The blessing and the wish are wonderful but melancholy in both poems, they register the fact that such a sense of nature may not go without saying. Indeed, the structure of Tintern Abbey is fundamentally the same, ending with Wordsworth blessing his companion, as Coleridge had blessed his son Hartley Coleridge, with the prophetic wish that nature will be, for his sister, as imbued with a sense of spirit and life as it is for him. “Tintern Abbey” is directly influenced by Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight” (gracefully alluding to it through the reference to the shining moon at line 135, to which compare the last lines of Frost at Midnight), and by the intense and melancholy reflections on the relationship of memory to present peace that is the heart of Coleridge’s poem. At the least, what has been lost is one’s own earlier self. The passage of time is felt through the relationship between memory and loss, through the memory of what has been lost. The poem is about subjectivity and time-about what time does to subjectivity. The natural world is seasonal and essentially timeless, but human life is time-bound, not seasonal and cyclical but headed toward age and death. He returns to hear “again / These waters,” to see “t hese steep and lofty cliffs,” to repose under “ this dark sycamore.” More important, perhaps, is that he is returning at “ this season,” which is to say that the place is the same and so is the time. ![]() He had last been there in August 1793 now he has returned and can measure how much he has changed by how little the natural landscape has. Wordsworth composed the poem on July 13, 1798, but he did not write it down for another few days, until he and his sister reached Bristol, so the thought that it records is the thought that he actually had on his return to the Wye. ![]() ![]() 153 Wordsworth was to regret this line afterward, and it should not be taken too literally it is, rather, an indication of what he does not worship at this time, the personal or Christian God). In the poem, Wordsworth knows where the abbey itself is because he is revisiting the banks of the River Wye however, he is not returning to Catholicism but to an earlier version of his own soul and the worship of Nature that was and continues to be his (l. But for the 28-year-old Wordsworth, faith was to be found elsewhere, in the woods, not the abbeys, and faith was not in God but in nature or the spirit of nature. ![]() (William Shakespeare alludes to such ruins in sonnet 73, where he talks of the “bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang”). The abbey itself was originally built in the 12th century, and its remains date from the 13th it was abandoned after 1536 when England began its cataclysmic transition to Protestantism, and Henry VIII (and later Elizabeth I) seized, despoiled or destroyed Catholic religious holdings. The full title deserves attention since the poem is not a description of Tintern Abbey itself but of the River Wye (in South Wales, where he was on a walking tour with his sister), miles away from that beautiful relic. (In conversation, Wordsworth always called it “Tintern Abbey,” and this natural abbreviation has persisted.) It is the last poem in the 1798 edition of the revolutionary book he wrote with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads. More properly called Lines: Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour, 13 July 1798, this is one of William Wordsworth’s greatest poems, second perhaps only to the Intimations Ode in its influence and power.
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