. . .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: A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things.
Alfred Lord Tennyson, the 19th-century English poet, thought these lines among the finest ever written in the English language, particularly for the way they establish the permanent in the transitory. The passage has been often discussed for what it reveals of Wordsworth’s theology.
Lines 102b-111a
The connective therefore indicates a causal relationship between the affirmation that the poet has just made about “A presence that disturbs . . . wi h the joy / Of elevated thoughts . . .” and the profession that he comes now to make – that he still loves nature, however much his experience in the present time differs from his former experience. In a different way, at a different level but with no less profundity, Wordsworth’s love for nature continues; he confirms that he is still
A lover of the meadows and the woods, And mountains; and of all that we behold From this green earth; of all the mighty world Of eye, and ear….
Furthermore, the experience with nature is still an interchange. For whatever diminishing of emotional intensity there has been in the encounter, the poet’s relationship with “meadows and . . . woods, / And mountains” is still one of active intercourse, is still one of power and inspiration received and power and inspiration given. The imagination is no less active in this new experience than it was before. The world that the poet loves is the world after the imagination has given it a measure of life and meaning that it would not have if left alone unto itself. The poet is not now, as he has not been in any experience with nature, a passive receptacle into which is poured sense data from the outside. He receives the “beauteous forms” as “life and food / For future years, ” but the world of nature that he knows is “all the mighty world / Of eye, and ear, – both what they half create, / And what perceive….” It is very important to recognize that Wordsworth speaks of a receiving and a giving. The imagination is being forcefully imposed on all these natural materials. It is in the poet’s intercourse with nature, in his active imaginative interchange, that he finds “The anchor of [his] purest thoughts, the nurse, / The guide, the guardian of [his] heart, and soul / Of all [his] moral being.” Unless the “power / Of harmony,” “the deep power of joy” were coming from within the poet and meeting the active spirit that rolls through the nature that is external to him, he would not discover the “anchor,” “nurse,” “guide,” “guardian.” These gifts come in the active interpersonal relationship, not in a mere passive reception.
Lines 111b-119a
There is through the whole of “Tintern Abbey,” and through these particular lines and the ones that follow in this final verse paragraph, the feeling that Wordsworth is discovering truth as he goes, that the poem itself is an exploration of past and present experience rather than any attempt at stating conclusions already drawn from experiences. The exploratory tone can be felt in this final verse paragraph of the poem. Wordsworth turns now to address his “dearest Friend,” his sister Dorothy. He hears in her voice echoes of what he was in times past: “in thy voice,” he says, “I catch / The language of my former heart. . . .” In her eyes he reads pleasures that were his in years gone by. He asks that he may for a while listen to and see these former times, now renewed for him in his companionship with his sister.
Lines 119b-134a
But Dorothy is not only in the poet’s attention (and therefore in the reader’s attention) for what she reveals of the experiences of the poet’s past life; she is also involved in the poet’s future experience, what he prophesies to be the certain blessings of continued intercourse with Nature through coming years. For the heart that loves Nature, for the person who through the strength of imagination creates the necessary conditions for active interchange with the spirit that moves through all things, there will be joy, “quietness and beauty,” and “cheerful faith” in the midst of all the “dreary intercourse of daily life. . .” Remembering that Nature is infinitely more to Wordsworth than rural scenery, remembering that Nature is the external forms of things but the Divine Spirit that moves within them as well, one finds the poet verifying here the marriage between the Spirit and the imagination as an unbreakable relationship. Wordsworth attests “that Nature never did betray / The heart that loved her” in language that is very close in tone to certain Biblical affirmations about the faithfulness of God in His relationship with His creation.
The content, of course, in “Tintern Abbey” and in the Bible is radically different, for Wordsworth is not basing the faithfulness of Nature to man on any kind of historical revelation, at least not historical revelation that has the particularity of the ministry of Jesus Christ. The relationship between Nature and man that continued through “Tintern Abbey” has not the definition of a supreme act of revelation once-and-for-all done. The spirit in Nature continues to meet the imagination of man in equally dynamic encounters. What Wordsworth anticipates finding in relationship with Nature in the future is a continuation of what he has found in the past.
Lines 134b-159
One may discover in the closing lines of the poem a fourth level of experience with Nature, a strengthening of relationship with Nature through a strengthening of personal love between Wordsworth and his sister. Wordsworth is through these lines continuing to address Dorothy, but he also, of course, is addressing the reader. He advises,
let the moon Shine on thee in thy solitary walk; And let the misty mountain-winds be free To blow against thee….
