ROMANTICISM AND WORDSWORTH

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I.                   I.                   I.                   INTRODUCTION: ROMANTIC CONTEXT

 

 

 

 

II.                II.                II.                BEFORE AND AFTER: NEOCLASSICISM AND REALISM

 

 

 

II.1.    NEOCLASSICISM

 

 

 

II.2.    REALISM

 

 

 

 

I.                   III.             III.             WILLIAM WORDSWORTH’S BIOGRAPHY AND WILLIAM WORDSWORTH’S POETRY

 

 

 

 

II.                IV.            IV.            THE ROLE OF POETRY IN THE ROMANTIC ERA

 

 

 

 

III.             V.               V.               COMMENTARY ON “TINTERN ABBEY”

 

 

 

 

IV.            VI.            VI.            RELATION OF THE POEM WITH TODAY

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

---------WORDSWORTH AND THE ROMANTIC POETRY----------

 

I.   INTRODUCTION: ROMANTIC CONTEXT.

 

Emerging in Germany with the poetry of Goethe and the influence of theoretical thinkers such as Schlegel, the new lyrics that toured Europe in the late XVIII century was characterized by its confidence in the imagination as a bridge to the transcendental knowledge. The new prominence that reached the individual gave way to the lyrical exploitation of the fight inside and the human experience, while finding correspondences in the nature and meaning to the poet conceived as a subject of knowledge, able to get rid of rational constraints and reborn in a powerful innocence. The rediscovery of the Middle Ages brought with it a new curiosity about the power of love (novel of chivalry, courteous love), while the search for a medieval epic and lyric popular and distinctly national, coupled with the exaltation of the concept of nation brought sometimes growing utopism political and patriotism. In England, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth announced the Lyrical Ballads in their lyrics, and it was Wordsworth who defined poetry as “Spontaneous flow of powerful feelings". Previously, the poet William Blake explored in his Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience in the form of the ballad, the song narrative Coleridge used for the famous “Ballad of the ancient mariner” and Wordsworth adapted everyday language and conversational in his poems. Along with them, John Keats, Lord Byron’s melancholy and picaresque and the allegorical and political Shelley were at the forefront of English Romanticism.
At a time when the concept of nation was defined and identification of national roots charged emotional resonances, the exploration of the origins in literary and cultural medieval context assumed a great importance.

G. MAYOS SOLSONA, Ilustración y romanticismo: Introducción a la polémica entre Kant y Herder, Barcelona, 2004; page 16.

 

Besides all that, Romanticism is an artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated around the middle of the XVIIIth century in Western Europe, during the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution. It was partly a revolt against aristocratic, social, and political norms of the Enlightenment period and a reaction against the scientific rationalization of nature in art and literature. It stressed strong emotion as a source of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as trepidation, horror, and the awe experienced in confronting the sublimity of untamed nature. It elevated folk art, nature and custom, as well as arguing for an epistemology based on nature, which included human activity conditioned by nature in the form of language, custom and usage.

The ideologies and events of the French Revolution and Industrial Revolution are thought to have influenced the movement. Romanticism elevated the achievements of what it perceived as misunderstood heroic individuals and artists that altered society. It also legitimized the individual imagination as a critical authority which permitted freedom from classical notions of form in art.

In a general sense, the term "Romanticism" has been used to refer to certain artists, poets, writers, musicians, as well as political, philosophical and social thinkers of the late XVIII and early XIX centuries.. Despite this general usage of the term, many attempts have been made to describe what Romanticism and the term “romantic” refer to: for some Romanticism had its beginnings in the English XVII century. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romantic_era

These differing versions of the age and lineage of Romanticism are matched with a corresponding diversity in the descriptions offered by those of our time who have given special care to the observation of it. Romanticism was a fairy way of writing; it implies reminiscence, the romantic schools have always depended more or less on the past.

         Among those for whom the word implies a social or political ideology and temper, Romanticism spells anarchy in every domain. The Romantic mind tends to be affected by an inferiority-complex.

 

The function of the human mind that is to be regarded as peculiarly romantic is for some the heart as opposed to the head; for others, the Imagination, as contrasted with Reason and the Sense of Fact.

