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Tintern Abbey Essay Research Paper William WordsworthTintern (стр. 1 из 2)

Tintern Abbey Essay, Research Paper

William Wordsworth

Tintern Abbey

This poem is written out of the experiences of a walking tour that Wordsworth shared with his sister Dorothy, in June of 1798. The background circumstances are that the two had gone to Bristol to look after the details of publishing the Lyrical Ballads. But they did not stay in the city long; they did not finds its buzz and hum at all compatible with their predispositions, so that after about a week they escaped into that country that Wordsworth had enjoyed seeing about five years before with his college friend, Robert Jones. He and Jones had passed this way after Wordsworth returned from his stay in France. The tour lasted about five days. Wordsworth left the following account of the excursion out of which “Tintern Abbey” came: “We crossed the Severn ferry and walked ten miles further to Tintern Abbey, a very beautiful ruin on the Wye. The next morning we walked along the river through Monmouth to Goodrich Castle, there slept, and returned the next day to Tintern, thence to Chepstow, and from Chepstow back again in a boat to Tintern, where we slept, and thence back in a small vessel to Bristol.”

The ruin of Tintern Abbey in Monmouthshire had long been celebrated both for its interest to historians and for its physical beauty. Humphrey Davy, a person famous in science during the days we have made the property of the English Romantics, once commented on how much he was moved by the sight of the Abbey by moonlight. But however important the place was to Wordsworth during the tour, the poem itself is not that much concerned with Tintern Abbey – that is, not concerned in the direct sense of being a celebration of a beautiful place in nature. There is in the background of the poem, of course, that whole tradition of the magnificence of the ruins of past times that had characterized the thought and life of the age of sensibility. But whatever there may be of pathos in the poem for the ruined monuments of past times, the heart of feeling in the poem is centered on something else. Tintern Abbey is little more than a pin to locate that terrain along the Wye River that is the setting of the poem. If one says that the poem is about landscape, it is more about the River itself, and the terrain around it. Wordsworth’s nature description in its customary particularity is at work in lines 4-22, but the natural scenery is important for what he gets out of it, not for itself. And that is a very important distinction for the student to make when he reads this poem and many others poems by Wordsworth that talk about nature. One may pause for a moment and consider seriously just what Wordsworth means by Nature. For most of the time in “Tintern Abbey,” Wordsworth seems to be discussing this natural scene around Tintern Abbey and telling what it has meant to him and what it can in the future be expected to give.

Meaning Of Nature

But when Wordsworth uses the word Nature, he means more than just rivers, trees, rocks, mountains, crags, lakes, and so on. He means all these things certainly, but more importantly he means a power, a force, a dynamic principle that animates, that molds with plastic might the physical furnishings of the universe. The point then about a man’s placing himself closely in touch with rural places and things is that there man comes most intimately in touch with this power, this force, this vivifying and, too, regulating principle of life; the reason is that rural places and things have been the least interfered with by the corrupting ambitions of man. In this connection, it may be well to repeat the emphasis that one finds throughout Wordsworth’s poetry (the poetry of other Romantics also): Nature is good, the city is evil. Any reading of “Tintern Abbey” should seek to encompass these greater meanings of Nature. Further, any reading should consider seriously also the human side of the matter: if Nature is to mean anything to man, he must be within himself predisposed in some way to the intercourse. Wordsworth says he is. There is in countless places in Wordsworth’s poems an affirmation that Nature and man are exquisitely fitted one to the other. The “presence” that disturbs Wordsworth (in “Tintern Abbey”) not only has its dwelling in “the light of setting suns,” but it dwells also “in the mind of man.”

The discussions of “Tintern Abbey” have in great measure been concerned with what the poem says about Wordsworth’s growth from childhood to manhood. In this regard, “Tintern Abbey” has been considered often as a compressed version of The Prelude and, too, a very valuable introduction to the “Intimations Ode.” Arthur Beatty, author of several studies on Wordsworth, saw in the background of the three stages of growth in “Tintern Abbey” the work of David Hartley, entitled Observations on Man, which was published for the first time in 1749. But in a sense, it might produce the more fruitful reading of “Tintern Abbey” to get away from the influence of The Prelude on the subject of growth, and think, rather, of three different kinds of encounters that the mind of man may have with nature. By avoiding the idea of growth, one can get beyond looking for connections between the stages, that is, how the poet gets from one stage to the other, and be better able, therefore, to realize the particular characteristics of the encounter in its three different dimensions.

