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Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey

by William Wordsworth

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Student Question

What is the role of affective memory in Tintern Abbey? Does it help Wordsworth's speaker recognize and resolve his problem?

Quick answer:

In "Tintern Abbey," affective memory plays a crucial role as it enables Wordsworth's speaker to recall emotional responses from past experiences, triggered by nature or natural phenomena. This mechanism aids in resolving his problem by allowing a tranquil restoration of past sensations, even in urban settings. The speaker uses this to reconstruct happy memories with his sister, Dorothy, indicating that affective memory not only recognizes but also helps resolve issues through the revival of past emotions.

Expert Answers

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Affective memory is the emotional response from a previous event being brought to consciousness again by a stimulus. Wordsworth, ever since his and Coleridge’s Prelude to Lyrical Ballads, advocated affective memory as the most valid justification for poetry. In his entire canon (cf. Daffodils) Wordsworth cites natural phenomena that bring up memories from the narrator’s past (Tintern Abbey, although man-made, has become, through decay, a part of nature). This poem places the narrator/viewer at a distance from the site, and even at this distance he recalls the sounds of the River Wye. The narrator remembers the “deep seclusion,” the repose he felt some five summers ago at that same spot, “and tells the reader that even in urban settings he could recall this scene in his memory to regain those sensations, “Felt in the blood and felt along the heart…with tranquil restoration.” The poem becomes an essay in blank verse, a sort of manifesto of Romantic poetry, and as such has become the “anthem” for all such poems. Even though his sister Dorothy, is gone now, he can affectively reconstruct her by remembering the happy time they once spent together there at Tintern Abbey, “For thou art with me here upon the banks” of the Wye.

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