 

Typical manifestations of the spiritual essence of Romanticism have been variously conceived to be a passion for moonlight, red waistcoasts like Théophile Gautier’s, for Gothic churches, talking exclusively about oneself, heroship, for losing oneself in an ecstatic contemplation of nature.

 

It is by different historians supposed to have begotten the French Revolution and the Oxford movement, the Return to Rome and the Return to the State of Nature, the philosophy of Hegel, the philosophy of Schopenhauer and the philosophy of Nietzsche the revival of neo-Platonic mysticism in Coleridge, scientific materialism (Wordsworth).

The result of all these samples is confusion of terms, and of ideas. The word Romantic has come to mean so many things that, by itself, it means nothing. Victor Hugo testified there were those who preferred to leave à ce mot de romantique un certain vague fantastique et indefinissable qui en redouble l’horreur. Identifying Romanticism with the essential spirit of the French Revolution, finds the chief cause of our woes in that movement’s breach with the past, in its discarding of the ancient traditions of European civilization and seeks the cure in a return to an older faith and an older and political and social order and abandonment of the optimistic fatalism generated by the idea of progress.

 

For one of the few certain things about Romanticism is that the name of it offers one of the most complicated, fascinating and instructive of all problems in semantic.

 

Not to get confused with its meaning, we should learn to use the word ”Romanticism” in the plural. Historians recognize that “Romanticism” of one country may have little in common with that of another, and that all events should be defined in distinctive terms.

 

A student of literature must set out from the simple and obvious fact that there are various historic events, episodes or movements, to which different historians have given the name.

 

Broadly speaking, we can divide early Romantic theory into two parts: the first associated with Coleridge and Wordsworth in England and the second Schiller and Goethe in Germany.

 

The first one stresses the sublime and vital function of man’s imagination, which gives order and meaning to his surroundings, and of poetry, the imaginations chief’s instrument of expression. This great power seemed solitary, the great “I am”, the dread watch-tower of man’s absolute self, the most potent embodiment of the individual self-consciousness.

 

When certain of these Romanticisms have in truth significant elements in common, there are not necessarily the same elements. Each of these Romanticisms should be resolved by a more thorough and discerning analysis into its elements. Many intellectual historians have seen Romanticism as a key movement in the Counter-Enlightenment, a reaction against the Age of Enlightenment. Whereas the thinkers of the Enlightenment emphasized the primacy of deductive reason, Romanticism emphasized intuition, imagination, and feeling, to a point that has led to some Romantic thinkers being accused of irrationalism.

ABRAMS, H. M. English Romantic Poets, Oxford University Press, New York, 1960, pages 3-24)

In visual art and literature, "Romanticism" typically refers to the late 18th century through the mid 19th century. Recurring themes found in Romantic literature are the criticism of the past, emphasis on women and children, and respect for nature. Furthermore, several romantic authors, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, based their writings on the supernatural/occult and human psychology, which they were fascinated with.

Romanticism in British literature developed in a different form slightly later, mostly associated with the poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose co-authored book Lyrical Ballads (1798) sought to reject Augustan poetry in favour of more direct speech derived from folk traditions. Both poets were also involved in Utopian social thought in the wake of the French Revolution.

         The poet and painter William Blake is the most extreme example of the Romantic sensibility in Britain, epitomised by his claim “I must create a system or be enslaved by another man's.” The painters Turner and John Constable are also generally associated with Romanticism. Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley and John Keats constitute another phase of Romanticism in Britain.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romantic_era

One of Romanticism's key ideas and most enduring legacies is the assertion of nationalism, which became a central theme of Romantic art and political philosophy. From the earliest parts of the movement, with their focus on development of national languages and folklore, and the importance of local customs and traditions, to the movements which would redraw the map of Europe and lead to calls for self-determination of nationalities, nationalism was one of the key vehicles of Romanticism, its role, expression and meaning.

