as visionary poet-prophets. They take the stance of
the Biblical prophet. They look at the cataclysmic events going on, and read them as forebodings
of great things to come. The Romantics begin by looking at the French Revolution as the
fulfillment of Biblical prophecy, of a millennium. But the revolution fails in one sense, with the
Reign of Terror, and then war breaks out between England and France.
The Romantics, however, do not abandon their hope and their faith in the millennium. Instead,
they simply shift it inward. They internalize it. Their hope becomes not a hope based on militant
political action, but on imaginative acts of perception—on creative visions of new possibilities,
new grounds of hope. They shift their hope from a belief that the entire world is going to be
transformed, to a desire to reform the life of the individual. Many critics talk about Romanticism
in terms of a “crisis of culture.” And this is what they mean—a critical time when the actualities
of experience don’t match the prevailing myths and dreams, and the writer is forced to look
within him or herself to bring about revolution, radical change on the level of the individual
mind.
Often, the Romantic poets pick up the language of the Bible—especially the apocalyptic Book of
Revelations. In Revelations, St. John imagines the coming of paradise, and he expresses it by
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using the metaphor of the wedding. He says that there will be a wedding between the lamb and
the New Jerusalem.
Think about that and the connection to the Romantics trying to overcome a split between
“subject” and “object,” between inner self and outside world. For the Romantics, paradise and
utopia are things that will come about, but not at the end of time, and not so much from a social
and political way, at least not initially. They will come about instead in the present moment,
when our imaginations and souls are wedded to things “out there” of a kindred nature—in
Wordsworth’s terms, with the world of nature and “the spirit that rolls through all things.”
So when we think about Wordsworth as a poet, we can’t just talk about Nature, because there is
always an interfusion between Nature, humanity, and some kind of “world spirit” that we can’t
think of as a traditional “God.”
The Search for Meaning in a Troubling World
Wordsworth is searching for meaning. How does he find it? He has to find it by creating, with
his own imagination, a relationship between the outward world, but also with what traditionalists
might call “God.” For many readers and critics, “Tintern Abbey” is a quasi-religious poem as
well as a Nature poem. Everywhere in the poem, for example, we hear Biblical reverberations.
Look at the following lines:
The day is come when I again repose
Here, under this dark sycamore
What are the implications of this language? The passage suggests revelation, the day of the new
world. It suggests design. It’s not just another day. He’s not saying, “Well, I’m sitting under a
sycamore, and I hope something will happen.” It’s like when Yeats writes, in “The Second
Coming,” “surely some revelation is at hand.”
You have in the Bible the notion of design. Traditionally, God is regarded as the unseen author
of eternity, orchestrating everything. But for Wordsworth, writing as he is in increasingly
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secularized times, that design exists in Nature. There is some mysterious Will or power there that
is making this happen. It’s not a random occurrence. This is a pattern for the visionary prophet,
the “Chosen Son,” (as he refers to himself in The Prelude). But notice that it is something that he
must discover in his own experience, because all of the old truths have been questioned.
Back to Nature . . .
Consider the following questions: To the extent is “Tintern Abbey” about Nature? What does
Wordsworth mean by Nature?
For Wordsworth, Nature always suggests relationship, reciprocity, interaction. That’s what he’s
deeply interested in—an interconnection between the human mind and natural world. Nature
becomes the occasion to talk about the most pressing of human questions. It becomes the object
which draws out Wordsworth’s imagination.
But literally, what does he mean by Nature?
1. First of all, he means the landscape. That may seem obvious, but in the eighteenth
century, when a poet like Alexander Pope talked about nature, he was typically talking about
fixed, absolute, universal truths—about Newtonian, stable mathematical laws. Samuel Johnson
says in one of his essays, “You shouldn’t number the streaks of a tulip.” These eighteenthcentury poets are not really interested in the details of the landscape—caverns, streams, hills,
woods—as Wordsworth is here. They use the term “Nature” to talk about what is universal.
Wordsworth ultimately means that too, but in a very different way.
2. So Nature is the landscape, but it’s not just that. It also means all of life, which is
somehow organically interwoven for Wordsworth.
3. Wordsworth also emphasizes that Nature is not just the physical landscape, and not just
life living in a harmonious whole, but something divine as well. For him, there is a sacred “spirit
that rolls through all things.” It’s key to realize that the Romantic poets were very much
influenced by the Bible, but they secularize it (i.e., to move something away from its original
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religious character or affiliations). This is the Romantic vision of what “God” is—some force or
spirit that is holy and sacred and inherent in the natural world.
Wordsworth refers to this “natural supernaturalism” or “secularized sacredness” when he writes
in “Tintern Abbey”:
I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose 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
The pattern here is especially significant. Notice that Wordsworth begins “out there,” in the air
and sky, and ends with his own imagination. So whatever this “Force” or “Presence” is, it’s not
just divine. Somehow, it also weds everything together.
In art, particularly in poetry, selection is meaning. Wordsworth cannot describe every detail in
the landscape. In the opening twenty lines or so, we are not getting a photo-journalist’s picture.
