Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey"

“Tintern Abbey” is an abbreviation of the full title “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798.” I know right, why would someone make a title that long? Wordsworth probably had his reasons, I’m guessing he had some kind of method for that long winded madness!

But, any who, this poem is written in blank verse or non-rhyming iambic pentameter. Wordsworth uses a variety of iambic rhythms that stresses different words in particular lines in the way that they would be spoken naturally without ruining his meter. This is a very effective tool in making you reflect on certain moments in the poem you wouldn’t necessarily pause at if written otherwise. There are themes of man and nature, of memory, and of transformation.

The poem starts on the banks of the river Wye at a place called Tintern Abbey, looking back on the scenery that the speaker had not laid eyes on for five years. He recalls the importance of the picture of the landscape he is looking down at and remembers how it had once meant so much to him and how it helped him cope with having to live in “the din/ Of towns and cities.” (Tintern Abbey 25-26) While looking at the beauty of the abbey he is forced to recon with a melting pot of emotions, experiencing overwhelming nostalgia from what he once felt before, coping with the deep thoughts of what and how he feels now in his current moment and also contemplative on what he will feel in the future when he looks back on that particular day. He once "boun[d] o'er the mountains" (68) and thought all of it “was all in all” (75) and now he has “learned/ To look on nature, not as in the hour/ Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes/ The still sad music of humanity.” (88-91)

He is forced to think of more pressing/ complex matters, no longer dwelling in the simplicity and innocence of life but in the symphony of aging men, slowing fading into his inevitable darkness, grappling for something more than what this life has to offer, searching his mind for thoughts to ease the sad music of humanity. He sees that everything is much grander than he had ever imagined before when he was a boy and he realizes that his sister will experience the same revelation in the future. He hopes that she will look back to that same day just as he has, and remember a time that she came to a place where she and her brother shared not only the moment that they lived in, but that the memory of that moment is something interconnected through the space of time and interwoven through the realms of different worlds, and that a simple thought of a life is transcendent even after death.

This poem is about much more than just a mountain, or a daisy, or how beautiful nature looked five years ago when the speaker took a walk with his little sister around an abbey. It’s about how he changed, and ultimately how we as people change over time. How we look back on things at different times of our lives and see them through new eyes of new experience and are forced to reminisce upon who we were and who we’ve now become, making us face the reality of why and how. Why did we take the path that we did and why does our memory sometimes fail to recall what actually happened in our lives? How did we get off track or how did we lose that wonder of innocence?




My questions are:

1. What does everyone perceive the “still, sad music of humanity” to be and could this be correctly/ successfully interpreted in many different ways?

2. If Wordsworth says that he was just a boy five years ago is he really even a man yet? What distinguishes the crossing over from boyhood into manhood and are his thoughts based on an entitlement of turning eighteen or something along those lines?

3. What do you think his thoughts would be if he came back to the abbey again at another time, except fifty years down the road?

- Vivian Ralena Williams