Tintern Abbey (poem) - Themes and Context

Themes and Context

"I cannot paint/ What then I was," Wordsworth writes, reflecting and almost puzzling over his "boyish days" when the natural world of Tintern Abbey was to him an unmixed "passion" and a "feeling" that had no need of "any interest/ Unborrowed from the eye." Yet the poet insists that age compensates for this loss of thoughtless passion by giving him instead a sense of the sublimity of nature, of "something far more deeply interfused," and here the poem seems in a sense to grope for God, invoking a "spirit" that "rolls through all things."

The poem has its roots in history. Accompanied by his sister Dorothy (whom he addresses warmly in the final paragraph as "thou my dearest Friend, / My dear, dear Friend"), Wordsworth did indeed revisit the abbey on the date stipulated after half a decade's absence. His previous visit had been on a solitary walking tour as a twenty-three-year-old in August 1793. His life had since taken a considerable turn: he had split with his French lover and their illegitimate daughter, while on a broader note Anglo-French tensions had escalated to such an extent that Britain would declare war later that year. The Wye, on the other hand, had remained much the same, affording the poet opportunity for contrast. A large portion of the poem explores the impact of the passing of time, contrasting the obviousness of it in the visitor with its seamlessness in the visited. This theme is emphasized from the start in the line "Five years have passed..."

Although written in 1798, the poem is in large part a recollection of Wordsworth's visit of 1793. It also harks back in the imagination to a time when the abbey was not in ruins, and dwells occasionally on the present and the future as well. The speaker admits to having reminisced about the place many times in the past five years. Notably, the abbey itself is nowhere described.

Poems which considered nature and the countryside were an established part of eighteenth-century verse, and works such as James Thomson's The Seasons remained popular in the 1790s. However, in Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey, Wordsworth employs a much more intellectual and philosophical engagement with nature than his predecessors.

Wordsworth claimed to have composed the poem entirely in his head, beginning it upon leaving Tintern and crossing the Wye, and not jotting so much as a line until he reached Bristol, by which time it had just reached mental completion. In all, it took him four to five days' rambling about with his sister. Although Lyrical Ballads was by then already in publication, he was so pleased with this offering that he had it inserted at the eleventh hour, as the concluding poem. It is unknown whether this placement was intentional, but scholars generally agree that it is apt, for the poem represents the climax of Wordsworth's first great period of creative output and prefigures much of the distinctively Wordsworthian verse that followed.

Although never overt, the poem is riddled with religion, most of it pantheistic. Wordsworth styles himself as a "worshipper of Nature" with a "far deeper zeal / Of holier love", seeming to hold that mental images of nature can engender a mystical intuition of the divine.