Wordsworth does describe what he sees, but (because as he tells us later, the imagination half
creates what it perceives) obviously he’s being selective. It’s not random. And so there are all
sorts of interesting implications in what he chooses to single out for our attention.
So what are the characteristics of Nature that Wordsworth emphasizes in his selection process?
1. Notice that Nature is secluded. This is a very traditional theme that Wordsworth
borrows from eighteenth-century writers—the contrast between the city and the country. If you
want to describe utopia, if you want to describe the golden world, you don’t talk about the
metropolis and its chaos—instead, you talk about the seclusion of nature.
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2. Nature is also tranquil. It is “soft.” It is “quiet” and “silent.” This is no accident. There
are differing Romantic visions of nature, and Wordsworth’s vision is not only far from the
Darwinian nature that is “red in tooth and claw,” it’s also very different from the nature that
Byron will portray in his work. The quiet that suffuses Nature is crucial to Wordsworth’s
conception. Nature is alive, but it’s peaceful. That’s going to take on important implications in
this poetry. He writes, “I again repose.” Think about the double meaning of the word “repose.” It
literally means to lie down, but it also means to rest and be at peace. That’s what “the wedding of
man and nature” is in part about. The fact that he doesn’t simply lie down, but reposes, gives a
suggestion that he is peacefully a part of the natural world.
Think about Wordsworth’s famous definition of poetry: “emotion recollected in
tranquility.” Tranquility is very important to Wordsworth. It’s not important to other Romantic
poets like Blake and Byron. We’re going to see all sorts of similarities between the poets of this
period, but there are all sorts of differences, too. Any poet who writes, like Blake, “Sooner
murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires” is not going to celebrate peace and
calm. Any poet like Byron who says “There is a fire and a motion to the soul,” is not going to
find meaning in the quietude of Nature. But fundamental to Nature—for Wordsworth—is its
quietude.
3. Nature moves to embrace the human: notice that it is “green to the very door.” The
natural realm being described is separate from the crowded city—it’s secluded. Wordsworth sets
up that contrast powerfully. But there are also rural peoples intimately connected to Nature. For
Wordsworth, Nature does not equal “not human.” There are people united with this scene.
4. Nature is a guide, shaping the imagination and consciousness. Think about the verb
“impress” and its meaningful suggestions. Wordsworth writes,
she [Nature] can so inform
The mind that is within us, so impress
With quietness and beauty
Nature is pressing into this mind. Wordsworth’s great theme is what he announces in the
subtitle of his epic poem The Prelude: “the growth of the poet’s mind.” That’s what almost all of
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his poetry is about. But how does that growth take place? Wordsworth argues that this growth
takes place because as a boy and a young man, he was fortunate because Nature helped to form
and shape his imagination, his mind, his soul. And here is a concrete instance.
The natural world is not a passive, blank slate out there. It is alive, in motion, and it’s
working on him. The most dramatic example of this sense of Nature being alive comes in the
stolen boat episode of Book I of The Prelude, which begins, “One summer evening (surely I was
led by her).” Nature leads him to these discoveries. Nature has some kind of will or instinct that
is God-like (but not the traditional God) and working on his imagination. It presses in on him,
and his mind responses. It impresses “thoughts of more deep seclusion.”
5. Importantly, Nature is sublime. Wordsworth’s description of nature is filled with
suggestions of peace, of tranquility, or a calm that pervades the landscape. That’s very important
for this poet. But there are also counter-suggestions: the steep and lofty cliffs, the deep seclusion.
Nature is also sublime. It suggests infinity or eternity. And in this aspect it helps the imagination
to stretch or expand its consciousness and possibilities of perception.
As if it were his cathedral, his temple, Wordsworth calls Nature “steep, lofty, and wide.”
In the eighteenth century, thinkers and poets often used the term “sublime” to talk about the
unknowable. This is not a word originating in the Romantic era. It goes back at least to Longinus
in the classical world. It’s usually defined in contradistinction to the beautiful, the picturesque.
The sublime is something that is defined according to the effect it has on the perceiver.
For example, in Of the Beautiful and Sublime (1764), Immanuel Kant writes: “The various
feelings of enjoyment or of displeasure rest not so much upon the nature of the external things
that arouse them as upon each person’s own disposition to be moved by these to pain or
pleasure.” And what emotions do you feel before the sublime? Awe. It engenders wonder and
joy, but also reverence and fear. It’s what one allegedly feels in the presence of God.
The “sublime” is elevating and beyond comprehension, and something that suggests
infinity and eternity. This is crucial to Romantic art, because the poetry can be viewed in many
respects as being about revelations of the sublime. But you have to take that also in the context
of the Romantic celebration of the commonplace. For Wordsworth, it may be a mountain that
symbolizes the sublime, but it may be a small flower like a pansy as well. For example, he
concludes his famous “Immortality Ode” by saying that, “the meanest flower can lie too deep for
tears.”
