Lines Written a Few

Miles above Tintern

Abbey

Tintern Abbey in 1794, a watercolour by J. M. W.

Turner
Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern
Abbey is a poem by William Wordsworth.
The title, Lines Written (or Composed) a
Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on
Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a
Tour, July 13, 1798, is often abbreviated
simply to Tintern Abbey, although that
building does not appear within the
poem. It was written by Wordsworth after
a walking tour with his sister in this
section of the Welsh Borders. The
description of his encounters with the
countryside on the banks of the River
Wye grows into an outline of his general
philosophy. There has been considerable
debate about why evidence of the human
presence in the landscape has been
downplayed and in what way the poem
fits within the 18th century loco-
descriptive genre.

Background
The poem has its roots in Wordsworth's
personal history. He had previously
visited the area as a troubled twenty-
three-year-old in August 1793. Since then
he had matured and his seminal poetical
relationship with Samuel Taylor Coleridge
had begun. Wordsworth claimed to have
composed the poem entirely in his head,
beginning it upon leaving Tintern and not
jotting down so much as a line until he
reached Bristol, by which time it had just
reached mental completion. Although the
Lyrical Ballads upon which the two
friends had been working was by then
already in publication, he was so pleased
with what he had just written that he had
it inserted at the eleventh hour as the
concluding poem. Scholars generally
agree that it is apt, for the poem
represents the climax of Wordsworth's
first great period of creative output and
prefigures much of the distinctively
Wordsworthian verse that was to
follow.[1]

The poem is written in tightly-structured

decasyllabic blank verse and comprises
verse-paragraphs rather than stanzas.
Categorising the poem is difficult, as it
contains some elements of the ode and
of the dramatic monologue. In the
second edition of Lyrical Ballads,
Wordsworth noted: "I have not ventured
to call this Poem an Ode but it was
written with a hope that in the transitions,
and the impassioned music of the
versification, would be found the
principle requisites of that species of
composition." The apostrophe at its
beginning is reminiscent of the 18th
century landscape-poem, but it is now
agreed that the best designation of the
work would be the conversation poem,
which is an organic development of the
loco-descriptive.[2] The silent listener in
this case is Wordsworth's sister Dorothy,
who is addressed in the poem's final
section. Transcending the nature poetry
written before that date, it employs a
much more intellectual and philosophical
engagement with the subject that verges
on Pantheism.[3]

Outline of themes
The poem's tripartite division
encompasses a contextual scene-setting,
a developing theorisation of the
significance of his experience of the
landscape, and a final confirmatory
address to the implied listener.
 Lines 1–49

Revisiting the natural beauty of the Wye

after five years fills the poet with a sense
of "tranquil restoration". He recognises in
the landscape something which had
been so internalised as to become the
basis for out of the body experience.

Lines 49-111

In "thoughtless youth" the poet had

rushed enthusiastically about the
landscape and it is only now that he
realises the power such scenery has
continued to have upon him, even when
not physically present there. He identifies
in it "a sense sublime/ Of something far
more deeply interfused,/ Whose dwelling
is the light of setting suns" (lines 95–97)
and the immanence of "A motion and a
spirit, that impels/ All thinking things, all
objects of all thought,/ And rolls through
all things" (lines 100–103). With this
insight he finds in nature "The anchor of
my purest thoughts, the nurse,/ The
guide, the guardian of my heart, and
soul/ Of all my moral being" (lines 108–
111).

Lines 111-159

The third movement of the poem is

addressed to his sister Dorothy, "my
dearest Friend,/ My dear, dear Friend," as
a sharer in this vision and in the
conviction that "all which we behold is
full of blessings". It is this that will
continue to create a lasting bond
between them.

Literary and aesthetic

context
Having internalised the landscape,
Wordsworth claimed now “to see into the
life of things” (line 50) and, so enabled, to
hear “oftentimes/ The still sad music of
humanity” (92-3), but recent critics have
used close readings of the poem to
question such assertions. For example,
Marjorie Levinson views him “as
managing to see into the life of things
only ‘by narrowing and skewing his field
of vision’ and by excluding ‘certain
conflictual sights and meanings’”.[4] Part
of her contention was that he had
suppressed mention of the heavy
industrial activity in the area, although it
has since been argued that the “wreaths
of smoke”, playfully interpreted by
Wordsworth as possible evidence “of
some Hermit’s cave” upslope, in fact
acknowledges the presence of the local
ironworks, or of charcoal burning, or of a
paper works.[5]