Origins

In view of the fact that “Tintern Abbey” is about what nature can do for man, what nature can give him in way of inspiration and instruction, not only in the midst of the encounter but later as well when man remembers it, the reader may find it interesting to give more than a passing glance to Wordsworth’s note on the origins of the poem. He gives this account: “I began it upon leaving Tintern, after crossing the Wye, and concluded it just as I was entering Bristol in the evening, after a ramble of four or five days, with my Sister. Not a line of it was altered, and not any part of it written down till I reached Bristol.”

Is this fulfillment of the processes of poetic creation as Wordsworth had talked about them in the 1800 “Preface”? It this “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings . . . [that] takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity”? Does the explanation of how Wordsworth wrote “Tintern Abbey” show the contemplation of the emotion “till, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind”? In one sense, yes, in one sense no. From what the poet says about the composition of the poem, it may seem one of the few works that he wrote on the spur of the moment; he said he started composing it when he arrived in Bristol. But, then, the process of poetic creation can be said to have taken place according to Wordsworth’s design as he explained it in the “Preface” in the sense that five years had past since he had been at Tintern Abbey.

Form

The overall form of address in the poem may not seem to identify it as a poem spoken to Dorothy; but, the final verse paragraph gives the impression that the poet had all the time been speaking to Dorothy, his companion on this second tour of the Wye. On this question, a useful distinction may be made between the subject matter of the poem and the tone of the language that carries the subject matter. It might very well be the case that if Wordsworth had used a form of conversational address throughout, he would not have been able to achieve the high level of seriousness and the dignity that characterize the whole. But in what the poem says-its content-Dorothy is the poet’s audience; the subject matter is meant first of all for her. Wordsworth also avoids the perils of informality in a work of such seriousness through using the words to Dorothy as insuppressible exclamations of joy and gratitude.

Summary

Lines 1-22

The poet has returned to the banks of the Wye River after an absence of five years. The period has been longer in emotional terms than it has been as actual calendar time. He views the scene again with all the “beauteous forms” that he has found in his absence to be sources of restoration and inspiration. But, of course, with characteristic discrimination, he chooses only those sounds and sights that serve to put into the reader’s mind not just scenery but what one might call the spirit of scenery, or the essence of scenery. The waters that roll “With a soft inland murmur” match the poet’s imagination that also rolls from internal “mountain-springs.” The cliffs connect earth with sky, but the connection is more internal than the connections of an impressive sight; the poet has “Thoughts of more deep seclusion” than the thought that around him stretches “a wild secluded scene.” The smoke that rises from the cottages on the farms around (the “sportive wood” serves as a boundary between fields in this country) stirs in the poet’s imagination the vision of wandering people or of a hermit sitting alone in his cave. In the area that his eye gathers in, there is both the wild and the tamed. There are unsubdued cliffs, but there are plots of cultivated ground, measured off by hedges. There is sound, but there is movement in silence. Wordsworth is trying through modifying the nouns with this and these to achieve the sense of immediate meeting between mind and nature. The poet’s placement of himself under a “dark sycamore” is not unusual, given the number of sheltered places that Wordsworth uses in his poems for repose and imaginative action.

Lines 23-49

After locating and giving some description of the external physical scene that provides the natural setting for his meditation, Wordsworth at line twenty-three begins to account of what “The beauteous forms” have meant to him during the five years of absence from the Wye and its environs. He has with his internal eye, “that inward eye / Which is the bliss of solitude” often seen these forms that surround him at Tintern Abbey; he has in his absence not been blind to them (Line 25). In the clattering and clamoring of the city, he has received from them (1) “sensations sweet,” (2) “tranquil restoration,” (3) unidentifiable feelings of pleasure, and (4) a “blessed mood” in which the depressing mystery of life was lightened. The feelings that Wordsworth recalls having had in the five intervening years are emphasized as feelings, not mere thoughts, by his locating them in his blood and heart. The “beauteous forms” of this natural scene around Tintern Abbey were when he saw them five years before actually taken into his being: they were impressed into layers of the poet’s being far below the cognitive level-he definitely wants us to know that! Notice the words that are used in these lines to give expression to the remarkable effect that these natural forms have had in the poet’s “recollection in tranquillity” during his hours “in lonely rooms, and ‘mid the din / Of towns and cities”: “sensations,” “blood,” “heart,” “feelings.” The profound reaches of the influence of the “beauteous forms” are evident in the fact that when the poet recalled them in his absence, there were emotional associations that he could not identify. They were involved, inseparably tied in, with “acts / Of kindness and of love” that he had performed in his life. That is, the “beauteous forms” had become so deeply impressed into his being when he saw them before that during his absence he did not so much think about them as feel them. And they had become impressed in his being in such a way that they had merged with associations already there, the best associations from the best former experiences in life-kindness and love. It is like saying that objects and sounds in nature were kindness and love concretized; this kindness and love would blend with the feelings of kindness and love already present within the deep folds of the poet’s inner being. There is a startling statement in these lines that the reader should not miss; the poet is saying that the sights and sounds around Tintern Abbey have been enough during his absence to show him meaning in life when it otherwise would have been absent. They have provided a “blessed mood” in which all the senseless suffering in life, in which all the absurdity of human striving and disappointment has been made endurable. By “the heavy and the weary weight / Of all this unintelligible world” Wordsworth means all the unanswered questions about human life that leave one with blackness. But there is still more to the blessing they have brought. It is not only a matter of relief from suffering; it is also that the imagination has found in them the necessary materials with which to achieve a penetrating vision “into the life of things.” The poet has found in the “beauteous forms” the resources for discovering meaning at the heart of things. Wordsworth is speaking of an active, not a passive experience:

