Composed in the middle of July 1798, “Tintern Abbey” was the last poem submitted for the publication of Lyrical Ballads, which was already in the press at Bristol. As the coda to Lyrical Ballads, “Tintern Abbey” represents a pivotal modulation in Wordsworth’s poetic development and ambition, prefiguring much of his distinctive verse to follow. Its sustained meditative subjectivity, masterful control of tone, elevated theme, scale of conceptual development, and orchestrated musicality mark the convergence of Wordsworth’s powers of aesthetic invention and the concerns he is to elaborate in the masterworks of his great decade from 1797-1807—the “Intimations” Ode, The Prelude, The Recluse, The Excursion, and shorter lyrics such as “Resolution and Independence” and “Elegiac Stanzas” (“Peele Castle”).

The distinctive Wordsworthian themes of the reciprocity of nature and the mind in the formation of individual consciousness and character, the significance of memory for intellectual and spiritual growth, the child’s visionary communion with nature and the loss of that power with age, the attraction toward pantheism and nature mysticism, and the yearning for permanence coupled with the recognition of mortality, are synthesized for the first time in the poem. In subject, tone, dimension, and form, “Tintern Abbey” marks the climax of Wordsworth’s first great period of creativity, heralds his maturity as a poet, and establishes a model for his mature poetic methodology. In doing so, the poem envisions a new form of self-consciousness and understanding of the power of the imagination that are distinctively Romantic.

The poem was occasioned by a short walking tour of the Wye valley in southwest England near the Welsh border that Wordsworth and Dorothy took in July 1798, revisiting scenes that a troubled younger William had first seen during a solo ramble in the summer of 1793. In 1843, Wordsworth recalled that no poem of his had originated under more pleasant circumstances and that he had composed it entirely in his head during the return to Bristol, where it was written down that evening.

The poem consists of five verse paragraphs of varying length written in blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter). In form, it resembles the English Pindaric ode, though the apostrophe to “my dearest friend” (the poet’s sister Dorothy) in the final paragraph admits an element of dramatic monologue. In the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth wrote that though he did not venture to call the poem an ode, he hoped that the poem’s “transitions, and the impassioned music of the versification” would meet the lofty purpose, and the aesthetic and structural demands, of the ode form. A locodescriptive poem, “Tintern Abbey” draws upon the 18th-century genre of landscape poetry while transcending the traditional form in the complexity of its tone, subject, and development of thought. It bears close affinity to the genre of the “conversation” poem, a meditative lyric originating in the speaker’s contemplation of nature and addressed to a silent listener (Dorothy Wordsworth, in this case). Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight” (1798), a conversation poem that employs a similar pattern of rhetorical movement as “Tintern Abbey” without attaining its emotional complexity and level of imaginative synthesis, is recognized by scholars as an influential model for Wordsworth’s poem.

“Tintern Abbey” consists of three parts: 1.) a locodescriptive introduction depicting the Wye river valley scenery and establishing the setting of the poem; 2.) the speaker’s reflection on the personal significance of this landscape, referring to the memory of his first visit and his experiences of distress in the intervening years; and 3.) his emergence from solitary introspection to address his sister, in whom he sees a reflection of his earlier, less self-conscious self. This tri-partite structure traces the evolution of the speaker’s ego over time, exploring the Wordsworthian self’s continuity-within-discontinuity as it confronts change within a “Then” versus “Now” framework.

Though ostensibly a celebratory poem extolling the beauties of nature and their restorative effect on the mind, “Tintern Abbey” reveals a disquieting subtext of loss, misgiving, and omission. The speaker attempts to persuade himself that nature will never betray him, and that the disappearance of the ecstatic, unconscious identification with it that he enjoyed in childhood has been adequately compensated for by his mature recognition of nature’s healing power. Repeated verbal cues suggest, however, that the speaker is struggling to resist the thought that this belief may be merely a visionary delusion. This tension underlies the poem’s ode-like transitions, its back-and-forth movement of temporal settings and shifts in tone, as the speaker negotiates between his past and present selves before turning toward his sister Dorothy, who embodies his younger self and hope for continuity, in the final paragraph.

