Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey

Summary

Tintern Abbey, as the poem is usually called, is a meditation in blank verse spoken on the banks of the River Wye a few miles upstream of the ruined Cistercian abbey on the border of England and Wales. Its first title dates it to 13 July 1798, when Wordsworth was on a walking tour with his sister Dorothy, and it was printed that autumn as the last poem in Lyrical Ballads. The poem moves through five verse paragraphs. In the first, the speaker notes that five years have passed since he last stood here, and he looks again at the cliffs, the orchards, the hedgerows run wild and the smoke rising from the woods. In the second, he says that these remembered forms have not been lost to him: in lonely rooms and noisy towns they have brought him tranquil restoration, perhaps prompted small unremembered acts of kindness, and given him a blessed mood in which the body is laid asleep and an eye made quiet sees into the life of things. The third paragraph admits that this may be a vain belief, but says how often his spirit has turned to the sylvan Wye. The fourth contrasts his younger self, who bounded over the hills like a roe and loved nature as an appetite, with the man he is now. That earlier rapture is gone, but he has gained a mind that hears the still, sad music of humanity and feels a presence, a motion and a spirit, that rolls through all things; nature has become the anchor of his purest thoughts and the guardian of his moral being. In the last paragraph he turns to his companion, his dear Sister, sees his own former self in her wild eyes, and blesses her: nature will lead her from joy to joy, and in later years her mind will be a mansion for these scenes, and she will remember that they stood here together. Wordsworth later said he composed the whole poem in his head between leaving Tintern and reaching Bristol.

Top Lessons

• Memory as a store laid up

  The speaker says the scene has lived in him for five years and that in this moment there is life and food for future years. The poem treats remembered beauty as a reserve that sustains a person in dull rooms and noisy cities.

• Loss and recompense

  The speaker admits that the dizzy raptures of his youth are gone and will not come back, but he refuses to mourn: he has gained a sober, thoughtful love that includes the sad music of humanity. The poem is a model of growing older without bitterness.

• What is the presence in nature?

  The speaker feels a presence, a motion and a spirit that rolls through all things, and calls nature the guardian of his moral being. Readers have long asked whether this describes the Creator known through creation or a spirit within nature itself; the poem keeps its language deliberately open.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

The poem describes a restorative use of memory in language that touches the physiology of its day. Remembered scenes bring sensations felt in the blood and along the heart and pass into the mind as tranquil restoration; in the blessed mood the breath and even the motion of the blood seem almost suspended until the speaker is laid asleep in body and becomes a living soul. His phrase about letting his genial spirits decay draws on the older idea of vital and animal spirits, and appears to echo Milton's Samson Agonistes. The poem has been read as an early account of nature and memory as consolation in low spirits, connected with Wordsworth's own unsettled state on his 1793 visit; such readings are interpretive. The fever of the world is figurative.

• Verse paragraph 2

  Remembered landscape gives sensations felt in the blood and heart and tranquil restoration, then a trance-like mood in which bodily motion seems suspended.

• Verse paragraph 3

  The speaker turns in spirit to the Wye amid the fretful stir and fever of the world.

• Verse paragraph 5

  He hopes his sister will have healing thoughts in solitude, fear, pain or grief, and speaks of his own genial spirits.