Revisiting Wordswoth's Tintern Abbey

Wordsworth's 1798 poem, one of his earlier, Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, is famously about his return on a visit to a scene - the banks of the River Wye - that he had greatly enjoyed visiting in his youth. The poem sets the foundation for his life's work and for all of British romantic poetry as well - truly revolutionary poem, changing the course of English (and world?) literature: Through the 18th century English literature was in the classic mode, on grand themes - Paradise Lost, An Essay on Man, faith, the nature of beauty - but Wordsworth began the turn toward personal experience and observation. Echoing Wordsworth, I'm returning to his poem, which I used to know pretty well but have not visited in many years; if asked I would have said it was about the beauty of nature on the banks of the Wye and his remembrance of his "frolics" in the same landscape in his youth. What I had forgotten, but now see as essential to this poem and to WW's thought, is the darkness within: It's not only that he sees the beauty and remembers his youth but that he is restored and given solace from a world that he finds almost unbearable in its sorrow and suffering. The poem is infused with thoughts of death and isolation: the hermit's cottage, for example, or the body with blood and breath "suspended," a meditative state, but also a version of death. The poem is by no means a conventional "pastoral," though it does have the outlines of the pastoral - escape from the city into the "green world." WW's version of the pastoral, like Shakespeare's by the way, is populated: He reflects on how in his "thoughtless" youth he imagined himself to be at one with nature but now, re-visiting, he hears "the still sad music of humanity." This is a theme WW will push further in later poems; in Tintern Abbey he believes that his re-visiting the site of former pleasures he can recover his lost youth, in later poems - the Prelude - the emotions of his youth were formative (child is father to the man) but beyond his adult grasp. 



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