Memory and Nature: A Guide to William Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey"

• The Poem
• Notes on Context
• Notes on Form
• Notes on Content
• Commentary and Quotations

Wordsworth announces at the very beginning of “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey” that his subject is memory, that he is returning to walk in a place he has been before, and that his experience of the place is all bound together with his memories of being there in the past:

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.

Wordsworth repeats “again” or “once again” four times in the poem’s first section description of the “wild secluded scene,” the landscape all green and pastoral, a fitting place for “some Hermit’s cave, where by his fire / The Hermit sits alone.” He has walked this lonely path before, and in the second section of the poem he is moved to appreciate how the memory of its sublime natural beauty has succored him:

...’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...

And more than succor, more than simple tranquility, his communion with the beautiful forms of the natural world has brought him to a kind of ecstasy, a higher state of being:

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.

But then another line is broken, another section begins, and the poem turns, its celebration giving way to a tone almost of lament, because he knows he is not the same thoughtless animal child who communed with nature in this place years ago:

That time is past,
And all its aching joys are now no more,
And all its dizzy raptures.

He has matured, become a thinking man, the scene is infused with memory, colored with thought, and his sensibility is attuned to the presence of something behind and beyond what his senses perceive in this natural setting:

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.

These are the lines that have led many readers to conclude that Wordsworth is proposing a kind of pantheism, in which the divine permeates the natural world, everything is God. Yet it seems almost as if he is trying to convince himself that his layered appreciation of the sublime is really an improvement over the thoughtless ecstasy of the wandering child. Yes, he has healing memories he can carry back to the city, but they also permeate his present experience of the beloved landscape, and it seems that memory in some way stands between his self and the sublime.

In the last section of the poem, Wordsworth addresses his companion, his beloved sister Dorothy, who has presumably been walking with him but has not yet been mentioned. He sees his former self in her enjoyment of the scene:

in thy voice I catch
The language of my former heart, and read
My former pleasures in the shooting lights
Of thy wild eyes.

And he is wistful, not certain, but hoping and praying (even though he uses the word “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.

Would it were so! But there is an uncertainty, a hint of mournfulness underneath the Poet’s declamations.