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6. Nature allows the poet to discover meaning in the world of experience. Wordsworth
does believe that there is a “God,” a spirit, a presence. He has intimations of immortality,
suggestions of an eternal and divine realm. But through Nature, he senses divinity in the world
around him, in the everyday. That’s key, because we’re starting to move toward a more
existentialist worldview, a poetics that begins to abandon the concept of a God “out there.” For
Wordsworth, Nature is not a book of God—a series of signs through which a traditional God
reveals Himself. Instead, Nature is divine in itself—it’s rolling rivers embody the Universal
Spirit; its sweeping winds are alive with that Sacred Presence. And so is the human mind for
Wordsworth. When the mind conjoins with Nature, it discovers meaning, value—something
beyond the strictly material world of atoms and the physical laws of gravity, temperature, etc.
Later in “Tintern Abbey,” Wordsworth is going to draw some specific conclusions and
make some philosophical generalizations. But it’s crucial to note that everything he tries to
articulate in abstract language later in the poem is implicit in what he sees and describes in the
particular earlier in the poem. For example, he goes on to say that “there is a spirit that rolls
through all things.” Notice that the opening lines tell us that “I hear / These waters, rolling from
their mountain-springs.” It’s not that these waters in the beginning of the poem “stand for” or
“represent” that spirit: they are, literally, that spirit. And later, when Wordsworth talks about the
effects of Nature sustaining his soul, we see that sustenance right from the beginning—“a wild
secluded scene impress / Thoughts of more deep seclusion” as it makes him caught up in “one
green hue.”
7. Ultimately for Wordsworth, Nature is important in its own right, but it’s going to be
the occasion for a kind of imaginative transformation akin to religious conversion—some kind
of great upwelling of emotion that has to work itself through. There are all sorts of similarities
between Puritan confessional writing about religious conversion, and the kind of poetry that
Wordsworth is writing. Wordsworth’s poems are often about a personal, psychological,
emotional crisis, and the poem tries to resolve that crisis.
Wordsworth and God . . .
People often wonder if Wordsworth considers Nature to be God. It’s a difficult question to
answer precisely. Wordsworth, at the end of his life, becomes very conservative and orthodox
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and a member of the Anglican Church. He continues to re-write The Prelude and he starts to rewrite the language. Certain words like “spirit” or “force” are sometimes replaced with the word
“God.” But at the point of his writing “Tintern Abbey,” Nature is never simply an allegory or
symbol for God, separate from God. It is “God” in the sense that it holds a “divine immanence,”
that divinity is inherent in the natural world. That comes from Wordsworth’s sense of something
sublime, of “something far more deeply interfused.” It’s not identical to God, nor is it a symbol
of God. For Wordsworth, it is the primary access that we have to “divinity.”
For Wordsworth, we are not Nature. We are the human, and for Wordsworth that is very
different. It’s only in rare moments that the human can become wedded to nature. Wordsworth
discovers within himself some kind of spirit that he will learn to call imagination. Then he
discovers in Nature a kindred spirit. So the human and the natural are not the same. But they
share—for the fortunate—a kindred spirit. And that is the closest thing we can get to “God” for
Wordsworth. He is secularizing the idea of “God.” For him, divinity has to do with the
imagination and what we bring to the world. The divine within us combines with the divinity in
the natural world, and together they embody “the spirit that rolls through all things.” Wordsworth
insists that this Spirit is dwelling in the Natural world, that it is inherent, immanent in all things.
Blake, on the other hand, writes that “Where man is not, nature is barren.” He also writes that
“There is no natural religion.” What Wordsworth is writing in Blakean terms is “natural
religion”—finding “God” in Nature. For Blake, that’s a mistake. Blake writes, “All deities reside
in the human breast,” by which he means that the external world is all a projection of the human
mind.
For Wordsworth, there is something out there that is divine, and his poetry is about the way in
which his intimation of that “sense sublime,” that presence, awakens a discovery of something
within himself that is like it. He calls that something the Imagination, which is wedded to Nature
in what he calls “blessed moods.” Thus, Nature is important in its own right. But ultimately it is
important because of the response it engenders from the poet himself.
The Poet of Memory . . .
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Wordsworth is also interested in the relationships between his former self and his present self.
That’s why he’s often called the great poet of memory. Ultimately, memory is what the poem is
all about. He talks about having visited the same spot five years ago. It’s about nostalgia. Notice
how very specific the subtitle is. And notice how, ironically, the poem is universally known as
“Tintern Abbey,” but that it doesn’t have anything to do with the actual Tintern Abbey at all. It
has to do with the Wye Valley, a few miles from Tintern Abbey.
This poem is based in large part on comparison. He compares this visit to his previous visit five
years earlier. That’s what drives the whole poem. And he’s nostalgic about the former visit
because it was so important to him. As he returns, he wants to recreate what happened the first
time. And he’s clearly got a lot at stake. Look at these lines:
While here I stand, not only with the sense
Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts
That in this moment there is life and food
For future years.
Wordsworth clearly wants to recreate what happened on the last visit. Because what happened
during the first visit had a power on him, a power that has drawn him back. And so he feels
anticipation, joy, nostalgia. But he also feels regret for all of the things that have been wasted
when he was in the lonely city, among the din, the selfish sneers, the confusion and the division.
