“Tintern Abbey” as a Romantic Poem.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850) was one of the most well known poets of the First generation Romantic Age. He is known for his collaboration with Samuel Taylor Coleridge on their work “Lyrical ballads” which led to the Romantic movement. he wrote an essay “Preface to the Lyrical ballads” which is considered to be one of the important piece of essay to understand Romantic school of poetry.

As a Romantic poet, Wordsworth expounded his theory on Poetry as a “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings and emotions recollected in tranquility”. “Tintern Abbey” is a poem which shows the poet’s own past memorial experiences which is recollected while his stay in town. He states that he was unable to connect with the “landscape ” in his first visit and thus he recollects his revisit after “five years” and he felt the sensation “In hours of weariness, sensations sweet/ Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart/ And passing even into my purer mind /With tranquil restoration”. The statement suggests the reflective mood of the landscape being recollected in a calm secluded tranquil state.

Wordsworth writing contains a Romantic characterisitics of organic oneness. It implies the connectivity between man and nature and hence both the entity are one. The recollected inspiration of “Tintern Abbey” led him to remember the “unremembered acts” and these feelings of spontaneity imbues in him as the “blessed mood” where it lightens the heavy “burden’ and “weary weight” of this “unintelligible world” and his mind , body and soul is felt beneath this “corporeal frame” like a deep slumber and they “become a living soul”. The idea is crafted in the statement of meditative mood where it is the “harmony” and “power of joy” that “we see into the life of things”.

In addition to this , the poem shrouds the element of mysticism. Wordsworth highlights the recollected consciousness of the beauty of River Wye. It is something to be of a divine experience for Wordsworth which seems to have a potential to ease the “joyless daylight” and the “fretful stir’ and of “the fever of the world”. The landscape of “the mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,/ Their colors and their forms,” becomes “an appetite” to him for it has vanished all the past “aching joys” and “dizzy raptures”. Assuming the element of mysticism to a higher order, it is known as pantheism and hence Wordsworth was considered as a pantheist.

The poem evokes the Romantic element of self-reflexivity. Wordsworth highlighted that “Poetry is just the image of man and nature” which reflects the idea of subjectivity and personal experiences. “Tintern Abbey” explores the poet’s own self reflection on these experiences. His first visit made him unable to connect with the landscape and he reflects on his self “like a roe” and he was “like a man /Flying from something that he dreads” and following the landscape of “deep rivers”, “lonely streams” as nature goes by. He further reflects implying that he is “change” and while he stands on the lap of nature, he is “with the sense /Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts” at the moment with life and these experiences will serve him as “food for future years” for he has learned to “look on nature” not only in the hour of “thoughtless youth” but when the “sad music of humanity” arrives.

Lastly ,the Romanticism in Wordsworth believe in nature as a source of inspiration and a moral guidance. Nature becomes a sole guidance and a leader to him. The poem examines that nature has taught him the joy of sublime thought which all things and objects of thoughts is “pleased to recognise” in “nature and language of the sense” which Wordsworth stated in his essay that “Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge” which is refined and can only be nurtured in the lap of nature. Hence, nature becomes “the guide, the guardian of my heart , and soul/ Of all my moral being”.