Hello Beautiful People,
This blog is Assignment writing on Paper- 103 ( Literature of the Romantics) assigned by Prof. Dr. Dilip Barad sir, Head of the English Department of Maharaja Krishnkumarsinhji Bhavsinhji Bhavangar University (MKBU).
Name :Bhatt Riddhiben D.
riddhi28bhatt@gmail.com
Sem :1
Roll No. :16
PG year :2020-2022
PG Enrollment No. :3069206420200004
Paper Name :103 ( Literature of the Romantic Period)
Topic Name :Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey- William Wordworth
Submitted to :Smt. S.B.Gardi Department of English
Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey
By William Wordworth
J Introduction:
Lines Written a Few Miles
above Tintern Abbey is a poem by William Wordsworth. The title, Lines Written 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.
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.” It opens with the speaker’s
declaration that five years have passed since he last visited this location,
encountered its tranquil, rustic scenery, and heard the murmuring waters of the
river. 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.
J Brief intro of William Wordworth:
William Wordsworth was
one of the founders of English Romanticism and one its most central figures and
important intellects. He is remembered as a poet of spiritual and
epistemological speculation, a poet concerned with the human relationship to
nature and a fierce advocate of using the vocabulary and speech patterns of
common people in poetry.
The son of John and Ann Cookson Wordsworth, William Wordworth was born on April 7, 1770 in Cockermouth, Cumberland, located in the Lake District of England: an area that would become closely associated with Wordsworth for over two centuries after his death. He began writing poetry as a young boy in grammar school, and before graduating from college he went on a walking tour of Europe, which deepened his love for nature and his sympathy for the common man: both major themes in his poetry. Wordsworth is best known for Lyrical Ballads, co-written with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and The Prelude, a Romantic epic poem chronicling the “growth of a poet’s mind.”
Wordsworth’s deep love
for the “beauteous forms” of the natural world was established early. The
Wordsworth children seem to have lived in a sort of rural paradise along the
Derwent River, which ran past the terraced garden below the ample house whose
tenancy John Wordsworth had obtained from his employer, the political magnate
and property owner Sir James Lowther, Baronet of Lowther (later Earl of
Lonsdale).
In his middle period
Wordsworth invested a good deal of his creative energy in odes, the best known
of which is “On the Power of Sound.” He also produced a large number of
sonnets, most of them strung together in sequences. The most admired are the
Duddon sonnets (1820), which trace the progress of a stream through Lake
District landscapes and blend nature poetry with philosophic reflection in a
manner now recognized as the best of the later Wordsworth.
Other sonnet sequences
record his tours through the European continent, and the three series of
Ecclesiastical Sketches (1822) develop meditations, many sharply satirical, on
church history. But the most memorable poems of Wordsworth’s middle and late
years were often cast in elegiac mode. They range from the poet’s heartfelt
laments for two of his children who died
in 1812—laments incorporated in The Excursion—to brilliant lyrical effusions on
the deaths of his fellow poets James Hogg, George Crabbe, Coleridge, and
Charles Lamb.
William Wordsworth was
the central figure in the English Romantic revolution in poetry. His
contribution to it was threefold. First, he formulated in his poems and his
essays a new attitude toward nature. This was more than a matter of introducing
nature imagery into his verse: it amounted to a fresh view of the organic
relation between man and the natural world, and it culminated in metaphors of a
wedding between nature and the human mind.
beyond that, in the
sweeping metaphor of nature as emblematic of the mind of God, a mind that
“feeds upon infinity” and “broods over the dark abyss.” Second, Wordsworth
probed deeply into his own sensibility as he traced, in his finest poem, The
Prelude, the “growth of a poet’s mind.” The Prelude was in fact the first long
autobiographical poem. Writing it in a drawn-out process of self-exploration,
Wordsworth worked his way toward a modern psychological understanding of his
own nature and, thus, more broadly, of human nature. Third, Wordsworth placed
poetry at the centre of human experience; in impassioned rhetoric he pronounced
poetry to be nothing less than “the first and last of all knowledge—it is as
immortal as the heart of man,” and he then went on to create some of the
greatest English poetry of his century. It is probably safe to say that by the
late 20th century he stood in critical estimation where Coleridge and Arnold
had originally placed him, next to John Milton—who stands, of course, next to
William Shakespeare.
J Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey :
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.—Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty
cliffs,
That on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect
The poem Lines Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey is
generally known as Tintern Abbey written in 1798 by the father of Romanticism
William Wordsworth. Tintern Abbey is one of the triumphs of Wordsworth's
genius. It may he called a condensed spiritual autobiography of the poet. It
deals with the subjective experiences of the poet, and traces the growth of his
mind through different periods of his life. Nature and its influence on the
poet in various stage forms the main theme of the poem. The poem deal with the
influence of Nature on the boy, the growing youth, and the man. The poet has
expressed his tender feeling towards nature.
He has specially recollected his
poetic idea of Tintern Abbey where he had gone first time in 1793. This is his
second visit to this place. Wordsworth has expressed his intense faith in
nature.
Realization of God in nature :
There is Wordsworth’s realization of
God in nature. He got sensuous delight in it and it is all in all to him.
Tintern Abbey impressed him most when he had first visited this place. He has
again come to the same place where there are lofty cliffs, the plots of cottage
ground, orchards groves and copses. He is glad to see again hedgerows, sportive
wood, pastoral farms and green doors. This lonely place, the banks of the river
and rolling waters from the mountain springs present a beautiful panoramic
light. The solitary place remands the poet of vagrant dwellers and hermits’
cave.
The poem is in realization of God in nature. The first section establishes the setting for the meditation. But it emphasizes the passage of time: five years have passed, five summers, five long winters… But when the poet is back to this place of natural beauty and serenity, it is still essentially the same.
Five section :
The poem opens with a
slow, dragging rhythm and the repetition of the word ‘five’ all designed to
emphasize the weight of time which has separated the poet from this scene. The
following lines develop a clear, visual picture of the scent. The view
presented is a blend of wildness and order. He can see the entirely natural
cliffs and waterfalls; he can see the hedges around the fields of the people;
and he can see wreaths of smoke probably coming from some hermits making fire
in their cave hermitages. These images evoke not only a pure nature as one
might expect, they evoke a life of the common people in harmony with the
nature.
The second section begins
with the meditation. The poet now realizes that these ‘beauteous’ forms have
always been with him, deep-seated in his mind, wherever he went. This vision
has been “Felt in the blood, and felt alone the heart” that is. It has affected
his whole being. They were not absent from his mind like form the mind of a man
born blind. In hours of weariness, frustration and anxiety, these things of
nature used to make him feel sweet sensations in his very blood, and he used to
feel it at the level of the impulse (heart) rather than in his waking
consciousness and through reasoning. From this point onward Wordsworth begins
to consider the sublime of nature, and his mystical awareness becomes clear.
Wordsworth’s idea was that human beings are naturally uncorrupted.
The poet studies nature
with open eyes and imaginative mind. He has been the lover of nature form the
core of his heart, and with purer mind. He feels a sensation of love for nature
in his blood. He feels high pleasure and deep power of joy in natural objects.
The beatings of his heart are full of the fire of nature’s love. He
concentrates attention to Sylvan Wye – a majestic and worth seeing river. He is
reminded of the pictures of the past visit and ponders over his future years.
On his first visit to this place he bounded over the mountains by the sides of
the deep rivers and the lovely streams. In the past the soundings haunted him
like a passion. The tall rock, the mountain and the deep and gloomy wood were
then to him like an appetite. But that time is gone now. In nature he finds the
sad music of humanity.
The third section
contains a kind of doubt; the poet is probably reflecting the reader’s possible
doubts so that he can go on to justify how he is right and what he means. He
doubts, for just a moment, whether this thought about the influence of the
nature is vain, but he can’t go on. He exclaims: “yet, oh! How often, amid the
joyless daylight, fretful and unprofitable fever of the world have I turned to
thee (nature)” for inspiration and peace of mind. He thanks the ‘Sylvan Wye’
for the everlasting influence it has imprinted on his mind; his spirit has very
often turned to this river for inspiration when he was losing the peace of mind
or the path and meaning of life. The river here becomes the symbol of
spirituality.
