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Wordsworth and Nature: Growing Old Together in "Tintern Abbey"

Harold Bloom wrote, " ‘Tintern Abbey’ is a miniature of the long poem Wordsworth never quite wrote, the philosophical and autobiographical epic…" (409). Another writer called it "a romantic return to nature, the search for the beautiful and permanent forms which incorporate primitive human goodness" (Magill 3638). "Tintern Abbey" distills and retells the maturation process of the poet himself, his imagination, and his relationship with Nature through a narrative of Wordsworth’s time spent on the banks of the Wye River and his remembrances of it. In "Tintern Abbey" the facets of the relationship between Wordsworth and Nature manifest in four ways: familial (parent/child), inspirational (spirit/poet), sexual (lover/lover), and religious (creator/worshipper).

A great deal of the poem details the maturation of the poet in body and imagination, setting up a familial parent/child relationship between Nature and Wordsworth. The poet sets out four main stages of development: childhood, adolescence, manhood, and that which is yet to come, presumably old age or death. Line 66 marks his introduction to this natural scene as a child, or the stage that Keats referred to as the "infant or thoughtless Chamber" (407). At this time, nature is all he knows and all he can see. He encounters nature as if he were an animal, following "wherever nature led." There are no revelations, only impressions converted immediately into strong feelings and impulses. Frank Magill says, "the rural scene is an imagined state of primitive nature where human goodness can exist in the child, like Adam in Eden before the fall" (3638). Line 83, then, marks his adolescence, or "Chamber of Maiden-Thought" (Keats 407), in which the poet begins to receive the other gifts of nature, escaping those "dizzy raptures" and innate goodness for more reflective times.

Continuing in the maturation process, Wordsworth immediately shifts into manhood in line 90, where "the world is full of Misery and Heartbreak, Pain, Sickness and oppression—whereby this Chamber of Maiden-Thought becomes gradually darken’d…" (Keats 407). Now that the poet is a man, he can hear in nature "the still, sad music of humanity," and through reflection, can lift himself out of his concerns for a time. Even though he is glad to be rid of those strong feelings, and is now free to experience reason, this is not necessarily a better stage than those preceding:

Lastly, pervading the entire poem is the final stage of his maturation, looming in the dark, which is manifest as the poet’s fear of being forgotten and of forgetting this scene of refuge (ll. 58-61). He begs Dorothy not to forget this scene, as he can see his own youth in her eyes (ll. 116-119, 148-9), and to know that it was dear to him because of her (l. 159). Ironically, as Bloom notes, Dorothy is only a year younger than the poet, who is himself not out of his twenties at the time of this writing. "His imagination aged very quickly, and Dorothy’s remained young and perpetually receptive to the beauty of the natural world" (411). Perhaps this quick maturation worries Wordsworth, and may have led him to think that he was on a quicker road to the end than actually was so.

Yet, he is grateful to his parent, nature, for guiding him through these stages, and encountering him wherever he stood. Even as he grows older, he is "well pleased to recognise (sic)/In nature and the language of the sense,/The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,/The guide…." He thus entrusts his sister to this parental facet of nature, saying, "Knowing that Nature never did betray/The heart that loved her; ‘tis her privilege,/Through all the years of this our life, to lead/From joy to joy." He then goes on to encourage Dorothy to stay wild and allow nature to fill her with "quietness and beauty" so that she will never be harmed by the ugliness of life.

Now that he is leaving this child/parent relationship, Wordsworth begins to encounter nature in an inspirational way, he as a poet and nature as the spirit. The poem opens with the sound of waters "rolling from their mountain-springs," much like "A Slumber did my Spirit Seal" in which Lucy is "rolled round in earth’s diurnal course." Here, the spirit of nature flows through the waters and the surroundings "with a soft inland murmur." And, here the poet goes to be inspired, where the landscape’s seclusion leads him to also grow deeper into seclusion in his own mind (Bloom 409). The orchard tufts, "Which at this season, with their unripe fruits,/Are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves/’Mid groves and copses," represent the poet, who loses himself in the landscape with his unripe ideas, letting the spirit of nature bring them to fruition.

In addition, Wordsworth is the Hermit in line 21, where he retreats into the cave of his mind, allowing the fires of his imagination to grow; in this inspired solitude, he fulfills his own definition of poetry, exploring emotions recollected in solitude. These forms which he sees have, over time, been transformed into images on his inward eye, for refreshment during a moment alone and in the retreat of his mind "’mid the din/Of towns and cities." Francis Jeffrey, one Wordsworth’s greatest detractors said,

Wordsworth may recognize this, however, as it is only in retrospect that these individual images are powerful; unless, of course, he experiences them all at once, immersing himself in the landscape, as he does here, for total inspiration and restoration. This "tranquil restoration" is the first gift from the spirit of nature contained in those forms, as well as feelings of "unremembered pleasure" which circumvent the mind and connect directly with his heart. In line 52, the poet describes daily life as "joyless daylight,…the fretful stir/Unprofitable, and the fever of the world," and cries to the spirit of nature, now contained in the Wye like a sprite wandering in the woods, saying his spirit often looks to connect with that spirit for relief.

