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William WordsworthLines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey ...
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1798A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Eye as an Organ of Physical and Spiritual Vision
“Tintern Abbey” is full of visual imagery: the sights of the Wye valley landscape, the speaker’s memory of that beautiful scenery, the appearance of his sister Dorothy, his traveling companion, and the resurrected image of his younger self that he “cannot paint,” all belong to the visual realm. The speaker’s eye is both a literal and figurative organ of vision: a bodily sensory system and a symbol of his manifold capacity for emotional, intellectual, and spiritual awareness. While auditory imagery is also important in the poem (e.g., the mountain streams’ “soft inland murmur” [4]), the eye and vision are the controlling metaphors of “Tintern Abbey.” It is through the eye, primarily, that the speaker takes in the landscape, relives his memory of it, experiences the semi-mystical vision that penetrates “into the life of things” (50), and witnesses evidence of the “motion” and “spirit” that “rolls through all things” (102-104).
In the first paragraph of the poem, the speaker’s eye embraces the pastoral scenery, taking an active role in its composition, framing and altering its details. The eye doesn’t see passively; what, and how, it perceives “impress[es] / Thoughts of more deep seclusion” and “connect[s] / The landscape with the quiet of the sky” (7-8). The speaker’s eye actively reworks the data of visual perception, selecting, abstracting, idealizing, and unifying through its exercise of aesthetic power. As the speaker explicitly notes in line 108, the eye and ear “half create” the objects of their perception; the mind inevitably imposes feelings and ideas on the raw data of sense impression. In the act of seeing and beholding again the rustic valley scenery, “hedge-rows” become “little lines / Of sportive wood run wild” (15-16), and the distinction between plots of cottage-ground and the surrounding woods is effaced as the “orchard-tufts […] lose themselves” (11-13) among the trees. The speaker is also losing something of himself, as he aesthetically depicts his prospect. It is a paradoxical combination of loss and gain; the eye of inner vision awakens, and he imagines the smoke visible above the landscape is coming from unseen vagrants in the woods, or a cave where a hermit sits alone by his fire.
The aesthetic quality of the landscape and its personal significance to the speaker is emphasized by the simile of the “blind man’s eye” in line 25. These beautiful forms have remained alive and visible to the speaker in memory since his first visit; unlike a blind man, he has conjured up their soothing influence at times of distress. The simile emphasizes, by its negative expression, the powerful effects of visual memory; “blind[ness]” is both physical and spiritual insensitivity, while he has owed to his memory of these beauteous forms “sensations sweet […] [and] feelings too / Of unremembered pleasure” (28-32). The eye is an aesthetic, emotional and spiritual organ, capable of transcendental insight: “While with an eye made quiet by the power / Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, / We see into the life of things” (48-50). In these lines, the eye functions as a synecdoche of spiritual perception; as the body seems to enter suspended animation, the mind becomes “a living soul” perceiving the organic totality or gestalt of things.
In the pivotal fourth paragraph of the poem, the visual metaphor predominates. As “the picture of the mind revives again” in “gleams of half-extinguished thought” (60-63), the speaker is forced to admit “I cannot paint / What then I was” (77-78); that is, the emotional complexity of the memory of his younger self does not render it fully capable of being made visible—either to himself or his listener. His passionate absorption in nature at that time needed nothing “[u]nborrowed from the eye” (85); the pleasures of sensation without thought were sufficient. As an adult, though, he has learned to look on the spectacle of nature while hearing the “still, sad music of humanity” (93); the introduction of the auditory sense qualifies and complexifies his earlier experience of nature, in which the eye’s appetite for beautiful forms was incapable of integrating them with the knowledge of human suffering.
In the poem’s conclusion, the visual metaphors embody the speaker’s desire to reconnect with his earlier self in the person of his sister, who is visiting the location for the first time. In the “shooting lights / Of [her] wild eyes” (121-122), the speaker sees his former self reflected in Dorothy’s excitement; like a mirror, she flashes “gleams / Of [his] past existence” (151-152). Her “wild eyes,” in themselves, reflect the “wild secluded scene” (6) of the locodescriptive beginning; Dorothy is assimilated to the wildness of the landscape so that the speaker can find in her the medium for his own primal identity—thoughtless, spontaneous, passionate, animal, visionary—buried in the past.
Wilderness Versus Society
The opposition between benevolent nature and the painful, dehumanizing conditions of urban social life is a major feature of “Tintern Abbey.” Wilderness, or that which is “wild,” implies freedom, beauty, health, healing, sweetness, religious experience, ecstatic pleasure and moral feeling, while the poem associates cities and towns with weariness, loneliness, hypocrisy, and noise. In “wild secluded scene[s],” the speaker’s senses, heart, and imagination awaken; transcendent insight and healing is to be found in nature, or in the memory of it. Wordsworth even naturalizes vestiges of human existence in his introductory depiction of the landscape, absorbing them into their wild environs; the “hedge-rows” whose purpose is to mark property boundaries are “hardly hedge-rows, [rather] / Little lines of sportive wood run wild” (15-16).