The general theme of Joseph Warton’s poem The lover of Nature  is one which had been a commonplace for several centuries: the superiority of Nature to art. The Natural in contrast with the artificial meant that which is not man-made; and within man’s life, it was supposed to consist in those expressions of human nature which are most spontaneous, unpremeditated, untouched by inflexion or design and free from the bondage of social convention. “Ce n’est pas raison, cried Montaigne, que l’art gagne le point d’honneur sur notre grande et puissante mere Nature. Nous avons tant recharge la beauté et richesse de ses ouvrages par nos inventions que nous l’avons tout à fait étouffée”. While the ‘natural’ was, on the one hand, conceived as the wild and spontaneous and irregular, it also was conceived as the simple, the naïve, the unsophisticated. Consequently, the idea of preferring nature to custom and art usually carried with it the suggestion of a program of simplification, it implied primitivism. The ‘natural’ was a thing you reached by going back and by leaving out.

 

The idea of the sublime is a very important one in the Romantics. Is has been described as “the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling” the sublime is related to the concepts of vasteness, inifinity, astonishment, when for instance we are contemplating nature and its elements of natural and supernatural ( enraged sea, immense mountains; when contemplating ruins of cathedrals, medieval architecture), maybe even evoking the battlements of a fortress.

 

Another characteristic of the Romantic is ethical dualism, a conviction that there are in a man’s constitution two natures ceaselessly at war (the inwardness, of Christianity and its preoccupation with the heart as distinguished from the outward act, its tendency to introspection.

 

ABRAMS, H. M. English Romantic Poets, Oxford University Press, New York, 1960 pages 110-128 BAYLEY, J. The Romantic Survival, Chatto & Windus, London, 1957

 

 

 

 

II. BEFORE AND AFTER: NEOCLASSICISM AND REALISM.

II. 1.NEOCLASSICISM

 

Order, logic, balance, propriety, reason and mastery of the emotions were the salient characteristics of this literary movement emerged in Europe in the XVIII eighteenth century as a result of French classicism of XVII. Of objectives moralizing and didactic, followed patterns formal study of Greco-Roman culture. By the second decade of the XIXth nineteenth century, neoclassical became visibly moved by the romance.
In the neoclassical theory, poetry was a genre of second order; the most important one was theater. The neoclassical have their source in the seminal work of Aristotle, Poetics, which, as we know, deals primarily with tragedy.
Theater was the literary genre of more popular impact until the XIXth century, since it reached the illiterate through sight and hearing. Its main objective was didactismo, ie. theater was intended to teach useful things from a moral standpoint. Didactics, serenity, balance decorum, the notion of beauty, the imitation of nature, and how it should be Man) were the major aesthetic features of this period.
But in Romanticism what matters is the authenticity staff, the expression of feelings under a semblance tormented, troubled, inner reflection, the truth of feelings, confessions from them. Romanticism supposed confront existential problems, to reflect on topics such as death.

 

Romanticism had its first roots in England, primarily due to the tradition of the Lutheran Church. The personal experience of the Bible, the fact that is death, the main concern of anyone, could be freely commented, made it possible for Lutheran countries an earlier and stronger Romanticism, and therefore developed before then in Catholic countries.

RULL, E. La poesía y el teatro en el siglo XVIII: Neoclasicismo, Taurus, Madrid, 1987

 


II.2.REALISM.



      In the mid-XIXth century, several European writers show a dramatic rejection of the fantasies and passions of Romanticism. The effort to write again about the reality of human social life, which begins to dominate the literary activity, gives rise to the movement known as Realism. The birth of sociology, the emergence of chronic journalistic and the emergence of photography influenced the development of this new aesthetic, which revalued the ordinary man and his present everyday activities as central themes in literature and arts. The objectivity, observation, the detailed description, clarity and stylistic trial dispassionate appear among the core values of a new literature that is devoted to recording the daily lives of ordinary people, and gives them dignity.

 

Unlike the aristocratic heroes of Romanticism, the actors in realistic works belong to the middle class and the broad popular and proletarian sectors  of societies of the time. The social concern and careful psychological analysis of these characters, hitherto excluded from the XIXth century literary universe, appear as the fundamental characteristics of realistic fiction.

