William Wordsworth: "Tintern Abbey"

Katie McAvoy
Section 1E - Brendan O'Kelly
[Final exam review handout]

Tintern Abbey – Misc. Notes

• Written by William Wordsworth, who was in favor of carrying the revolutionary sentiment from France to England and whose poems are obsessed with common people and nature
• Part of the Romantic period
• Eighteenth century to nineteenth century - time of revolution
• Romanticism - revolutionary moment
• Nature, the conception of nature
• An awareness of the self
• Awareness of the torture of the self
• Natural beauty versus being locked in "the self"
• Landscape becomes a mirror of the human soul
• Expression of the sense of anxiety
• About the self viewing the landscape rather than viewing the landscape itself
• Written in blank verse
• Tranquil scenery
• Centered around memory
• Time lapse: 5 years
• Wordsworth is trying to reattach himself though he knows that it isn’t possible
• Wordsworth tries to console himself about the loss of his past through memory
• He examines his memories for this consolation; but sees what the progression of time has done to them
• Dorothy: Wordsworth’s sister
• Wordsworth loved the joy that nature brought him

Notable Lines/Passages

· Five years have past; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a soft inland murmur. -- Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
That on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect
The landscape with the quiet of the sky.
The day is come when I again repose
Here, under this dark sycamore, and view

These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts,
Which at this season, with their unripe fruits,
Are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves
'Mid groves and copses.

· These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind,
With tranquil restoration:--feelings too

Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,
As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man's life,
His little, nameless, unremembered, acts
Of kindness and of love.

· We stood together; and that I, so long
A worshipper of Nature, hither came
Unwearied in that service: rather say
With warmer love--oh! with far deeper zeal
Of holier love. Nor wilt thou then forget,
That after many wanderings, many years
Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs,
And this green pastoral landscape, were to me
More dear, both for themselves and for thy sake!