The gloss strips the economic and legal significance of the shrubbery, and its human cultivation, to emphasize purely aesthetic and natural qualities; rather than demarcating the patchwork of small, fixed landholdings, the hedge-rows “run wild” in harmonious freedom with the green landscape, escaping their social purpose. Throughout “Tintern Abbey,” the social presence of humans is either idealized (the imagined hermit), erased (the industrial and commercial activities of the town; the disturbing poverty of the vagrants), or deplored (the sneers, hypocrisy, and other social slights of men) to serve Wordsworth’s aesthetic strategy of valorizing the individual self’s communion with nature.
The adjective “wild” carries a freight of connotations in the poem. Applied to the natural environment, it codes freedom from human constraint, aesthetic integrity, beauty, divine power. Applied to the human world, it signifies excitement, spontaneity, ecstasy, rapturous aesthetic enjoyment. The “shooting lights” of Dorothy’s “wild eyes” reflect back to the speaker his own youthful response to the same landscape when he first viewed it. “Wild” connotes primal, childlike innocence and wonder, with its visionary capacity and unconscious faith in the inseparability of truth from beauty. This primal “wild” innocence lies at the core of the speaker’s historical identity; “Tintern Abbey” is his attempt to reconcile with its loss and understand the transformations of his enduring love of nature in the formation of his mature self.
By contrast, the town and city—the arenas of social life—represent the eclipsing of the speaker’s imaginative vision and the smothering of the gentle “affections” that lead him to a holistic sense of well-being. In “lonely rooms, and ’mid the din / Of towns and cities” (26-27) restoring memories of the Wye have often been a refuge of consolation. The disagreeable social encounters he lists in the poem’s final paragraph—the “evil tongues, / Rash judgments, […] sneers of selfish men, / […] greetings where no kindness is, nor all / The dreary intercourse of daily life” (131-134) are the price paid for social existence. Likely allusions to Wordsworth’s life in London after returning from France, they are symptomatic of his urban malaise. The poem’s speaker proclaims his faith that Nature, in her benevolence toward her devotees, offers sanctuary and healing from social injuries, loneliness, pain, fear, and grief, inviting his sister to share that compact, as she shares his love for Nature’s beauty and sublimity.
The River Wye
As the poem’s title indicates, the Wye River valley is the location of “Tintern Abbey” and the speaker’s description of its scenery occupies the first paragraph of the poem. From his vantage point, the river is apparently unseen but heard, its waters creating a “soft inland murmur” (4) as they roll seaward from the mountain springs of their origin. This auditory image personifies the river, as it evokes the meditative flow of the speaker’s own association of thoughts, images, and feelings. As an external analog of his pleasurable stream of consciousness, the “soft inland murmur” is an example of the pathetic fallacy, a commonly occurring Romantic trope in which external objects are infused with subjective feeling.
The Wye is a metonym—more particularly, a synecdoche—for the beautiful forms of the surrounding environment. In the third paragraph, the speaker explicitly personifies the river, apostrophizing the “sylvan Wye” as “[t]hou wanderer thro' the woods” (58), claiming his spirit has often turned to the memory of it as a source of healing and spiritual nourishment. The image foregrounds the natural qualities of the watercourse, suggesting the river meanders undisturbed by human development through an idealized sylvan landscape. New Historicist and sociological critics have noted that Wordsworth omits mention of the heavy commercial traffic on the Wye that served the ironworks industry of the town of Tintern.
The Hermit
Though the hermit is mentioned only once in the poem, the image is significant as an evocation of an alternate, idealized lifestyle that attracts the speaker. At the close of the first verse paragraph, the speaker surmises that the wreaths of smoke he sees rising up “in silence, from among the trees” (18) might signal the presence of “vagrant dwellers,” or, possibly, “some Hermit’s cave, where by his fire / The Hermit sits alone” (21-22). The imagined presence of the hermit, unseen in the woods, reflects the speaker’s own solitary seclusion, as he is drawn deeper into a meditative reverie and process of association during his observation of the rustic scene. Wordsworth was well aware of the impoverished vagrants who inhabited Tintern Abbey and its surroundings, burning charcoal and offering tours of the abbey’s grounds to secure a meagre income. The speaker’s brief mention of them in the poem avoids confronting the deplorable socioeconomic conditions of their existence, instead aestheticizing—or naturalizing—their presence in the landscape.
While disturbing evidence of vagrants could be readily seen around Tintern Abbey, the hermit is an image more conducive to Wordsworth’s imagined self-image, suggesting a reclusive poet who has retired from human society, fleeing “the din / Of towns and cities” (26-27) and finding sanctuary from the “evil tongues / […] [and] sneers of selfish men (131-132). This image, in fact, becomes the title of Wordsworth’s uncompleted and unpublished philosophical epic, The Recluse. In “Tintern Abbey,” the hermit functions as an ephemeral projection of the poet’s idealized self into the landscape he depicts.
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By William Wordsworth
