A Trip to "Tintern Abbey" [by David Lehman]

It is not difficult to see why some poets from Lord Byron to the present have resisted and sometimes even jeered at William Wordsworth (1770-1850). The refreshing heterodoxy of Wordsworth’s youthful verse gave way to the piety of his “Ode to Duty.” He started out full of French revolutionary fervor – “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven!” – but grew disenchanted and became a tory. By the time he was forty he had lost what he called the “visionary gleam” but lived twice as many years and kept writing.

Not for Wordsworth the ghostly galleons of Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”; Wordsworth’s imagination was ever tamer than that of his collaborator on the landmark Lyrical Ballads, to whom he was a less than generous friend. Nor was he as adroit a craftsman as Keats or Shelley, masters of lyric forms, although he singlehandedly revived the sonnet from a century of neglect. He lacked utterly what Byron had in excess: a sense of humor. There isn’t an intentionally funny line in Wordsworth.

            Yet Wordsworth, personally the least likeable of the major English Romantics, was arguably the most indispensable – the one to whom we turn for the consummate exposition of a crucial movement of thought. “Tintern Abbey,” one of the greatest of all Romantic odes, comprises 159 lines of blank verse. The form involves a shift from the present moment to the recollected past and ends on a prayer for the future. Coleridge in “Frost at Midnight,” one of his “conversation poems,” introduced the form in February 1798; Wordsworth perfected it in “Tintern Abbey” on July 13 of that year.

“Tintern Abbey” -- the poem’s full title is “Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the banks of the Wye during a tour” – presents the crisis of melancholy, specifically the melancholy over the passing of youth. If the majestic prospect of a ruined twelfth-century church on the Welsh side of the River Wye triggers the meditation, the landscape’s fourth dimension – time as an almost palpable presence -- dominates it. Five years have gone by since the poet last stood here. Now his thoughts turn naturally to the changes since then and to trepidations over what may ensue.

Wordsworth has a fierce nostalgia for boyhood – “when like a roe / I bounded o’er the mountains, by the sides / Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams, / Wherever nature led.” But the reality principle is strong in him; he shuts off the reverie in four curt syllables: “That time is past.” The crisis is solved, the melancholy fit cured, by the key apprehension of a divinity located not in the remote heavens but on earth, in nature. The conviction that there is “a motion and a spirit that impels / All thinking things, all objects of all thought, / And rolls through all things,” expresses itself with the force of a soul-restoring epiphany. 

Prizing “the language really used by men,” Wordsworth does away with the artificialities of poetic diction that marked eighteenth-century verse but adopts a sentence structure that can orchestrate a complex argument. This sentence, for example, stretches across sixteen lines like a rhapsodic passage in a symphony, where the music rises, meets resistance, dips to a low, hesitates, and then recovers, as tensions are teased out and triumphantly resolved:

                     Oh! yet a little while
      May I behold in thee what I was once,                       
      My dear, dear Sister! and this prayer I make,
      Knowing that Nature never did betray
      The heart that loved her; 'tis her privilege,
      Through all the years of this our life, to lead
      From joy to joy: for she can so inform
      The mind that is within us, so impress
      With quietness and beauty, and so feed
      With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,
      Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
      Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all                
      The dreary intercourse of daily life,
      Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb
      Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold
      Is full of blessings.

The poem is a triumph emotionally. The seemingly spontaneous overflow of feelings in the last movement of the poem – the prayer addressed to Dorothy Wordsworth -- may bring tears to your eyes. I know no finer or more tender expression of a man’s love for a sister. The poem is a triumph, too, of the “cheerful faith” that reconciles us to losses and compensates for them.  It comes as close as Wordsworth ever did to achieving a metrical ideal: the language approaching prose, with the fixed meter acting as a firm restraint. 

          The climactic moment in Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight” is signaled by the word “Therefore” followed by the prayer he makes for the infant son in his arms. Wordsworth likes the function of “therefore” so much he uses it twice. “Tintern Abbey” has a double climax -- the second not a re-statement of the first but an ecstatic application of it.

The first “Therefore” prefaces a statement of resolution, a vow predicated on a belief: “Therefore am I still / A lover of the meadows and the woods, /And mountains, and of all that we behold / From this green earth.” As radiant as this affirmation is, I believe it is eclipsed by the exhortations that the second “therefore” introduces -- if only because the second-person pronoun keeps at bay the solipsism to which a sublime egoist like Wordsworth may otherwise be susceptible:

                     Therefore let the moon
      Shine on thee in thy solitary walk;
      And let the misty mountain-winds be free
      To blow against thee: and, in after years,
      When these wild ecstasies shall be matured
      Into a sober pleasure; when thy mind
      Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms,
      Thy memory be as a dwelling-place
      For all sweet sounds and harmonies; oh! then,
      If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief,
      Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts
      Of tender joy wilt thou remember me,
      And these my exhortations!

When my own “genial spirits” fail, the poem I turn to for wisdom and succor beyond consolation is “Tintern Abbey.”

Ed. note: This essay was originally published in The Wall Street Journal as a "Masterpiece" column on November 17, 2013. The picture is copyright: ©The British Library Board.  For a vocabulary lesson based on the poem, click here:  here:https://www.vocabulary.com/lists/341605

For other readings of great poems click on these links:

Shelley, "Ozymandias"

Emily Dickinson, part II

Coleridge, Ancient Mariner 

George Herbert

Ben Jonson

Comments

[Sally Ashton]

Thanks for posting, David. "Beyond consolation" indeed.

[Angela Ball]

Lovely discussion of Wordsworth and his importance as consoler and inspirer.