 RULL, E. La poesía y el teatro en el siglo XVIII: Neoclasicismo, Taurus, Madrid, 1987

 

 III. WORDSWORTH’S BIOGRAPHY AND POETRY

 

William Wordsworth was born in Cockermouth in Cumberland. His sister, the poet and diarist Dorothy Wordsworth, to whom he was close all his life was born one year later. After the death of their mother in 1778, she and William did not meet again for another nine years. In 1783 their father died.

Although many aspects of his boyhood were positive, he recalled bouts of loneliness and anxiety. It took him many years, and much writing, to recover from the death of his parents and his separation from his siblings. In 1790, he visited Revolutionary France and supported the Republican movement. The following year, he graduated from Cambridge without distinction. In November 1791, Wordsworth returned to France and took a walking tour of Europe that included the Alps and Italy. He fell in love with a French woman, Annette Vallon, who in 1792 gave birth to their child, Caroline. Because of lack of money and Britain's tensions with France, he returned alone to England the next year. The circumstances of his return and his subsequent behaviour raise doubts as to his declared wish to marry Annette but he supported her and his daughter as best he could in later life. During this period, he wrote his acclaimed "It is a beauteous evening, calm and free," recalling his seaside walk with his daughter, whom he had never seen. The occurring lines reveal his deep love for both child and mother. The Reign of Terror estranged him from the Republican movement, and war between France and Britain prevented him from seeing Annette and Caroline again for several years. There are also strong suggestions that Wordsworth may have been depressed and emotionally unsettled in the mid 1790s. With the Peace of Amiens again allowing travel to France, in 1802 Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy, visited Annette and Caroline in France. 1793 saw Wordsworth's first published poetry with the collections An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches That year, he also met Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Somerset. The two poets quickly developed a close friendship. Wordsworth and Coleridge (with insights from Dorothy) produced Lyrical Ballads (1798), an important work in the English Romantic movement. The volume had neither the name of Wordsworth nor Coleridge as author. One of Wordsworth's most famous poems, "Tintern Abbey", was published in the work, along with Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner". The second edition, published in 1800, had only Wordsworth listed as author, and included a preface to the poems, which was significantly augmented in the 1802 edition. This Preface to Lyrical Ballads is considered a central work of Romantic literary theory. In it, Wordsworth discusses what he sees as the elements of a new type of poetry, one based on the "real language of men" and which avoids the poetic diction of much eighteenth-century poetry. Here, Wordsworth also gives his famous definition of poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings from emotions recollected in tranquility." A fourth and final edition of Lyrical Ballads was published in 1805. During the harsh winter of 1798–1799, Wordsworth lived with Dorothy, and despite extreme stress and loneliness, he began work on an autobiographical piece later titled The Prelude. He also wrote a number of famous poems, including "the Lucy poems" Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey came to be known as the "Lake Poets". Through this period, many of his poems revolve around themes of death, endurance, separation, and grief. In 1802, after returning from his trip to France with Dorothy to visit Annette and Caroline, Wordsworth received the inheritance owed by Lord Lonsdale since John Wordsworth's death in 1783. Later that year, he married a childhood friend, Mary Hutchinson. Dorothy continued to live with the couple and grew close to Mary. The following year, Mary gave birth to the first of five children, John. Both Coleridge's health and his relationship to Wordsworth began showing signs of decay in 1804. With Napoleon's rise as Emperor of the French, Wordsworth's last wisp of liberalism fell.

The source of Wordsworth's philosophical allegiances as articulated in The Prelude and in such shorter works as "Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey" has been the source of much critical debate. While it had long been supposed that Wordsworth relied chiefly on Coleridge for philosophical guidance, more recent scholarship has suggested that Wordsworth's ideas may have been formed years before he and Coleridge became friends in the mid 1790s.