With regard to the furnishing of the memory with “beauteous forms,” given greater life and meaning through the enlivening, modifying power of imagination, the process that is at the heart of the poet’s advice is the same that has informed the poem to this point. The only difference is, as suggested above, that the present interchange between the poet and his sister will make future recollection in tranquillity stronger and richer. In whatever future “solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief” there might be, there will be “healing thoughts / Of tender joy” not only for what the “beauteous forms” of the River Wye are with the force that moves through them, but also for the compounding of these forms and their internal spirit with the present love expressed between two human beings. It is a storing up of the mind with the beauty without and the beauty within and the beauty of the meeting and merging of the two. This is the basis of the poet’s trust expressed in the closing lines:
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!
Comment
The form of a work of literature cannot in an absolute way be separated from the content of the work. But for the sake of clearer explication and evaluation, critics try to work within this distinction. It may be useful here to attempt this distinction. Although Wordsworth was a rebel against the conventions of the poetry of the 18th century, “Tintern Abbey” is written in the tradition of a long meditative poem, a form that had been frequently used by 18th-century writers. The language of “Tintern Abbey” is far from being the language of ordinary conversation, is far from being “a selection of language really used by men.” Wordsworth’s poetic diction in “Tintern Abbey” is skillfully, painstakingly achieved. The words are well-chosen, and he thoughtfully calculates their effect. There is an obvious absence of metaphors and personifications in “Tintern Abbey,” for Wordsworth is in this poem following the demands of the “unmediated vision,” that is, the poet’s confrontation of nature without the intermediate agencies of poetic techniques and language. But this is not to say that “Tintern Abbey” is without easily identified rhetorical techniques.
The poem is written in blank verse, which is a verse form that uses unrhymed iambic pentameter. Wordsworth’s use of this kind of verse form may also be seen to be a part of his reaction against the poetic practices of the 18th-century. A great deal of 18th-century verse was regimented, even stultified, by the heroic couplet, that is iambic pentameter rhyming in pairs. The great emphasis then was on form, and design, and details were subordinated to these ends. Coleridge had made extensive use of blank verse in his Conversation Poems, and he found in it a workable means of expression for the more mysterious, more expansive forms of experience that was the subject matter of his poetry. In this regard it might be worthwhile to recall the fact that 18th-century poetry had also reduced the obscure and the mysterious to a minimum. The more irregular forms of natural scenes were avoided, and the overwhelming preference was for the more manageable forms, forms that could be regulated and confined within the framework of the formal garden. Wordsworth had read Coleridge’s poetry, with its highly individualist, highly subjective expression of the mysterious through the medium of blank verse. Wordsworth admired the great flexibility that characterized Coleridge’s Conversation Poems; he admired the freedom the form gave for the expression of private meditation on the mysterious encounter that goes on between the spirit in nature and the imagination of the poet. Wordsworth was greatly under the influence of the poetic idiom and verse form of Coleridge’s Conversation Poems in the writing of “Tintern Abbey.” The language of “Tintern Abbey” has a prose-like quality. The lines that begin the second verse paragraph,
These beauteous forms, Through a long absence, have not been to me, As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye…
are too poetic to be truly representative of the whole poem. In fact, apart from the word beauteous, it is difficult to find a “poetic” word in the whole poem, at least “poetic” in the sense that the word was used in Wordsworth’s day. One recalls, of course, that Wordsworth wrote in the “Preface” of 1800 that he wished to avoid using the conventional language of poetry. Whatever poetry there is in “Tintern Abbey” comes from some other source than Wordsworth’s use of the standardized poetic diction of his time.
Rhetorical Techniques
One of the rhetorical techniques that Wordsworth employs in “Tintern Abbey” is repetition; the technique has additional force because it is employed in a simple framework. The following lines may serve the purpose of illustration (italics mine):
Five years have past; five summers, with the length Of five long winters! (lines 1 & 2)
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. Once again I see These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows…. (lines 11-15)
How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee, O sylvan Wye! thou wanderer thro’ the woods, How often has my spirit turned to thee! (lines 55-57)
thou my dearest Friend, My dear, dear Friend; and in thy voice I catch The language of my former heart, and read My former pleasures in the shooting lights Of thy wild eyes. Oh! yet a little while May I behold in thee what I was once, My