The “Blessed Mood” . . .
Wordsworth revisits the Wye valley, three miles from the abbey ruins, for a reinjection of the
spirit, to reconnect with the blessed mood. He begins by saying that he owes gifts to his previous
visit, and he starts to catalogue them. But then he reaches that greatest of gifts, the “blessed
mood.” What is he talking about? How does he describe the “blessed mood’? What are the
analogies that are suggested by the language “blessed mood”? He writes:
Nor less, I trust,
To them I may have owed another gift,
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Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened:—that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on,—
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, 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.
He’s talking about a spiritual state, some kind of access to a divine realm, a visionary mind-scape
“beyond” but also “inherent in” the physical world. Nature is his muse calling him out of his
body. There’s a comparison to a mystical, out-of-body, transcendent experience. This is why, in
America, similar writers like Whitman and Thoreau are called “Transcendentalists.” It is a quasireligious event, an encounter with the divine. This is like the breath of God. But notice that he
writes,
the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul
It seems like death. Why? Because it is like the ultimate surrender—that’s why we get the death
and resurrection imagery here. This is very archetypal. Wordsworth is transcending this world
and arriving at some “other” world. To do that, he has to go through a passage something like
death. It’s the obliteration of ordinary consciousness.
It’s mystical. But Wordsworth is not denying the body. Notice that it starts with the body: it’s
felt along the blood. He’s not a mystic in the sense that the external world is a something occult
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or obscure, an allegorical or symbolic code for some other divine world. Instead, Wordsworth
starts in this world, responding very intensely to it. And it becomes so intense that suddenly it’s
as if he passes into another level of consciousness.
In the Simpleton Pass episode of The Prelude, Wordsworth writes that “the light of sense goes
out, but with a flash that reveals eternity.” So Wordsworth starts with the senses, which “halfcreate what they perceive.” But then it becomes so intense that it leads to an obliteration of
ordinary waking consciousness and a higher, more transcendent imaginative state.
Look closely at the language here. He writes:
that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened
What does that imply about the value of this experience? There’s a release from the pressure of
the world—its burdensome weight is lightened. Notice that he’s talking about this in a
psychological sense. And what about “unintelligible”? What’s the implication of that word?
Without these transcendent moments, where imagination and nature are interfused, the world for
Wordsworth is unintelligible, a chaotic mass of random events. But he momentarily escapes and
orders that randomness because of these “blessed moods,” or what he calls “spots of time” in The
Prelude. These are like Biblical revelations, in which the unintelligible world becomes
intelligible. And so one value of these sorts of experiences is knowledge, understanding. But
there’s something else. The world doesn’t weigh us down anymore during the blessed moods.
The burden is lifted and we are at peace with the world.
Think seriously about this: What does it mean to be wedded to nature in an imaginative “spot of
time,” a visionary moment? On the one hand, it means to have a revelation, to understand, to see
patterns where there don’t appear to be any. But just as important for Wordsworth is that it
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changes the way we live and feel—during and afterwards. It’s not just something intellectual. It
involves the entire human being. We are at peace with the world and with ourselves. The burden
is lifted. You find this throughout Wordsworth’s poetry. There are moments of perception and
insight, but crucial to those are the way that they transform us in visceral and psychological
ways.
And the last line of the stanza—where Wordsworth is attempting to articulate these “blessed
moods”—is crucial. He says that with “the deep power of joy, / We see into the life of things.”
Not “Out There and Up There,” but “In Here and Down Here” . . .
It’s important that you refrain from confining your interpretations of Wordsworth’s poetry to
simply a translation of religious faith. It’s more than that. Think about the preposition “into”?
There is a mysterious light beneath. There’s a sense of going ever and ever inward and deeper.
For Wordsworth, the source of things is not out there and up there, but in here and down here.
This is what the imagination does. It penetrates beyond the surface, into the mysterious depths.
Wordsworth’s poetry is about a journey into this kind of world.
And think about “the life of things.” It goes beyond religion. For most people, the world is
composed of objects—dead, lifeless objects. The world around them isn’t connected to them. It
has no meaningful significance. But if you are fortunate, if you’ve had the kind of experience
that Wordsworth has had in the Wye valley, then Nature draws out your imagination and inspires
you to see that “things” have a life.
For Wordsworth, we have a world around us, and we can see that we are separated from it, that it
has no literal connection to us. We have a distinct feeling of where our bodies end. But the world
can be connected to us if we discover it by half creating it. We have intimations that we are more
than mere biological creatures, simply eating, reproducing and dying. In Wordsworth’s vision,
there is something else, some Otherness both within us and in the world around us. The poet’s
job is to connect the two in a visionary experience.
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It’s very much like what archetypal critics call “death-rebirth archetypes.” First, ordinary waking
consciousness is transcended. That’s the death: Wordsworth is dead to this world in those
moments. He describes this world as being a kind of dreary, mundane set of activities. He
transcends that world and he becomes “a living soul.” In other words, he becomes reborn—
aware of that part of himself that is more than just a normal, animal, biological being. It means
powerfully becoming someone who is sentient, who can understand and has emotions, who has
an imagination and a creative soul—those things that makes us distinctive in our world. That is,
he is talking about all of those things that give the possibility of adding meaning, significance,
order to the world around us. On the most general level, “Tintern Abbey” is about discovering
value and meaning in life. Wordsworth does it by writing about the growth of the poet’s mind,
by creating value and meaning himself. He wasn’t born knowing all this. These are things that he
discovers in experience, and through a life of the imagination.