Poet Biography

William Wordsworth (1770-1850) is widely considered the most important English poet since Milton. A major figure in British Romanticism, he was born in Cockermouth in the English Lake District. He recalled in later life an idyllic childhood with his younger sister and lifelong companion, Dorothy, among the pastoral scenery of the Westmoreland hills, lakes, and valleys, until the death of their mother in 1778. After attending Hawkshead grammar school, William entered Cambridge University in 1787. His academic performance suffered as the result of social and political distractions, and, roused by the enthusiasm then sweeping liberal English circles for the French Revolution, he toured revolutionary France in the summer of 1790. After graduating Cambridge, Wordsworth returned to France where he became politically radicalized and had a love affair with Annette Vallon, the daughter of a royalist family, who gave birth to their daughter, Anne-Caroline, in December 1792. As the Reign of Terror gripped the French Republic in the fall of 1792, Wordsworth escaped to England, which declared war on the France in 1793, preventing his return to his infant child and her mother.

Active in radical London circles during the next few years, Wordsworth suffered a mental breakdown brought on by the depressing course of events in France, the shattering of his ideals, monetary and family woes, and remorse over his love affair. In 1795, he achieved financial stability through a friend’s inheritance and set up a household with Dorothy in the West Country of England, where he met Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1797. It was a seminal meeting: The energetic Coleridge infused Wordsworth with the confidence necessary to achieve his mature poetic identity, and the Wordsworths moved to Alfoxden, near Coleridge’s residence in Somersetshire. The creative dialogue of their relationship yielded ambitious poetic plans and a radically original theory of poetics. Wordsworth and Coleridge’s collaboration resulted in the publication of Lyrical Ballads; with a Few Other Poems in 1798, a watershed in literary history that marks the convergence of many of the thematic, psychological, sociological, and aesthetic concerns that came to be associated with English Romanticism. The anonymously published first edition of Lyrical Ballads included Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere” and “The Nightingale,” and Wordsworth’s “The Thorn,” “We are Seven,” “Lines Written in Early Spring,” and the long meditative poem known as “Tintern Abbey,” which concludes the volume.

Following the publication of Lyrical Ballads, the Wordsworths wintered in Germany with Coleridge, and relocated to Grasmere in the Lake District upon their return from the continent in 1799. Urged by Coleridge to attempt a grand epic poem encapsulating his mature philosophical and aesthetic ideas, Wordsworth made elaborate plans for The Recluse, which, however, was never fully completed. Simultaneously, Wordsworth undertook a verse autobiography, The Prelude, or, Growth of a Poet’s Mind (1850), conceived as a preliminary to The Recluse project, which he composed and revised extensively over the next thirty years but withheld from publication. A meditative history of the evolution of the poet’s imagination, from the mystical, visionary experiences of childhood to the philosophical transcendence of manhood, The Prelude introduces Wordsworth’s poetic innovation of “spots of time,” early memories that combine precise description of landscape with attendant emotional experiences whose numinous intensity, recollected in tranquility, yields epiphanies of insight.

With the publication of The Excursion, the first part of The Recluse, in 1814, Wordsworth’s poetic reputation was firmly established. By the time he became poet laureate in 1843, the elder Wordsworth had long outlived the political liberalism of his youth and in the preceding years had come to be seen by younger generations of Romantics, such as Percy Bysshe Shelley, as an apostate to the cause of progressive social reform. The apparent anticlimax of Wordsworth’s conservative turn and his decline of creative power is exemplified by his sonnet sequence in favor of capital punishment, composed in 1839-40. At the time of Wordsworth’s death in 1850, reviewers, such as Charles Dickens, disparaged his reputation for political reasons, suggesting his poetry was outmoded and irrelevant in the context of contemporary social concerns. Wordsworth’s magnum opus, The Prelude, was published posthumously in 1850; its critical reception ultimately secured Wordsworth recognition as one of the major contributors to the English literary tradition, second only to Milton, Shakespeare, and Spenser.