            For a time (starting in 1810), Wordsworth and Coleridge were estranged over the latter's opium addiction. Two of his children, Thomas and Catherine, died in 1812. In 1814 he published The Excursion as the second part of the three-part The Recluse. He had not completed the first and third parts, and never would complete them. However, he did write a poetic Prospectus to "The Recluse" in which he lays out the structure and intent of the poem. The Prospectus contains some of Wordsworth's most famous lines on the relation between the human mind and nature. BAYLEY, J. The Romantic Survival, Chatto & Windus, London, 1957

 

            Some modern critics recognise a decline in his works beginning around the mid-1810s. But this decline was perhaps more a change in his lifestyle and beliefs, since most of the issues that characterise his early poetry (loss, death, endurance, separation, abandonment) were resolved in his writings. But, by 1820 he enjoyed the success accompanying a reversal in the contemporary critical opinion of his earlier works. By 1828, Wordsworth had become fully reconciled to Coleridge, and the two toured the Rhineland together that year. When his daughter, Dora, died in 1847, his production of poetry came to a standstill. William Wordsworth died in Rydal Mount in 1850 and was buried at St. Oswald's church in Grasmere. His widow published his lengthy autobiographical "poem to Coleridge" as The Prelude several months after his death. Though this failed to arouse great interest in 1850, it has since come to be recognised as his masterpiece.

ABRAMS, H. M. English Romantic Poets, Oxford University Press, New York, 1960

 

 

 THE ROLE OF POETRY AND WORDSWORTH.

 

The poetry exists to make understandable a set of abstract notions, and these abstract notions have been taken over as truth from the natural philosophers such as Descartes, Newton, Leibnitz, and Locke. For other poets, mythologies were almost as unreal as they were to Worthwords, but their positive beliefs, their Deism was intellectually held, and it consequently appears in poetry mainly as rhetoric. 

 

Wordsworth, amongst others, was intent on transforming the place of poetry in society: from a specialised, agreeable, but not from very high-ranking pursuit and taste, it was to be given sherry, as Wordsworth scornfully put it. Poetry was to be no longer a relaxation, and a plaything separated from reason; now the poet’s purpose was to reconcile man with his surroundings, and his imagination with what it fed on in the external world.

 

Wordsworth had written in the letter to Lady Beaumont that ‘to be incapable of a feeling of poetry, in my sense of the word, is to be without love of human nature and reverence for God’. The poet might indeed feel that the cares of the world were on his shoulders. Worthwords intends to choose everyday subjects and ‘situations from common life’ and to throw over them a certain colouring of the imagination in order to present them in an unusual aspect.

 

Halfway through the XVIII century, poetry was exploring the world of external nature, and with ever-increasing delicacy and detail. Indeed, as fiction became more fantastic, poetry tended to become more exact, and to fix its eye more and more closely on the object. Romantic poetry was in danger of becoming a purely contemplative and exploratory power which might penetrate the individual mind with the same acuteness as it penetrated the external objects, but which has none the less lost the art of representing dramatically the conflicts between man as an individual and as a social being; between his illusions about his environment and the reality about it. A poem like The Prelude is sensitive and tentacular: the poet’s mind is reaching out into the mystery of itself and its surroundings, and the process cannot but be an exceedingly undramatic one. The essence of drama is clash; the essence of poetry is synthetic and healing, tending always towards harmony and similarity, not division and difference. Romantics believed that in so writing they were representing the nature of Reality.

BAYLEY, J. The Romantic Survival, Chatto & Windus, London, 1957, pages 3-24.

 

 

POETRY IN THE ROMANTIC ERA.

 

It is arguable that the novelists more than the poets of the XIX century are the real beneficiaries of the great Romantic endowment. Certainly the novel and not the long poem was to become the dominating literary form of the century, and the novel went on to success in a field in which poetry virtually ceased to compete- the relationship between the individual imagination and the problems and complications of society.

 

The technical requirements made verse more exacting, and the forms and technique of verse were not equal to the inmense expansion of the imagination into regions which it would take prose fiction to settle and colonise.

 

One can hardly emphasize how little the early Romantic theories deserve such epithets such as dreamy, exotic, eccentric, private, escapist, devitalised-all the adjectives which have come by association to cling to the word Romantic- nor how much they require such terms as practical, sensible, unifying, all-embracing, morally aware and so on. The sensitive point in the structure of early Romantic theory is the relationship between the poet’s mind and the world which it contemplates. In the course of the XIX century the Romantic preoccupation with the relationship between the creator and his material took every possible form and carried every implication to its most explicit conclusions.