Genius Loci . . .
Think about this phrase: “genius loci,” which is Latin for “spirit of place.” Five years before,
Wordsworth visited the Wye valley, and what he discovered was a spirit of place, a genius loci.
He discovered that there is a force, a presence, or a spirit that rolls through all things. And that
genius loci not only revealed its divinity to him, its sacredness, but it also gave him a dawning
awareness of his own imaginative powers to half-create what he perceives. It gave him an
awareness of the “genius”—the creative spirit—within him.
We already know that the blessed mood has provided him with life and food for the intervening
five years. But he wants to recreate that. In the Wye valley near Tintern Abbey, Wordsworth
discovered a kind of secret power in nature, a “genius loci,” a power of place. Ultimately the
reason that it’s important to him is that it contributes to what he calls “the growth of the poet’s
mind.” The power in nature for Wordsworth helps to awaken him to a power within himself, his
imagination.
This revelation involves not just the gaining of knowledge, but also helps to transform
Wordsworth’s very being. That is, he not only “sees into the life of things,” he not only has an
expansion of consciousness, but he becomes at peace with the world around him when he is
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wedded to nature. We are spiritual beings, for Wordsworth. We are more than simply someone
who is born, lives, and dies. That is, we have what Wordsworth will call “intimations of
immortality.” We have the desire to believe that the individual life does count. The key thing is
that he discovers something kindred, that he shares a force whose dwelling is in the light of
setting suns, etc.
The “Descriptive-Meditative Lyric” . . .
This poem as a genre has a label: it’s often called a “descriptive-meditative” lyric. This was a
very common kind of poem that was written particularly in the latter part of the eighteenth
century. And in these poems,
1. the writer begins by describing the external world.
2. But then something about what the poet sees and describes triggers thought, triggers
meditation. It may be some change in the landscape. It may be something unusual about the
landscape. The poet doesn’t forget the external landscape while meditating—there does continue
to be some kind of interaction between what is seen and what is thought. But remember that it’s
not one then the other—landscape then meditation. It’s about interrelationship, interaction, the
blending of both.
3. And then at the end of the poem, the poem rounds full circle, in a circular pattern,
where the poet ends up still describing the landscape, but it no longer looks exactly as it did in
the beginning, because of the intervening meditation.
4. And often, there is some kind of silent listener. In “Tintern Abbey,” it turns out to be
Wordsworth’s sister Dorothy. We’re not even aware that there’s someone else there until we
near the end of the poem.
The Picture of the Mind . . .
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Wordsworth has been describing the landscape, and he’s been meditating about what the
previous visit meant to him, and then at line 58, he writes,
And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought,
With many recognitions dim and faint,
And somewhat of a sad perplexity,
The picture of the mind revives again:
What does Wordsworth mean by “The picture of the mind revives again”? It has to do with
memory. (Ultimately memory is at least as important to Wordsworth as Nature.) It’s a picture of
the scene he saw before, five years ago. It’s as if the mind were a camera, and five years ago,
Wordsworth experienced something so vivid, so important, that a kind of snapshot has been
taken. So he’s coming back to the same site, and he’s re-experiencing it, calling up the old
picture. He didn’t just see it five years ago, but he captured it intensely—so vividly that it rises
from the depths of the mind again.
The passage also has to do with the picture of his mind, with a description of his own inner
consciousness and imagination. That’s a secondary implication. It does mean a painting
composed, a photo that his imagination took of the landscape. But it’s also a picture of what his
mind was like five years ago, as opposed to what it is like now. He’s changed, and he’s going to
compare pictures of his mind’s alteration over five years’ time.
Sad Perplexity over Change . . .
Why is there a sad perplexity? Why would the poet be sad if he can remember the experience,
the blessed mood, so vividly? He’s looking at the scene again, five years later. There are two
pictures of the landscape. There’s the present scene. But there’s also this vivid memory of five
years ago. Wordsworth summons up the image identically with what he saw five years ago, and
he compares them. And the two pictures don’t match. This is what produces his “sad perplexity.”
Why does the scene look different? Logically, there are two ways of explaining why it looks
different. One is that the landscape has changed. But remember that this is rural part of the
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British Isles in the nineteenth century, not a modernized world. So it’s not likely that it changed
in any fundamental way in five years. So if the landscape hasn’t changed, then the feeling must
have changed. He writes:
changed, no doubt, from what I was when first
I came among these hills
He makes explicit the fact that he has changed. Wordsworth is writing about change in time, and
he’s using Nature as something permanent to measure changes in time and process. This is
another of the things that Nature means for Wordsworth: permanence. It’s a constant. He uses
Nature to measure himself, the growth and alterations of his mind.