Another gift from the spirit of nature is a "blessed mood," when the remembrance of these forms alleviates for a time the weight of the world (ll. 39-40), allowing him to understand the sublime. It is in this state that the poet can "see into the life of things," and as Bloom says, "To see into the life of things is to see things for themselves and not their potential use" (410). Here, in this place of "elevated thoughts," he can encounter things for their own sake, as part of nature, and therefore, inspiration. In the sublime, he sees again "a spirit, that impels/All thinking things, all objects of all thought,/And rolls through all things." In his last stanza, the poet seems to suggest that without this touch of the spirit and moment of the sublime, his creative spirits would disappear (ll. 113-4), and spotting a flicker of this in his sister’s eye, he looks to her to help him in his endeavor.

Because of her more direct connection to nature, Dorothy then becomes a substitute for nature, and an embodiment of that spirit, who also "impress[es]/With quietness and beauty, and so feed[s]/With lofty thoughts." In her mind is a dwelling place for all of these forms of nature, and a container for "healing thoughts." The poet then begs Dorothy/nature to never forget him as a part of her own self (ll. 155-9). Since the poem is a situation in which the poet treats the reader as his sister, "who is ‘on-stage’ as his dramatic audience" (Magill 3637), it stands to reason that we, too, are an incarnation of this nature and part of the poet.
With nature, then, firmly established with female characteristics, the relationship displays a definite sexual facet, Wordsworth with nature as lover and lover. It is in this facet that through "mutual generosity an identity is established between one giver’s love and the other’s beauty" (Bloom 409). Even after all of this time, the poet is "still/A lover of the meadows and the woods,/And mountains," which are all parts of the spirit and body of nature. But this relationship is no longer full of the "coarser pleasures," passions, and appetites (ll. 73-85) of the former days during their first encounter. Their relationship is now a more mature and reciprocal "sober pleasure," and he is secure with this, "Knowing that Nature never did betray/The heart that loved her."

Through this relationship, the seeds of nature birth in him goodness, kindness and love (ll. 31-5). Now that he sees that these "dizzy raptures" and "aching joys" are gone forever, that he can only remember the "wild ecstasies" of nature’s touch through "gleams of half-extinguished thought," he searches for perpetuation of himself. Judith Page says, "Wordsworth endorsed the developing ideology of womanhood based on notions of female purity and spirituality played out in the domestic sphere" (338). It may be, then, that he views the flickers in Dorothy’s eyes as a rebirth of himself, as she rightfully fulfills her role as a re-creator of life, although not a literally physical birth, but more of a reincarnation.

Finally, the relationship reaches the ultimate state in a religious facet, that of creator/god and worshipper. While Wordsworth never directly describes nature as his god, he does consider nature as the ultimate creator and himself as her worshipper (152). His language is greatly of "religious devotion, displaced into a naturalistic mode" (Bloom 412). He begins the poem sitting underneath a sycamore tree to start the renewal process, a tree which often in the Bible serves to signify natural abundance and faith (I Kings 10:27; Luke 17 and 19). He comes here (ll. 152-5) to worship nature as if undertaking a holy pilgrimage, and does not begrudge nature her due services. He may also be offering himself as atonement for his separation from nature in order to renew his moral wholeness. Geoffrey Hartman said, "Only an elemental contact with nature…can restore the social principle in man separated from it by sin, accident, or necessity inherent in maturation itself" (419). Nature is, in the poet’s opinion, the source of all moral goodness (ll. 31-5, 95; Magill 3638) and protects man from the evil of daily life (ll. 128-133).
Again, even more echoes of the Bible appear in the last stanza. He says, "in thy voice I catch/The language of my former heart," sounding much like "out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks" of Matthew 12:34. And later, "neither evil tongues,/Rash judgments,…/Shall e’er prevail against us, or disturb/Our cheerful faith," like "no weapon formed against you shall prosper" of Isaiah 54:17. Indeed, Joseph Beech states,
His nature-philosophy derived much of its force and many of its characteristic features from theology…. Nature may be regarded as then in very large measure a kind of substitute religion, which we may call the religion of naturalism. (441)

Therefore in the final thrust of his religious experience, represented in the ending lines when Wordsworth pleads with Dorothy/nature, it appears as though he is searching for immortality. As, as he sees the light of his former self in her eyes (l. 118), his religious experience is complete—"the personal myth of memory as salvation" (Bloom 412).

Thus, Wordsworth incorporates the many facets of his relationship with nature—the familial, the inspirational, the sexual and the religious—into "Tintern Abbey," leaving the poem with a sense of salvation, and us with a piece of himself. Charles Burney once complained that the poem was "tinctured with gloomy, narrow, and unsociable ideas of seclusion from the commerce of the world: as if men were born to live in the woods and wilds, unconnected with each other!" (388) But Wordsworth teaches us that it is only through this seclusion that we can learn how to connect with each other, and it is in the seclusion of this poem and the world it creates that we connect with him as well.

Works Cited

Beach, Joseph W. "Nature in Wordsworth: Summary," Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism 12 (1986): 439-442.

Bloom, Harold. "William Wordsworth." Poetry Criticism 4 (1992): 409-414.

Burney, Charles. "Lyrical Ballads and a Few Other Poems." Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism 12 (1986): 388.

Hartman, Geoffrey H. "William Wordsworth." Poetry Criticism 4 (1992): 419.

Keats, John. Letter to John Reynolds. Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism 12 (1986): 407.

Magill, Frank N. "William Wordsworth." Critical Survey of Poetry 8 (1992): 3631-3648.

Page, Judith W. "William Wordsworth." Dictionary of Literary Biography 93 (1990): 304-345.

Stephen, Leslie. "William Wordsworth." Poetry Criticism 4 (1992): 391.