“Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” Introduction

• “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798”— commonly known as “Tintern Abbey”— is a poem written by the British Romantic poet William Wordsworth. Wordsworth had first visited the Wye Valley when he was 23 years old. His return five years later occasioned this poem, which Wordsworth saw as articulating his beliefs about nature, creativity, and the human soul. “Tintern Abbey” was included as the final poem in Lyrical Ballads, a 1798 collection of poems by Wordsworth and his friend and fellow poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

• Read the full text of “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey”

“Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” Summary

• The speaker says it has been five years since he last visited this setting. That's five summers and five winters, which felt especially long. Now that he's back, he once again can enjoy the gentle sound of rivers and streams running down from the mountains. He again gets to marvel at the high and impressive cliffs. The sight of these cliffs within this remote, untouched setting puts him in a thoughtful, reflective mood. The cliffs visually link this quiet landscape to the calm silence of the sky. The speaker comments on how, as in his last visit, he can sit underneath a shady sycamore tree and from there look down at the surrounding farmland in the valley, including at the gardens surrounding cottages and at the many clumps of trees within orchards. He notes that because of the time of year (mid-summer), the fruit on the trees is not yet ripe and the orchards are completely green, blending in with the surrounding trees. The lines of bushes that he can see are, from his vantage point, tiny and almost indistinguishable as deliberately planted rows, and the picturesque, rural farms also look almost completely green. In between the trees he sees circles of smoke drifting up silently, as though delivering some unknown message. He imagines that this smoke could be coming from wandering people living in the woods, or from the fire of a devoutly religious person living alone in a cave.

  Even while the speaker was away from this beautiful landscape, he didn’t forget it and could still picture it vividly. While surrounded by the noisiness and loneliness of urban settings, remembering the beauty of this place helped the speaker through difficult and tiring times, bringing him pleasant feelings within his body and mind. These memories helped him feel calm and restored, and even affected his actions, pushing him toward small, daily acts of goodness and care for other people. The speaker further thanks these memories for granting him an even more immense and awe-inspiring the gift: that wonderful, precious mood in which he felt free from the burdens of the unknown, and in which the heaviness of dealing with this often confusing, senseless world was lessened. In that calm, precious state of mind, the speaker could in a sense transcend the restrictions of his physical body, which would become totally still as the speaker became only his soul. In this state, he says, his vision became silent, calm, powerful, and with a feeling of equanimity and happiness he had insight into life itself.

  The speaker goes on to offer the possibility that he simply imagined this experience, because it is something that he just wants to believe. He then rejects this possibility, however, commenting on how so many times, when unhappiness and the rush and stress of daily life have weighed heavily upon his heart, he has remembered this beautiful, landscape. Addressing the landscape directly, he says that within his mind or soul he has gone back to the woodlands of the Wye Valley for solace and comfort.

  The speaker's memories are like shining lights that have been half snuffed out, becoming darker or hard to see. There is a kind of sadness or confusion in the speaker's thoughts as the landscape, so often remembered as a picture in his mind, is now seen again in real life. At the same time, being in this landscape gives him the sense that in addition to the happiness he's experiencing right now, he will also have happiness in the future from remembering this current visit. He hopes that this is true, even though he is different from how he was when he was younger and first came here. His younger self was like a deer, jumping through the hills and alongside deep rivers and isolated streams alike, following nature. His younger self was someone running away from something that he feared, rather than running toward something he cared for. Even so, back then nature was everything to him, since he had already lost some of the less sophisticated happiness of his childhood. He can't express or showing the reader exactly how he used to be, though. As a younger man, the sound of a waterfall stuck with him, like a passion sticks with someone (perhaps painfully or frighteningly). Similarly, his younger self experienced the shapes and colors of the rock cliffs, the mountain, and the shade and darkness of the forest with a kind of hunger. The landscape filled the younger speaker with intense emotion and love, yet this experience was missing a deeper spiritual or intellectual aspect beyond what could physically be seen. The past is over, though, as are the emotional highs and lows of youth that were intense to the point of being painful or disorienting. The speaker isn’t weakened by this loss and doesn’t grieve it, however, because he has gained so much in exchange. Specifically, over time he has gained the ability to really see nature, not thoughtlessly as he did when he was younger, but with a full awareness of all the sadness and harmony that comes with being a human being. This awareness—this human music—is not jarring or unpleasant. Instead, it has a calming, maturing effect, helping the speaker grow out of his youthful intensity and naivety. Over time, the speaker has also come to experience a kind of force that is at once joyful and disturbing in the way that it broadens the scope of his thoughts. This force creates a profound, nearly overwhelming awareness of the way that everything is connected and part of a whole. This force, this sense of connection and unity, is present throughout the natural world and universe. It exists in the light of suns as they set, in the round ocean, the air, the blue sky, and in the human mind. This presence or force is a kind of power or living soul that makes all things possible, including the capacity for thought and everything that is thought about. This force is described as moving through everything in the universe with a motion similar to rolling waves. Because of all of this insight that he has gained, the speaker says, he loves the natural world, including the fields, forests, and mountains, and the equally powerful world of the human mind and human senses of sight and hearing, which, he says, work by half inventing and half observing the world. The speaker sees in nature and in the human senses what is most fundamental to his thinking and his best thoughts. He compares nature to a person or spiritual presence who nurtures, leads, and protects every part of him, including his heart, soul, and morality.