Notice, though, that he’s not just accepting that things change. That’s easy to do. We all go to a
place and of course we’ve changed. We’ve got to remember what’s at stake for Wordsworth.
This is not just a place that Wordsworth once visited—it’s a place that he visited, and because of
its unique power, some spirit animated in this world, he experienced the blessed mood that has
sustained and nourished him emotionally, intellectually, imaginatively, in a quasi-religious way,
for five intervening years.
And what is he expecting to happen when he returns? He expects another blessed mood, another
visionary experience that will sustain him in the future. It seems as though Wordsworth has to
discover whether he can find something permanent amid change. He seems to be asking himself:
“Are those revelations experienced five years ago still true?” So in many respects, this is a poem
about the source of meaning. For Wordsworth, there are no longer fixed, universal, absolute
truths—so what he knows is what he experienced five years ago. He hopes to experience it again,
but immediately a question arises, a worry. Wordsworth knows that time and change threaten the
wedding between mind and Nature, and the possibility of experiencing “the dilated self,” or
transcendentalism.
In The Prelude, he’ll talk about “those god-like hours when I am worthy of myself.” In
Wordsworth’s worldview, we can have god-like hours, spots of time, blessed moods. In the
“Immortality Ode,” he describes it as a kind of infinite expansion of self. We become a part of
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something larger than the self. The experience entails naturalism—because it takes place at and
with a specific river, the Wye, a particular natural place. For Wordsworth, naturalism leads to
transcendence. It’s a complex state of being. It’s not denial of the world at all. It’s immersion in
the world and all it’s concrete reality, but that then leads to something that goes beyond it. Still,
time threatens the possibility of entering blessed moods . . . at least that’s what Wordsworth
seems to fear.
How does Wordsworth describe what he was like five years ago? How has he changed? What
does he feel about that change? First, he presents his younger self, during his first visit, as having
“glad animal movements,” like those of a deer, a roe. What he’s suggesting here is based upon
the senses, the sensual beauty and pleasure of Nature. The animal is not conscious in an
intellectual way—it’s instinctive. This is a sensual as opposed to conscious. It has to do with
direct feelings, rather than rational awareness, intellect. Also, an animal is totally caught up in
the present moment: it lacks an acute, human sense of time. That’s one of the implications of
“glad animal movements.” Wordsworth’s talking about living totally in the present, in a state that
suggests a kind of eternity.
In The Prelude, Wordsworth imagines himself “drinking in” nature. He also describes the
relationship between nature and self as being like that of a mother and infant. (Take a look, for
example, at the famous “Bless’d the infant Babe” section in Book II.) The baby doesn’t know
intellectually that its mother loves it. It feels it, senses it intuitively, physically. And that’s the
way Wordsworth talks about the relationship of the human and nature, especially in The Prelude.
It’s as if the umbilical cord is still there and life is passing from one to another. That’s what he
means by the phrase “by thought supplied”? Animals and the child in nature don’t need thought.
It’s not intellectual, philosophical. Instead, it’s deep instinctive passion.
Romanticism and (Self)Consciousness . . .
There’s a fundamental issue in Romanticism that has to do with consciousness, which is that
consciousness is both a blessing and a curse. That’s what makes the human distinct in the
landscape—we have consciousness. Wordsworth claims that his great theme is the growth of the
poet’s mind, of imagination. The problem, though, particularly in the modern condition, is self-
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consciousness. This is not the same thing as self-awareness. It carries with it negative
connotations. We’re not only standing in the landscape—instead we’re standing in the landscape
watching ourselves stand in the landscape. Self-consciousness has to do with a kind of
absorption with the self and self-concern. It’s a kind of unfortunate emergence of the self that
can be destructive.
But Wordsworth’s point here is that, in youth, his bond with Nature was so direct that it had “no
need of a remoter charm.” It didn’t need some other element to make it meaningful.
So Wordsworth is talking about a change. He’s now experiencing something that is less direct
than before, something that involves thought. He uses the term “thoughtless youth.” There are
people who read this passage and think, well, earlier he was thoughtless, he didn’t really
understand. Now, they say, he’s filled with thought, awareness, and a superiority of vision. But
that’s not what Wordsworth is getting at. He makes it very clear that there’s a loss involved in
moving away from that earlier, animal-like bond with Nature.
Abundant Recompense . . .
This poem is about a belief that: “for such loss, I would believe, / Abundant recompense.”
What is the “abundant recompense”? As a child and a younger man, Wordsworth seems to claim,
he was aware of a feeling and an appetite and a love that was direct and instinctive and emotional
and sensual. Now, he is more explicitly conscious of something “far more deeply interfused.”
Intellectually, philosophically, consciously he is aware of the sublimity of the natural world and
his relationship to it.
In one sense he’s saying that he’s still wedded to nature—it’s just that the characteristics of that
wedding have changed. It’s now more conscious, more meditative, more philosophical, more
sublime.