Poem Text

Five years have past; five summers, with the length

Of five long winters! and again I hear

These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs

With a soft inland murmur.—Once again

Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,

That on a wild secluded scene impress

Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect

The landscape with the quiet of the sky.

The day is come when I again repose

Here, under this dark sycamore, and view                       

These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts,

Which at this season, with their unripe fruits,

Are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves

'Mid groves and copses. Once again I see

These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines

Of sportive wood run wild: these pastoral farms,

Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke

Sent up, in silence, from among the trees!

With some uncertain notice, as might seem

Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods,                            

Or of some Hermit's cave, where by his fire

The Hermit sits alone.

                                             These beauteous forms,

Through a long absence, have not been to me

As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:

But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din

Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,

In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,

Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;

And passing even into my purer mind                                      

With tranquil restoration:—feelings too

Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,

As have no slight or trivial influence

On that best portion of a good man's life,

His little, nameless, unremembered, acts

Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust,

To them I may have owed another gift,

Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,

In which the burthen of the mystery,

In which the heavy and the weary weight                                

Of all this unintelligible world,

Is lightened:—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.

                                                       If this

Be but a vain belief, yet, oh! how oft—

In darkness and amid the many shapes

Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir

Unprofitable, and the fever of the world,

Have hung upon the beatings of my heart—

How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee,

O sylvan Wye! thou wanderer thro’ the woods,

        How often has my spirit turned to thee!

And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought,              

With many recognitions dim and faint,

And somewhat of a sad perplexity,

The picture of the mind revives again:

While here I stand, not only with the sense

Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts

That in this moment there is life and food

For future years. And so I dare to hope,

Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first

I came among these hills; when like a roe

I bounded o’er the mountains, by the sides                              

Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams,

Wherever nature led: more like a man

Flying from something that he dreads, than one

Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then

(The coarser pleasures of my boyish days

And their glad animal movements all gone by)

To me was all in all.—I cannot paint

What then I was. The sounding cataract

Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,

The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,                       

Their colours and their forms, were then to me

An appetite; a feeling and a love,

That had no need of a remoter charm,

By thought supplied, nor any interest

Unborrowed from the eye.—That time is past,

And all its aching joys are now no more,

And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this

Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur; other gifts

Have followed; for such loss, I would believe,

Abundant recompense. For I have learned                               

To look on nature, not as in the hour

Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes

The still sad music of humanity,

Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power

To chasten and subdue.—And I have felt

A presence that disturbs me with the joy

Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean and the living air,                                    

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still

A lover of the meadows and the woods

And mountains; and of all that we behold

From this green earth; of all the mighty world

Of eye, and ear,—both what they half create,

And what perceive; well pleased to recognise

In nature and the language of the sense                                  

The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,

The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul

Of all my moral being.

                                           Nor perchance,

If I were not thus taught, should I the more

Suffer my genial spirits to decay:

For thou art with me here upon the banks

Of this fair river; thou my dearest Friend,

My dear, dear Friend; and in thy voice I catch

The language of my former heart, and read                             

My former pleasures in the shooting lights

Of thy wild eyes. 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. 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! Nor, perchance—

If I should be where I no more can hear                                  

Thy voice, nor catch from thy wild eyes these gleams

Of past existence—wilt thou then forget

That on the banks of this delightful stream

We stood together; and that I, so long

A worshipper of Nature, hither came

Unwearied in that service: rather say

With warmer love—oh! with far deeper zeal

Of holier love. Nor wilt thou then forget,

That after many wanderings, many years

Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs,                         

And this green pastoral landscape, were to me

More dear, both for themselves and for thy sake!