He fifth and last section
continues with the same meditation from where the poet addresses his younger
sister Dorothy, whom he blesses and gives advice about what he has learnt. He
says that he can hear the voice of his own youth when he hears her speak, the
language of his former heart; he can also “read my former pleasure in the
soothing lights of thy wild eyes’. He is excited to look at his own youthful
image in her. He says that nature has never betrayed his heart and that is why
they had been living from joy to joy. Nature can impress the mind with
quietness and beauty, and feed it lofty thoughts, that no evil tongues of the
human society can corrupt their hearts with any amount of contact with it.
The poet then begins to
address the moon in his reverie, and to ask the nature to bestow his sister
with their blessings. Let the moon shine on her solitary walk, and let the
mountain winds blow their breeze on her. When the present youthful ecstasies are
over, as they did with him, let her mind become the palace of the lovely forms
and thought about the nature, so that she can enjoy and understand life and
overcome the vexations of living in a harsh human society. The conclusion to
the poem takes us almost cyclically, back to a physical view of the ‘steep
woods’, ‘lofty cliffs’ and ‘green pastoral landscape’ in which the meditation
of the poem is happening.
The poet has expressed
his honest and natural feelings to Nature’s Superiority. The language is so simple
and lucid that one is not tired of reading it again and again. The sweetness of
style touches the heart of a reader. The medium of this poem is neither ballad
nor lyric but an elevated blank verse. The blank verse that is used in it is
low-toned, familiar, and moves with sureness, sereneness and inevitable ease.
It has the quiet pulse, suggestive of 'central peace', which is felt in all his
great poetry. This is the beauty of Wordsworth’s language.
J Main idea of Tintern Abbey by
Wordsworth:
Tintern Abbey” is the
young Wordsworth's first great statement of his principle (great) theme: that
the memory of pure communion with nature in childhood works upon the mind even
in adulthood, when access to that pure communion has been lost, and that the
maturity of mind present in adulthood offers compensation for a very better
way. Also, we see that Tintern is famous for its abbey and for the poets and
painters such as Wordsworth and Turner who visited it two hundred years ago in
the Romantic period.
It is indeed a
wonderfully romantic place, lying on the Welsh side of the winding valley of
the River Wye between Chepstow and Monmouth. This poem is also romantic so that
“Tintern Abbey” is unique to Wordsworth's Romantic theory because it contains
his characteristic use of isolation. The poem begins with Wordsworth returning
to the abbey after five years, accompanied by his sister Dorothy. ... The poem
says, “Five years have past; five summers, with the length – of five long
winters! Wordsworth's “Tintern Abbey” takes on an abundance of ideas regarding
nature's ability to preserve one's memories as well as past and present
perceptions. Wordsworth conveys his experiences with nature to readers through
his poem using vibrant imagery, a narrative-like structure and abstract
metaphors.
J Conclusion:
So after this discusson
we see that one way in which ‘Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey’
might be regarded as a transitional poem between earlier nature poetry of the
century and the Romantic movement (which Wordsworth was ushering in with his
poem) is in the way nature, in this poem, hovers somewhere between order and
chaos: it is not quite tamed, but nor is it completely wild either.
Wordsworth may imagine
that the smoke billowing up from those cottages is from hermits living entirely
separate from society in caves in the hills and woods, but he knows that this
is fancy, rather than reality. so the reminders of the real world of society,
building, and living are scattered throughout the wild hills and woods of the
countryside. This juxtaposition is what lends the place a particular
significance for Wordsworth. In the last analysis, then, ‘Lines Written a Few
Miles Above Tintern Abbey’ is a poem that shows Romanticism emerging from
earlier poetry, but also becoming something distinctive.
J References:
- 1. Castell James, "Wordsworth and the ‘Life of Things’” in The Oxford Handbook of William Wordsworth,
- 2. Stephen Maxfield. "William Wordsworth". Encyclopaedia Britannica, 17 Dec. 2020, https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Wordsworth. Accessed 12 February2021
- 3. "Wordsworth, William (WRDT787W)". A Cambridge Alumni Database. University of Cambridge.
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