Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey (Magill Book Reviews)

Composed of 159 lines of blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter), this poem is narrated by a man who has returned after a five year absence to a ruined abbey on the banks of the Wye River. The tranquil scene prompts a meditation on the speaker’s lifelong relationship with nature. As an adult, he must now come to terms with what nature has meant to him during the various stages of his life.

The speaker divides human life into three phases, each characterized by a distinct relationship to nature. A young child is at one with nature, bounding through the countryside like an animal. An adolescent feels a spiritual kinship, but this union is not yet affected by the intellect. An adult, however, has forever lost both these earlier stages of his life and must find recompense in remembering them.

The most significant portion of the poem deals with one fundamental question. Is the adult perspective on nature (and on life in general) a triumph or a loss? The poet refuses to give a pat answer, and much of the poem’s greatness derives from its humane and serious analysis of the cycles of gain and loss that make up human life.

Important to the poem is the presence of the poet’s dear friend (most likely Wordsworth’s sister Dorothy), whom he addresses in the moving final stanzas. He wishes for her a feeling of unity with nature, and hopes that her memories of Tintern Abbey will be the richer for his presence. A difficult but rewarding poem, “Tintern Abbey” is one of the central documents of the English Romantic poets, exhibiting their preoccupations with nature, memory, and the human mind.