Tintern
Abbey: William Wordsworth - Summary and Critical Analysis
In the poem Tintern Abbey the poet has expressed his tender
feeling towards nature. He has specially recollected his poetic idea of Tintern
Abbey where he had gone first time in 1793. This is his second visit to this
place. Wordsworth has expressed his intense faith in nature.
There is Wordsworth’s
realization of God in nature. He got sensuous delight in it and it is all in
all to him. Tintern Abbey impressed him most when he had first visited this
place. He has again come to the same place where there are lofty cliffs, the
plots of cottage ground, orchards groves and copses. He is glad to see again
hedgerows, sportive wood, pastoral farms and green doors. This lonely place,
the banks of the river and rolling waters from their mountain springs present a
beautiful panoramic light. The solitary place remands the poet of vagrant
dwellers and hermits’ cave.
The poem is in five
sections. The first section establishes the setting for the meditation. But it
emphasizes the passage of time: five years have passed, five summers, five long
winters… But when the poet is back to this place of natural beauty and
serenity, it is still essentially the same. The poem opens with a slow,
dragging rhythm and the repetition of the word ‘five’ all designed to emphasize
the weight of time which has separated the poet from this scene. The following
lines develop a clear, visual picture of the scent. The view presented is a
blend of wildness and order. He can see the entirely natural cliffs and
waterfalls; he can see the hedges around the fields of the people; and he can
see wreaths of smoke probably coming from some hermits making fire in their
cave hermitages. These images evoke not only a pure nature as one might expect,
they evoke a life of the common people in harmony with the nature.
The second section begins with the meditation.
The poet now realizes that these ‘beauteous’ forms have always been with him,
deep-seated in his mind, wherever he went. This vision has been “Felt in the
blood, and felt alone the heart” that is. It has affected his whole being. They
were not absent from his mind like form the mind of a man born blind. In hours
of weariness, frustration and anxiety, these things of nature used to make him
feel sweet sensations in his very blood, and he used to feel it at the level of
the impulse (heart) rather than in his waking consciousness and through
reasoning. From this point onward Wordsworth begins to consider the sublime of
nature, and his mystical awareness becomes clear. Wordsworth’s idea was that
human beings are naturally uncorrupted.
The poet studies
nature with open eyes and imaginative mind. He has been the lover of nature
form the core of his heart, and with purer mind. He feels a sensation of love
for nature in his blood. He feels high pleasure and deep power of joy in
natural objects. The beatings of his heart are full of the fire of nature’s
love. He concentrates attention to Sylvan Wye – a majestic and worth seeing
river. He is reminded of the pictures of the past visit and ponders over his
future years. On his first visit to this place he bounded over the mountains by
the sides of the deep rivers and the lovely streams. In the past the soundings
haunted him like a passion. The tall rock, the mountain and the deep and gloomy
wood were then to him like an appetite. But that time is gone now. In nature he
finds the sad music of humanity.
The third section
contains a kind of doubt; the poet is probably reflecting the reader’s possible
doubts so that he can go on to justify how he is right and what he means. He doubts,
for just a moment, whether this thought about the influence of the nature is
vain, but he can’t go on. He exclaims: “yet, oh! How often, amid the joyless
daylight, fretful and unprofitable fever of the world have I turned to thee
(nature)” for inspiration and peace of mind. He thanks the ‘Sylvan Wye’ for the
everlasting influence it has imprinted on his mind; his spirit has very often
turned to this river for inspiration when he was losing the peace of mind or
the path and meaning of life. The river here becomes the symbol of
spirituality.
Though the poet has become serious and
perplexed in the fourth section the nature gives him courage and spirit enough
to stand there with a sense of delight and pleasure. This is so typical of
Wordsworth that it seems he can’t write poetry without recounting his personal
experiences, especially those of his childhood. Here he also begins from the
earliest of his days! It was first the coarse pleasures in his ‘boyish days’,
which have all gone by now. “That time is past and all its aching joys are now
no more, and all its dizzy raptures”. But the poet does not mourn for them; he
doesn’t even grumble about their loss. Clearly, he has gained something in
return: “other gifts have followed; for such loss… for I have learnt to look on
nature, not as in the hour of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes the
still, sad music of humanity”. This is a philosophic statement about maturing,
about the development of personality, and of the poetic or philosophic mind as
well. So now the poet is able to feel a joy of elevated thought, a sense
sublime, and far more deeply interfused. He feels a sense of sublime and the
working of a supreme power in the light of the setting sun, in round oceans and
in the blue sky. He is of opinion that a motion and a spirit impel all thinking
things. Therefore Wordsworth claims that he is a lover of the meadows and of
all which we see from this green earth. Nature is a nurse, a guide and the
guardian of his heart and soul. The poet comes to one important conclusion: for
all the formative influences, he is now consciously in love with the nature. He
has become a thoughtful lover of the meadows, the woods and the mountains.
Though his ears and eyes seem to create the other half of all these sensations,
the nature is the actual source of these sublime thoughts.
The fifth and last
section continues with the same meditation from where the poet addresses his
younger sister Dorothy, whom he blesses and gives advice about what he has
learnt. He says that he can hear the voice of his own youth when he hears her
speak, the language of his former heart; he can also “read my former pleasure
in the soothing lights of thy wild eyes’. He is excited to look at his own
youthful image in her. He says that nature has never betrayed his heart and
that is why they had been living from joy to joy. Nature can impress the mind
with quietness and beauty, and feed it lofty thoughts, that no evil tongues of
the human society can corrupt their hearts with any amount of contact with it.
The poet then begins
to address the moon in his reverie, and to ask the nature to bestow his sister
with their blessings. Let the moon shine on her solitary walk, and let the
mountain winds blow their breeze on her. When the present youthful ecstasies
are over, as they did with him, let her mind become the palace of the lovely
forms and thought about the nature, so that she can enjoy and understand life
and overcome the vexations of living in a harsh human society. The conclusion
to the poem takes us almost cyclically, back to a physical view of the ‘steep
woods’, ‘lofty cliffs’ and ‘green pastoral landscape’ in which the meditation
of the poem is happening.
The poet has expressed
his honest and natural feelings to Nature’s Superiority. The language is so
simple and lucid that one is not tired of reading it again and again. The
sweetness of style touches the heart of a reader. This is the beauty of
Wordsworth’s language.