  The speaker says that even if, by some chance, he hadn’t learned all of this, he still would not allow himself to lose his positive outlook. Addressing his sister, the speaker says that this is because she is there with him in this landscape. Calling her his closest friend, the speaker says that he sees and hears in her his former self, including the way he used to feel and understand things, and the pleasure and joy he used to experience. Celebrating this, the speaker expresses the hope that he will see his younger self in her longer so that she can experience this youthful happiness longer. He then offers a prayer for his sister’s future. He compares nature to a woman who is faithful, and who cares most for leading people through life joyfully. The speaker says that nature can shape human minds so well, make such a strong impression of beauty and calm, and nurture such a higher level of thinking, that through these gifts people can withstand all the difficulties and immorality of daily life, including cruel words, unfair or quick judgments, condescension, selfishness, and empty or fake interactions. In fact, he says, with the gifts of nature people can withstand everything that is wearing or difficult in day-to-day existence. In doing so, they can uphold a positive outlook and belief in the goodness and blessedness of life. The speaker prays that nature will always stay with and help his sister; he hopes that when she is alone, she will experience moonlight, and that she will feel the presence of the soft or slightly rainy wind from the mountains. He goes on to imagine her when she is older, and her current youthful happiness has been moderated into a more muted or quiet outlook. Then, her mind will be like a spacious, lofty house for everything that is beautiful, and everything that is melodious and harmonious will live in only in her memories. He hopes that if, at that point, she experiences pain, or loneliness, or fear, she will joyfully remember him addressing her now, and that this memory will be healing. The speaker then goes on to imagine that at this future point he might have died and can no longer see or hear his sister. He says that even if this is the case, his sister will remember that they were together in this landscape. She won’t forget, he says, that like a religious person he worshipped nature, and that he came to this setting out of this devotion. He describes his feeling for this place as not just ordinary love but as the stronger kind of devotional and sacred love. He says, finally, that his sister will remember, even after the passage of many years and traveling elsewhere, that this forest, these cliffs, and this whole living natural place were beloved to him, on their own terms but also because of what they will mean to her.

“Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” Themes

• 

  The Restorative Power of Nature

  Before diving in, it's worth noting some context: Wordsworth wrote “Tintern Abbey” during the Industrial Revolution, when rural areas throughout Europe were being transformed into centers of manufacturing and production. In the poem, the speaker visits a natural, rural place that he sees as preserved and intact, not yet altered by industrialization. The poem implicitly responds to the industrialization of society by suggesting that urban life is lonely and depleting, and that the natural world has the power to restore and nourish the human soul. So powerful is nature, the speaker argues, that even simple memories of time spent in such pristine landscapes can be healing.

  The poem makes clear that urban life is difficult for the speaker, who uses words such as “din,” “lonely,” “dreary,” “evil,” and “selfish” to describe life in “towns and cities.” These descriptions suggest that daily life in these settings is noisy, isolating, tiring, and even immoral. Such environments—far from being nourishing or comforting—are emotionally and morally taxing for the speaker, and, the poem implies, for everyone who lives in them.

