Five years have passed; five
summers, with
the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a sweet inland murmur. -- Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
Which 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,
Among the woods and copses lose themselves,
Nor, with their green and simple hue, disturb
The wild green landscape. 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 wreathes 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.
Though absent long,
These forms of beauty 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 may have had no 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 lighten'd -- 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 day-light; 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 through the wood
How often has my spirit turned to thee!
And now, with gleams of
half-extinguished
though[t,]
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, or 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
The still, sad music of humanity,
Not harsh or 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
recognize
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 chearful 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. Now 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.
(cf<http://www.bartleby.com/145/ww138.html>)
The first edition
of Lyrical ballads concluded
with ‘Lines written a few miles above
Tintern
Abbey’. In
the context of the discussion it serves to bring together a number of
the themes
already considered in relation to the Ballads.
The full title of
this poem is "Lines Composed a Few
Miles above Tintern Abbey, on
Revisiting the
Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13,
1798."
(
cf<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Wordsworth>)
‘Tintern
Abbey’
is an autobiography in summary. Visiting
the Wye valley with
Dorothy in July
1798. He remembers back five years to
1793, when the poet
of
‘ Salisbury
Plain’ (having lost his companion)was making his way into Wales.
In ‘Tintern
Abbey’(1798) it is located at the point when he
returned from France in
1973, a time of
intense personal dislocation and of social
and political chaos: ‘I can’t
paint/what then I
was’
( cf.< http://www.vanderbilt.edu/AnS/english/English151W-03/wordsworth%5Btinternabbey%5D.htm
> )
The poem opens
with the speaker's declaration that five
years have passed since he last
visited
this
location, encountered its tranquil, rural scenery, and heard the
murmuring
waters of the
river:
(
cf http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/wordsworth/section1.html
)
Five
years have passed; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a sweet inland murmur.
He recites the
objects he sees again, and describes their effect upon
him: the "steep and
lofty cliffs"
impress upon him "thoughts of more
deep seclusion"; he leans against the
dark sycamore
tree and looks at the cottage-grounds and the
orchard trees, whose fruit is
still unripe. He
sees the "wreaths of smoke"
rising up from cottage chimneys between
the trees, and
imagines that they might rise from
"vagrant dwellers in the houseless
woods,"
or
from the cave of a hermit in the deep forest.
(
cf http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/wordsworth/section1.html
)
Once
again
Do I
behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
Which 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,
Among the woods and copses lose themselves,
Nor, with their green and simple hue, disturb
The wild green landscape. 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 wreathes 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.
From
a distance
of five years Wordsworth
judges himself not
then to have
been
fully in control;
it was a time both of fear , ‘a man/ Flying from something that
he
dreads ‘ ,
and of
‘dizzy raptures’. Five years
later, he is
in control ;it
is
the fact
that
he is now
able to record
the difference
that
enables him to
claim( as he
was also doing through
the person the Pedlar) that he
had grasped a knowledge of
the ‘one
life’ in
terms of a tranquillity of mind not
available to him before.
In this passage ,
besides , we meet a
complex significance of memory as a central
feature of
Wordsworth’s creative instincts :
( cf. <
http://www.vanderbilt.edu/AnS/english/English151W-03/wordsworth%5Btinternabbey%5D.htm
> )
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.
There is
a passivity of
a mature poet; the maturity lies
partly in the recognition
that
there is
loss here also. As a
young man he
enjoyed
a sense of
closeness to the
physical world
without which we are diminished.
Sadness is a
necessary part of
the
process,
therefore. It results in
the mood of the following passage:
( cf.
< http://www.vanderbilt.edu/AnS/english/English151W-03/wordsworth%5Btinternabbey%5D.htm
> )
And now, with gleams of
half-extinguished though[t,]
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.
The latter
part of
‘Tintern Abbey’ constitutes a
compliment to the role
Dorothy had
played in helping
Wordsworth cultivate his
mature relationship with nature and
society, with his fellow
man, and with poetry. He indicates
how important it was for
him to feel that he
not only had Dorothy’s companionship,
but a secure place within a
circle of friends. The
pain, fear, anger of recent years
could now be subsumed in
nature. In addition
to Dorothy, he
now
had friends to
encourage him, friends who
in turn
needed him.
( cf.
< http://www.vanderbilt.edu/AnS/english/English151W-03/wordsworth%5Btinternabbey%5D.htm
> )
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.
In the final lines
of ‘ Tintern Abbey’, though, we
return to Dorothy and the Why
valley that memorialises
a poetic gift that
Wordsworth can now no longer
maintain
as
his own. He now
implies that for
him to become
a complete poet, Dorothy must
be
on hand
to exrcise a
perceptive insight he
himself no longer enjoys.
There are a
lot of unresolved
contradictions here: the context
is the first thing,
the
supposed
need for Dorothy is the
second, contained within the
first.
( cf < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tintern_Abbey_%28poem%29 > )
Form
"Tintern Abbey"
is composed in blank verse, which
is a name used to describe
unrhymed lines in
iambic pentameter. Its style is therefore
very fluid and natural; it
reads as easily
as if it were a prose piece. But of course
the poetic structure is tightly
constructed;
Wordsworth's slight variations on the stresses
of iambic rhythms is
remarkable. Lines
such as "Here, under this dark
sycamore, and view" do not quite
conform to the
stress-patterns of the meter, but fit into
it loosely, helping Wordsworth
approximate the
sounds of natural speech without grossly
breaking his meter.
Occasionally,
divided lines are used to indicate a kind of
paragraph break, when the
poet changes
subjects or shifts the focus of his discourse.
(
cf http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/wordsworth/section1.html
)