 

All slogans, explanations and critical catchphrases by poets and their critics suffer from being almost impossible to relate to the actuality of poetry itself. Thus, such terms as “imagination”, “sensibility”, poetic truth’ can shed very little light on what we get out of poetry or on the reasons why poetry affects us; what they can do is to show us why at certain periods certain poets and their readers thought about poetry as they did. The feeling that poetry should deal with morally acceptable ideas is one that finds expression in many periods of criticism, usually in the argument that intellect and tradition are sounder guides in the making of poetry than are instinct and imagination. The argument may also take the form that poetry has no transmutative power over ideas that are wrong, foolish or unacceptable to the reader; that what the imagination seizes on as beauty is not necessarily truth. The antithesis thus presents itself between the worth of ideas and the worth of poetry, and it was one that greatly occupied the Romantic theorists. Can philosophical and poetic truth be made synonymous, or is there an inevitable gap between them? Coleridge thought there was not; and he hoped that Wordsworth’s poem The Prelude would demonstrate their compatibility, by being the first philosophical poem. The reality sadly disappointed him. It became natural for the later Romantics to make the separation between the meaning and the ideas in a poem and the imaginative power with which it makes its impact on the reader. Such a separation would not have seemed possible for Wordsworth, who never conceived his imagination as functioning apart from the full authority of abstract ideas, and who never attempted to liberate his imagination from their service. Poetry and geometric truth are for him close allies, and he tells us how in his childhood he was never able to keep the symbols of geometry and algebra out of his mind, apart from the living spectacle of nature.

 

Worthwords was a poet who could only have appeared in the XVIII, when mythologies were exploited and a belief in the visible universe as the body of which God was the soul alone remained. His beliefs can be viewed as data furnished to him by a tradition. He, as well as Dante, may be said to have employed his sensibility within a framework of received beliefs.

His most positive beliefs, these by which he appears in reaction against the scientific tradition, were built up by him representative of the modern situation; the situation in which beliefs are made out of poetry rather than poetry out of beliefs.

 

To animise the real world, the universe of death, that the mechanical system of philosophy had produced, but to do this without using an exploded mythology or fabricating a new one; that was the special task and mission of Wordsworth.  It was the visible world what Worthwords sought, and he felt that mechanical materialism had substituted a universe of death for that which moves with light and life instinct, actual, divine, true. Worthword’s poetic activity was largely conditioned by the reality standards of his time, which left him alone with the universe. But his creative sensibility had taught him that he was not alone with an inanimate cold world, but with an active universe, a universe capable of being moulded and modified by he plastic power which abode within himself. Poetry becomes with Wordsworth the record of moments of ennobling interchange of action from within and from without; it takes on a psychological aspect. There’s scarcely one of my poems which does not aim to direct the attention to some moral sentiment or to some general principle, or law or thought or of our intellectual constitution. Wordsworth’s aloneness with the universe marks his position in the history of poetry and beliefs; it seems to determine the quality of much of his work.

 

He believed in the capacity of the mind co-operate with this active universe, to contribute something to its own to it in perceiving it; and it was that belief which encouraged him to hope that poetry might be delivered from the fetters of the mechanical tradition without being allowed to fall into disrepute as ‘unreal’ or fanciful.

 E. LEGOUIS, Choix de Poésies, , 1961, Préface pages 1-10; BAYLEY, J. The Romantic Survival, Chatto & Windus, London, 1957, pages 24-67)

 

 

V. COMMENTARY ON “TINTERN ABBEY”

 

  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                        10
      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,                     20
      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                        30
      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,                               40
      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--                        50
      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,                               60
      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                            70
      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,                              80
      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 recompence. For I have learned
      To look on nature, not as in the hour
      Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes                    90
      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                             100
      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                  110
      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,                          120
      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                    130
      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,                       140
      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                    150
      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!

 http://www.bartleby.com/145/ww138.html

 

 

The full title of the poem tells us readers many things: W could notice the date, which is the eve of Bastille Day. Wordsworth was born on 7 April 1770 and was 28 when he wrote this poem.