– 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.

This passage should not be read as a version of the mystic’s passive absorption, a state in which all the hindrances of the flesh are left behind through a reduction of human flesh to the most absolute minimum possible. The poet has found a vision “into the life of things” precisely because of the active power of the imagination. The words harmony and joy that Wordsworth uses in line forty-eight are virtually synonyms for imagination. And Wordsworth’s concept of imagination is that it is a power from within that exerts itself on the surrounding world. When Wordsworth in these lines speaks of the suspension of “the motion of our human blood,” and of the body being laid asleep, it is only as a means to the end of becoming “a living soul.” Samuel Taylor Coleridge, close friend and frequent companion of Wordsworth during the time that “Tintern Abbey” was written, often speaks of the imagination in the terms of harmony and joy. Coleridge also thinks of the imagination as an active, shaping power. The “beauteous forms” of the area around Tintern Abbey have provided Wordsworth with the resources for making his life meaningful in times and places when it would have been otherwise meaningless and unbearable.

Lines 50-57

Wordsworth reaffirms the faith expressed in the foregoing lines, with more exact reference to the River Wye. The belief in the power of nature to nourish and sustain through the molding and shaping spirit of the imagination is so remarkable that it may seem “but a vain belief.” But he knows on re-examination of his experiences that the belief is a true one. He has in the midst of “darkness and … the many shapes / Of joyless delight,” in the midst of “the fretful stir / Unprofitable, and the fever of the world,” turned his inward eye to the “sylvan Wye! … wanderer thro’ the woods….”

Lines 58-65a

But, the poet’s return and present experiences at Tintern Abbey are not only the occasion for remembrance; he realizes as he renews his intercourse with the “beauteous forms” and reflects on their ministry to him in years of absence that he is also finding “life and food / For future years.” This brings him to consider the levels of his experience with nature throughout his life.

Lines 65b-102a

Some readers of Wordsworth discuss this part of “Tintern Abbey” as a record of the three principal stages of Wordsworth’s growth as a poet. As suggested earlier, it may be more productive to read them not in the terms of growth, but, rather, in the terms of three different kinds of experience that Wordsworth has discovered in his encounter with nature, remembering nature not to be just scenery, but the things in nature plus the power and spirit that rolls through them. (1) Childhood: (lines 73 & 74) This was the dimension of experience in which the poet was blended with nature; his movements, “glad animal movements,” were the same as nature’s movements – there was a unison of life, perhaps resembling most closely the relationship of the fetus to its mother. This is the dimension of experience when there is no differentiation made between the creature and the external natural order than surrounds him. The relationship with nature in this dimension is very nearly osmotic. (2) Adolescence: (lines 66-72; 75-83) The older child begins to be aware of the natural phenomena with which he has been formerly blended. This is the level of experience with nature at which there begins to be a differentiation between sights and sounds. This would have been the kind of experience that Wordsworth would have had during his visit to the Wye in 1793. There is a reveling in nature: Wordsworth uses such telling description as “aching joys” and “dizzy raptures.” At this time when nature was “all in all,” he “bounded o’er the mountains” “like a roe.” The emotional pitch of this level of experience is very high. Wordsworth speaks of it in the terms of a man fleeing from something feared, of being haunted by a passion, of appetite and feeling, of “aching joys” and “dizzy raptures.” (3) Early Maturity (lines 84-102a) The adult finds nature to provide “other gifts,” which serve as “Abundant recompense” for the level of “thoughtless youth.” He comes to find a Divine Presence behind the perishable phenomena of nature. The adult comes to hear “The still, sad music of humanity . . .,” but perhaps it is only for this reason that he can find “A presence that disturbs … with the joy / Of elevated thoughts. . . .” Only after one has been chastened and subdued with the disappointment and pain of responsibility for oneself and for others is one sensitive to