Think about these extremely important lines (105-107):
of all the mighty world
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Of eye, and ear,—both what they half create,
And what perceive
Again, he’s looking for permanence amid change. It’s clear that this earlier self half created what
it experienced. The child/younger man, in his own imaginative way—not consciously, but still
imaginatively—is capable of seeing into the life of things. He clearly wasn’t living in a world of
dead, lifeless objects. He was haunted by the sound of cataracts. (Think about the word “haunt.”
It’s an Anglo Saxon word. The phrase “the haunting” means to dwell within, to have a spirit
dwell within in you.) Nature dwelled within the younger Wordsworth. Why? Obviously because
he was half creating what he perceived.
Now, although he has changed, Wordsworth realizes that he can still half create what he
perceives. He may be coloring what he creates differently as a more mature adult. But the light is
still the light of the human imagination. It’s not a passive mirror, simply reflecting what it
perceives.
The Still Sad Music . . .
Another key line is “the still sad music of humanity.” He doesn’t explain that line at all. He
writes,
for such loss, I would believe,
Abundant recompense. 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,
What does this mean? The younger self lived totally in the moment, unaware of anything but the
moment. He wasn’t self-conscious. He wasn’t thinking about the problems of the self. Now, as a
more mature adult Wordsworth knows those problems. He’s lived in the city and had all kinds of
experiences. And he brings those to bear on all he sees.
It’s our humanity, and the fact that we are human, that does distinguish us from Nature. We will
die and we do suffer. So Wordsworth says that now, alongside this earlier relationship with
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Nature—which once was “all in all”—he’s got a relationship with the rest of the world that
includes what it means to be human, to go into the city, with its dreariness and selfishness. It has
to do with the fact that he knows that he has suffered, and that he will grow old and die. But he
brings that to Nature and that suffering and awareness of mortality turns into music. And that
music is composed by the imagination. And so this makes his bond with Nature all the deeper
and all the more precious.
So notice again that here is someone aware of change and of process, and he’s looking for
recompense for loss. This is a poem of celebration and thanksgiving, but beneath the surface
there are many rumbling notes of loss.
What Wordsworth finds is that there is permanence within change. Nature, in the sense that he
talks about it—as a sublime, living, harmonious, divine force—never changes. Also, even though
we do change, there is something within us that doesn’t change either. In Wordsworth’s terms,
that would be the imagination. Religious people might call it “the soul” or “the light of God.”
But the Romantics would call it the creative light of the imagination. The particular nature of the
imagination, the particular kind of light that the mind casts—that may change, but not the fact
that we are imaginative creatures, that we half create what we see.
So What’s the Abundant Recompense, Again?
Wordsworth’s recompense—his compensation for losing an earlier, unmediated relationship with
Nature—is not just one thing. It’s a cluster of loosely related things.
1. Certainly it has to do with Imagination, with its power to compose what it sees. That’s
a deep part of Wordsworth’s recompense.
2. The recompense clearly has to do as well with the fact that Nature is permanent, never
changes. And it also has to do with the fact that however much he has changed over the five
years, Wordsworth can still half create what he perceives. So the imagination is permanent, too.
That’s comforting, a consolation.
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3. Part of it, as well, is that he’s aware of the still sad music of humanity, and that makes
his relationship with Nature even deeper and more precious.
Time, Time, Time . . .
Notice the references to time in “Tintern Abbey”:
— July 13th, 1798 - this visit
— July, 1793 - his last visit
— There are also references to the intervening years in the city, when the spirit
of the place turns in memory
— There are also references to the future: “pleasing thoughts / That in this
moment there is life and food / For future years.”
— the glad animal movements of childhood
— death
In line 147, turning to Dorothy, he writes:
If I should be where I no more can hear
Thy voice, nor catch from thy wild eyes these gleams
Of past existence—wilt thou then forget
He’s referring to his death. So in this one poem we have a telescoped version of his entire life.
Many Romantic poems explore the idea that time is a subjective creation of the human mind.
Time, of course, is something that we have to deal with, or at least the process of time. But
Wordsworth’s poetry focuses not on time, but on the spots of time: blessed moods. These are
moments in which time stops. And in these moments, we see into the life of things, we
experience the wedding of man and nature, we experience a presence that rolls through all
things. These are moments of transcendence.
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In these moments, what we experience is an Eternal Presence. But what these moments taken
together constitute is an Eternal Present. Time is an illusion. That is, it has no meaning unless we
let ourselves be ruled by it. Almost all of the Romantics are searching for moments of meaning
that they see as being immortal or timeless.
Once Wordsworth experiences this blessed mood, this genius loci, it informs his whole life. It
doesn’t end. It doesn’t die. He’s afraid that it might. But he believes that it won’t. And again, this
poem reinforces that it will never die. And so when we come in touch with this eternal presence,
it creates out of life an eternal present. That’s why children and animals and madmen show up so
often in Wordsworth’s poetry. They do not have a vexed consciousness of time. They live in an
eternal present.
Notice that, for Wordsworth, the enemy is time or self-consciousness. Self consciousness raises
doubts. We can’t see anything apart from the enervating presence of self. Perhaps the greatest
example of this is Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” He writes, “Let us go then you
and I.” The you and I are part of the same person. Hamlet is another example of the modern
mind at war with itself and unable to act. The child, the animal, the insane—these are beings that
for Wordsworth live in the moment. The future is not something they worry about.