 

Wordsworth sets the action in the ‘humble and rustic’ life because in that condition ‘the essential passions of the heart find a better soul, in which they can attain their maturity’ and ‘because they ‘speak a plainer and more emphatic language’. SANDERS, A. The Short Oxford History of English literature, Oxford University Press, Oxford , 1994

 

 

We can see as we read through the poem that five years (“five summers with the length/ Of five long winters”) have passed since he visited the place he is talking about. He says aloud from memory a place where maybe he went to when he was younger (“the steep and lofty cliffs”) that has now become for the poet a place of retirement, a place where he can think, a place of introspection. He describes also the effects produced on his mind, on his feelings; this place is now one of “thoughts of more deep seclusion; he describes also a beautiful landscape with the quiet of the sky”. He is resting under a “dark sycamore” contemplating “cottage-grounds” and “the orchard trees”, whose fruits are not ripe yet.

 

I would say that Wordsworth suggests the contemplation of this landscape through the eyes of someone who is taking a walk (“I again repose here under”…) and in an evening fireside (“Or of some Hermit's cave, where by his fire/ The Hermit sits alone.”) 

 

Then the poet describes what his feelings were towards “these beatous forms” after some time away from them, alone in the cities or in towns, crowded and ugly places. Let us not forget that Wordsworth is against the industrialization and social background of a developing Britain, and there are many other examples in his poetry that indicate this. When he remembered what it was like to be in the Nature he was overwhelmed with “sweet sensations”. It “felt in the blood, and felt along the heart." It is a peaceful sight which brings the poet “ tranquil restauration feelings”. He remembers experiences out of the past and he feels joyful when reviving them (“here I stand with pleasing thoughts”). The poet is telling us of powers within the human mind that he cannot himself fully comprehend, but which he feels to be of immense importance.

Worthwords is aware that this loss of bodily awareness is accompanied by a "mystical communion with the life-force of the universe", "the life of things", a similar communion that is to be found in Coleridge's earlier poem This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison. But for Coleridge the life-force is more specifically referred to as the Unitarian God, the one Life, "the Almighty Spirit". (A. SANDERS, The Short Oxford History of English Literature, Oxford University Press, 1994, page 87 )

 

         He was someone different back then, when he used to “bound o'er the mountains” and the “sides of the rivers”. In those days nature was everything for him. Now time has gone (“And all its aching joys are now no more”) by and he doesn’t “mourn” because he has gained more than he has lost. He’s gained, and I have to be honest on this one and say I don’t know what he is actually talking about: he has learned  how to "look on nature, not as in the hour / Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes / The still, sad music of humanity." Wordsworth makes it clear that he does not "mourn or murmur" for this loss because the heightened experience that follows is "abundant recompense"; more has been gained than lost in the passing of time. And he can now sense the presence of something far more subtle, powerful, and fundamental in the light of the setting suns, the ocean, the air itself, and even in the mind of man; this energy seems to him "a motion and a spirit that impels / All thinking thoughts....” he still does love nature. The whole poem is It like an internal monologue that in the end involves the sister, Dorothy, who turns out to be the one to whom the poem is addressed.

 

The  lyrical voice tells us that even if he hadn’t felt the way he had, or if he wasn’t to understand these things, everything would have bee perfect since Dorothy, (“Dear, dear friend”) is with him. Her voice and her manners remind him of when he was younger (“what I once was”).

 

Later on, he states that either when Dorothy grows older (when (“thy mind /Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms,”) “Thy memory be as a dwelling place / For all sweet sounds and harmonies”) or when she feels alone, sad or sick (“If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief,/ Should be thy portion”), she can always remember what this place, this living place of positive feelings, experiences, sensations, and joyful recollections meant to him , and she can always remember this journey back into the past.

 

The experience Wordsworth is describing is one between the poet's mind and the external world. The poet loves Nature for its own sake alone, and the presence of Nature gives beauty to the poet's mind. When Wordsworth sees into "the life of things" he sees things not for their potential use but for themselves.

 

 

The poem strikingly avoids any localizing detail. It opens with the evocation of a particular place "these steep and lofty cliffs", "these plots of cottage-ground". The most striking absent detail is any mention of the actual ruins themselves.

