Lines Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey By William Wordsworth

Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey by William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth is commonly regarded as the vanguard poet of the Romantic
movement in British literature. The son of a wealthy Cumberland attorney, his birth followed the
dawn of the English Industrial Revolution. Afforded an education not uncommon of the British
bourgeoisie, Wordsworth attended St. John’s College, Cambridge, studying literature and
rhetoric, prior to the advent of the French Revolution. Having fallen prey to his keen interest in
the excitement of French revolutionary ideology, Wordsworth spent the next several years in
France with his lover, Annette Vallon. He was heavily influenced by the works of the French
revolutionaries and was impressed with an intense desire to bring similar power and fervor to his
own work. A pioneer of free verse, Wordsworth sought to cast off all literary convention,
expressing often controversial political and religious opinions through his simply-written poetry
and prose. Wordsworth’s “Lyrical Ballads” became the consummate expression of the author’s
vibrant and effulgent new style. Wordsworth’s most famous poem, “Lines Composed a Few Miles
Above Tintern Abbey” was included as the last item in his collection of “Lyrical Ballads.” The
poem expresses the author’s nearly pantheistic love of nature and his longing for humanity’s
eventual reunification with the natural world.
As “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey” opens, we are met the narrator,
standing pensively on the Banks of the Wye river, revisited after five years absence. He is lost in
the bitter-sweet recollection of the bygone days of his youth, spent frolicking along its shores. He
describes a sacred place, a refuge from the storms of the outside world. He speaks almost
reverently of the scenes magnanimity and the thought of introspection that it inspires, explaining,
“. . .Once again/ Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,/That on a wild secluded scene impress/
Thoughts of more deep seclusion” (552, l. 5-8). Wordsworth’s veneration of nature was typical of
the Romantic lyricists, who often practiced forms of pantheism and mysticism, seeking
transcendence through natural awareness.
Early in the poem, the author focus resides upon the physical and aethetic pleasures that
surround. He is seduced by the “beauteous,” lush, green forms that beset him.

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