A i t b Th H f th "I F t
A print by Thomas Hearne of the "Iron Forge at
Tintern" (1795)

Another contribution to the debate has

been Crystal Lake's study of other poems
written after a visit to Tintern Abbey,
particularly those from about the same
time as Wordsworth's. Noting not just the
absence of direct engagement on his
part with “the still sad music of
humanity” in its present industrial
manifestation, but also of its past
evidence in the ruins of the abbey itself,
she concludes that this “confirms
Marjorie Levinson‘s well-known argument
that the local politics of the
Monmouthshire landscape require
erasure if Wordsworth’s poem is to
advance its aesthetic agenda.”[6]

The poems concerned include the

following:

1745. Rev. Dr. Syned Davies, Epistle IV

“Describing a Voyage to Tintern Abbey,
in Monmouthshire, from Whitminster in
Gloucestershire”
About 1790. Rev. Duncomb Davis,
“Poetical description of Tintern
Abbey”
1790s. Edmund Gardner, “Sonnet
written in Tintern Abbey”
1796. Edward Jerningham, “Tintern
Abbey” [7]
 About 1800. Rev. Luke Booker,
“Original sonnet composed on leaving
Tintern Abbey and proceeding with a
party of friends down the River Wye to
Chepstow”

As the boat carrying Syned Davies

neared Tintern Abbey, he noted the
presence of “naked quarries” before
passing to the ruins, bathed in evening
light and blending into the natural
surroundings to give a sense of
“pleasurable sadness”.[8] The poem by
Davies more or less set the emotional
tone for the poems to come and brackets
past and present human traces far more
directly than does Wordsworth. His
fellow clergyman Duncomb Davis, being
from the area, goes into more detail.
After a historical deviation, he returns to
the present, where

… now no bell calls monks to

morning prayer,
Daws only chant their early matins
there,
Black forges smoke, and noisy
hammers beat
Where sooty Cyclops puffing, drink
and sweat,

following this with a description of the

smelting process and a reflection that
the present is more virtuous than the
past. He anticipates Wordsworth by
drawing a moral lesson from the scene,
in his case noting the ivy-swathed ruin
and exhorting,

Fix deep the bright exemplar in thy

heart:
To friendship’s sacred call with joy
attend,
Cling, like the ivy, round a falling
friend.[9]

Similar reflections appear in the two

contemporary sonnets. For Edmund
Gardner, “Man’s but a temple of a shorter
date”,[10] while Luke Booker, embarking at
sunset, hopes to sail as peacefully to the
“eternal Ocean” at death.[11] The action of
Wordsworth's poem therefore takes
place in an already established moral
landscape. Its retrospective mood draws
on a particularly 18th century emotional
sensibility also found in Edward
Jerningham's description of the ruins,
with their natural adornments of moss
and ‘flow’rets’, and reflected in J. M. W.
Turner’s watercolour of them.
Wordsworth's preference in his poem is
for the broader picture rather than human
detail, but otherwise it fits seamlessly
within its contemporary literary and
aesthetic context.

References
1. Arthur Beatty, William Wordsworth,
his doctrine and art in their historical
 relations, University of Wisconsin
Studies #17, 1922, p.64
2. J. Robert Barth, Romanticism and
Transcendence: Wordsworth,
Coleridge, and the Religious,
University of Missouri, 2003, p.79
3. Geoffrey Durrant, p. 24.
4. James Castell, "Wordsworth and the
‘Life of Things’” in The Oxford
Handbook of William Wordsworth,
OUP 2015, p.740
5. Dr Dewey Hall, Romantic Naturalists,
Early Environmentalists: An
Ecocritical Study, Ashgate Publishing
2014, pp.124-8
 6. Crystal B. Lake, "The Life of Things
at Tintern Abbey", Review of English
Studies (2012) pp.444-465
7. Poems and Plays, Vol.2, p.135
8. Google Books
9. Quoted in Heath's guide to Tintern
Abbey
10. The sonnet originally appeared
pseudonymously, accompanying a
similarly moralising sonnet on the
Severn in The European Magazine
vol.30, p.119
11. Booker's sonnet appeared in Charles
Heath’s guide to Tintern Abbey

Bibliography
 Durrant, Geoffrey. William Wordsworth
(Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1969)

External links

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to this article:
Lines Written a Few Miles above
Tintern Abbey

Wordsworth biography and works

Online Text of Poem

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