The biggest difference between Tintern and the conversation poems before it is that this feeling is associated with the human capacity to learn from experience. Coleridge's earlier conversation poems: The Eolian Harp, Frost at Midnight and This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison come as a direct response to the beauty of the objects perceived before him but WW experiences this "serene and blessed mood" via the visual memories that the objects have impressed in his mind.

 

         Wordsworth finally turns to his sister Dorothy who accompanied him in his second visit to the Wye in 1798 but never been there previously and Wordsworth sees in her the figure of himself when he first visited the area (we can see that in Wordsworth description of Dorothy as having "wild eyes"). Dorothy's new experience not only benefits herself but William as well for the landscape is made "more dear" since Dorothy now treasures it.

            The subject o “Tintern Abbey” is memory; to be more accurate, childhood memories involving natural beauty. Wordsworth emphasizes the reciprocity of nature. Dorothy echoes this last line in a poem of her own written over 30 years later, expressing the feelings that William had hoped the experience of the Wye would bestow upon her. Dorothy's memory is not only reciprocal with Nature itself but with her brother William as well. The final conclusion of the poem is one that values reciprocal experience between man, woman and Nature. (The Short Oxford History of English literature ABRAMS, H. M. English Romantic Poets, Oxford University Press, New York, 1960

; http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/wordsworth/section1.html)

 

 

VI. RELATION OF THE POEM WITH TODAY

 

Wordsworth sees nature as a place of introspection, a place where he can be at peace; we have seen that Wordsworth loves nature for its own sake alone, and that for him it’s the most pleasurable view; he’s extremely happy to be in contact with Nature. Natural landscapes are full of deep pleasure, because he recalls a pastime paradise; so in a way Nature itself brings time back (the time when he was younger).  Wordsworth actually admires the beauty of Nature, he loves everything that nature produces , everything he is genuinely describing. Nature actually does cool things down (like, for instance this sort stress, of not being quite comfortable, this bad feeling that Wordsworth talks about in the poem when he is the city or in a town, disappears the minute he sits down and contemplates the marvellous wondrous that is before him).
 
Wordsworth probably saw the destruction of his loved nature coming because of the Industrial Revolution. So, in a way he was doing some kind of an ecological manifesto. He was not the first in the last nor the last to do such a thing.
Before him there was Chief Seattle (1784-1866), a Native American who in January 1855 ceded his lands in Washington State. He wrote a letter to the American President at that time, Franklin Pierce stating that for the white man, “one portion of land is the same to him as the next; the earth is not his brother but his enemy, and when he has conquered it, he moves on. He kidnaps the earth from his children and he does not care; his appetite will devour the earth and leave behind a desert; the earth does not belong to the man, man belongs to the earth. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth. Man did not weave the web of the life; he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself”. (M. LOVRIC. The World’s Greatest Letters, Past times; Oxford 2002 pages 146-147). 
 
Nowadays we have the Global warming problem all over the place. We have got world leaders aiming at assessing the impact and extent of climate change, there are many scientists in various countries who say that the evidence of global worsening is overwhelming. So strong is the evidence linking the warming climate of human actions that only the most irresponsible world leaders can turn their back on global warming and its causes. Nature is an issue of great importance in these days, and it is a responsibility that we have to take seriously.

 

 

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

 

 

 

ABRAMS, H. M. English Romantic Poets, Oxford University Press, New York, 1960

 

AULLÓN DE HARO, P. La poesía en el siglo XIX: Romanticismo y Realismo, Taurus, 1988

 

BAYLEY, J. The Romantic Survival, Chatto & Windus, London, 1957

 

LEGOUIS, E. William Wordsworth Choix de Poésies, Société d’Édition

 

LOVRIC, M. The World’s Greatest Letters, PAST TIMES, OXFORD, 2002

 

MAYOS SOLSONA,  G Ilustración y romanticismo: Introducción a la polémica entre Kant y Herder, Herder, Barcelona, 2004)

Belles Lettres, Paris, 1961

 

RULL, E. La poesía y el teatro en el siglo XVIII: Neoclasicismo, Taurus, Madrid, 1987

 

SANDERS, A. The Short Oxford History of English literature, Oxford University Press, Oxford , 1994

 

http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/wordsworth/section1.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romantic_era

http://www.bartleby.com/145/ww138.html