Wordsworth, William. “Tintern Abbey.” 1798. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

Lines 1-22

In the first verse paragraph, the speaker describes the sights and sounds of the Wye river valley a few miles upstream from the ruin of Tintern Abbey. Sitting under a sycamore tree, he observes the same scenery he viewed from the identical spot five years earlier. Returning to this delightful pastoral landscape, he dotes on its visual details: the lofty cliffs, the summer green that clothes everything in the same vibrant hue, the smoke that connects the hazy hillsides with the sky, the unripe fruits of the cottage trees surrounding the small dwellings, the lines of hedge-rows marking property boundaries. As the speaker takes in the rustic scenery, he begins to enter a meditative reverie: The secluded scene elicits thoughts “of more deep seclusion” (Line 7), and he imagines that the wreaths of smoke rising above the trees issue from the fires of unseen vagrant dwellers in the woods, or perhaps from a cave where a hermit sits alone by his fire.

Lines 23-50

In the second paragraph, the speaker reflects that, though he has been long absent from these beautiful forms, their memory has often nourished him with “tranquil restoration” (Line 31) amid the noise and loneliness of urban life. Such memories have been accompanied by “unremembered pleasure” (Line 32) and have elicited feelings that may have influenced the speaker ethically, in his little acts of love and kindness. More importantly, the cultivation of his sensibility aroused by the beauty of the Wye environs has led him to moments of transcendent insight, a “serene and blessed mood” (Line 42) of heightened perception, in which the body’s motion seems suspended and we see “into the life of things” (Line 50).

Lines 51-59

After momentarily admitting this might be merely a “vain belief” (Line 52), the speaker reaffirms how often he has sought consolation in the nourishing memory of this landscape. In darkness and depression, when the “fever of the world” (Line 55) has oppressed his spirit, he has repeatedly turned toward the Wye, whom he apostrophizes as “Thou wanderer thro' the woods” (Line 58)[.]

Lines 60-113

The speaker recalls himself at 23, when he romped like a wild animal along the hillsides and streams of the Wye valley, as if fleeing from something he dreaded. As a youth, he relished nature with a visceral passion, fully given to sensation without need for thought. Looking back, he admits he “cannot paint / What then I was” (Line 77); the “aching joys” (Line 86) and “dizzy raptures” (Line 87) of those days are now irretrievably gone.

A “sad perplexity” (Line 62) accompanies the reawakening of these memories, yet the speaker believes “other gifts” (Line 88) have recompensed him for the loss of his former undifferentiated, unconscious absorption in nature. He has learned to see nature while often hearing the “still, sad music of humanity” (Line 93), the knowledge of which has chastened and subdued him. He has experienced “a sense sublime” (Line 97) of an immanent power “far more deeply interfused, / Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns […] / A motion and a spirit, that impels / All thinking things, all objects of all thought, / And rolls through all things” (Lines 98-103). This spiritual experience sustains his love for nature, though now modulated to a more intellectual key, and he recognizes in nature “the nurse, / The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul / Of all my moral being” (Lines 111-113).

Lines 114-162

The speaker turns to address his “dearest Friend” (Line 118), his sister Dorothy, in whose “wild eyes” (Line 122) he reads the “former pleasures” (Line 121) of his youth, and in whose voice he catches the “language of [his] former heart” (Line 129)[.] He prays that he may behold in Dorothy a little while longer what he once was, and, claiming that “Nature never did betray / The heart that loved her” (Lines 125-126), commends his sister to the nurturing benevolence of nature, whose beauty and quietness inures us against the pettiness of social intercourse, as well offers a balm for life’s more tragic occurrences. The speaker imagines that when the “wild ecstasies” (Line 141) of Dorothy’s youthful exuberance are matured into a “sober pleasure” (Line 142) like his own, she will tenderly remember his advice during times of distress or loneliness, carrying within her the memory of their visit and her brother’s joyful devotion to both her and nature after he is gone.