Wordsworth is also known as the great poet of angst. What creates anxiety? Awareness of time
and the future.
In “Night the Ninth” of The Four Zoas, for example, William Blake writes in some great
concluding lines: “I cast away dark futurity. Lo, the future is in this moment.” And that’s part of
what the Romantic revolution is all about. Earlier, there was discussion of the Romantics
internalizing of the French Revolution. Heaven is not something for them to be found at the end
of time. Heaven is something to be found in the here and now. Paradise is not some golden city
on a hill in some indefinite future. It is in this moment—if we can see it imaginatively. The
Romantics believe we can live in paradise now. And so Wordsworth turns the Wye valley into
paradise.
Twilight of the Gods . . .
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Here’s other general way of looking at “Tintern Abbey”—one that may be helpful for looking at
a lot of other Romantic works, and indeed poems in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth
centuries.
In many Romantic poems, we find the poet standing in front of the landscape, and the idea is that
the landscape was once inhabited by spirits and gods. Think about classical myth and all the
references to wood sprites and nymphs—what Keats calls “light-winged dryads of the trees.”
The world was suffused, animated with these spirits. That’s what religion is all about. Each
religion offers an imaginative story that animates the world and gives it meaning.
When you come to the nineteenth century, though, the poet can no longer believe objectively,
universally, absolutely that the world is animated by spirits. In The Wasteland, Eliot writes: “the
nymphs have departed, left no forwarding addresses.” It’s called “the twilight of the Gods,” or
what the critic J. Hillis Miller calls “The Disappearance of God.”
So the world was once animated by religion, but now that that brand of imagining holds less
weight, the poet stands before the landscape and has to animate it with the individual
imagination. The poet has to recreate something analogous to that world in which there were
once water sprites and wood nymphs.
In Wordsworth’s terms, the poet has to “see into the life of things.” And if this couldn’t be done,
for Wordsworth, the world is simply a random collection of lifeless objects. But there is
something worse than this for Wordsworth. If he cannot animate the landscape with his
imagination, he becomes the lifeless object himself. This is a central theme as well of
Coleridge’s “Dejection: An Ode.” In that poem, the speaker cannot feel. He lives in the world
that Coleridge calls “Life-in-Death.” And how can he animate the world? He has to feel, because
feeling releases consciousness and imagination.
My Genial Spirits to Decay . . .
Look at lines 111-113:
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Nor perchance,
If I were not thus taught, should I the more
Suffer my genial spirits to decay:
On the one hand, then, “Tintern Abbey” is about thanksgiving and celebration, as Wordsworth
celebrates the divinity of the world around him and the power of the imagination, and gives
thanks for the fact that he is a part of Nature, wedded to the Eternal Presence. But beneath the
surface is worry—and it is a recurring worry for Wordsworth. He knows that it’s only the power
of our “genial spirits,” our imaginations, that animates the world. So the constant fear is that the
imagination will be incapable of flowing out and animating the world.
The word “genial” is interesting etymologically. In the most general sense, it means “genius,” so
he’s talking about his imaginative genius. But it goes back to the classical folk tales about
genies—tutelary divinities, good angels that watch over us. So it means that there’s some good
angel in our midst. It means joy as well. But is also means wedding and procreation. So this one
word brings together many of the things we’ve been talking about in this poem.
Some Conclusions . . .
Ultimately, what Wordsworth is talking about is a dynamic, a relationship, a reciprocity—
something that leads to an indissoluble blending of inner and outer. To use his words, it’s a
wedding. But if that is to happen, Nature must be seen as filled with peace and calm, and
secluded from the chaotic city. Nature is also moving and trying to embrace the human figure in
the landscape. Nature is something that is animated, alive. And not only is it animated and alive,
but it’s a part of some harmonious whole. Furthermore, it is sacred and divine. There is a
presence, a force that rolls through all things, that is immanent or inherent within Nature. Nature
is divine, alive, and interconnected, and that this interconnection includes the human presence in
the landscape—the solitary figure wedded to nature. Essentially, what Wordsworth is portraying
is a relation—a relationship between the human and Nature, and what Wordsworth himself will
call “the wedding of man and nature.” You might think of terms such as reciprocity, interaction,
and what all of that implies. It is not just relationships, but process—a process that implies an
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organic universe, where everything is interconnected and alive, like a plant, not strictly
mechanistic, like a watch.
“Tintern Abbey” is a poem about Nature, but it’s also not a poem about Nature. Ultimately
Nature is more the object of the poem, rather than the subject. The subject is Wordsworth and the
growth of the poet’s mind. Some people read this poem as a testament to Wordsworth’s
pantheism, to his belief that Nature is filled with a divine spirit. But that limits its meaning for
those of us who live in the twenty-first century. But if you see if from more of an existential
viewpoint, or a phenomenological point of view—if you hear the poem wrestling with questions
such as “How do we create meaning?” and “How does our consciousness evolve over time?”—
then it seems as important today as it was in 1798.