  Despite this, the speaker suggests that time spent in nature has sustained and nourished him, and that it will continue to do so in the future. The speaker recalls how in “hours of weariness” he has remembered the time he spent in the poem's beautiful natural setting, and this has brought him “tranquil restoration.” This suggests that nature is so powerfully restorative that even the memory of it has the power to calm and nourish the human soul.

  The speaker goes on to say that his current visit to this place will comfort him in years to come. This current visit gives him “present pleasure” as well as “life and food / For future years.” By describing this visit as “food,” the speaker suggests that in the future, remembering his time in this natural setting will nourish and support him. The mere thought of nature, the poem implies, is as restorative as actual food.

  Finally, the speaker suggests that time in nature is replenishing not just for the speaker but for human beings in general. Addressing his sister, the speaker suggests that memories of this natural place are restorative not only for him, but for her as well. The speaker says that if, in the future, she experiences “solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief,” remembering the time they spent together in this place will bring her “healing thoughts,” or comfort her.

  The speaker also uses the plural first person (“we” and “us”), saying that thanks to the healing and restorative powers of nature, daily life in urban settings will never “prevail against us.” While the “we” here could be read as referring to the speaker and his sister, it can also be read as a more general “we,” including all humanity. The speaker’s use of “thou” (“you”), while addressing his sister, also turns the poem outward to the reader. This use of “thou” suggests that the reader, too, will be comforted and restored by the natural world, and perhaps even by the presence of the natural world in the poem itself.

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• 

  Awe and the Sublime

  The Romantic poets were interested in the overwhelming awe and wonder people can experience when encountering the boundlessness of the universe and the natural world. They believed that in experiencing this awe and wonder, one encounters something called the "Sublime"—basically, a sense of infinity and vastness that exceeds rationality or measurement.

  This experience, the thinking goes, can be so overpowering that it can take people “beyond” themselves. In “Tintern Abbey,” the speaker suggests that nature offers access to the Sublime. The immense awe that the speaker feels upon being in this natural setting grants him greater insight into the connection and unity between humanity, the natural world, and the universe. Such feelings, the poem argues, can even allow people to transcend their earthly bodies altogether.

  As the speaker describes the natural world in the beginning of the poem, notice that he does so by describing individual parts of it. There's an image of a sycamore tree, of smoke rising from the woods, and of some hedges in the distance—yet the landscape is not captured in totality. This suggests that this setting is so vast, so overwhelming, that the speaker can, at first at least, grasp only disparate pieces of it.

  At the same time, this sense of awe and wonder ultimately leads the speaker to observe a sense of unity within the natural world. Those hedges the speaker sees seem to blend together, for example. Later, describing his experience of a “sense sublime,” the speaker takes this initial hint at the connectedness of nature further. He offers a vision of the sun, the ocean, the air, and the sky as integrated, as inherently connected parts of a whole.

  This shift in the descriptions—from individual bits of nature to seeing these bits as connected parts of a vast whole—suggests that the speaker has undergone an internal shift. And the longer he spends in this natural place, the more he is able to fully encounter its awe and wonder—and in doing so to gain a kind of transcendent vision of the natural world. That is, the speaker cannot see the entirety of nature at once, but can sense that everything he does see is linked to some far greater whole. This awareness, in turn, is part of what it feels like to experience the Sublime.

  The speaker goes on to imply that by experiencing the Sublime, he is able to have greater insight into the workings of the universe. He says that in such moments, “We see into the life of things.” The speaker suggests that through this experience of awe and wonder, and the “deep power of joy” that it brings, he can gain insight into life itself.

  The poem also suggests that the speaker’s experience of the Sublime is transcendent: his experience of the natural world has allowed him not just to be restored, but to move beyond his body altogether. The speaker says that through experiencing the Sublime in nature, “we are laid asleep / In body, and become a living soul.” This suggests that his experience of awe and wonder at the natural world is so powerful that he can escape the confines of his physical body!

  This sense of transcendence is echoed in the poem’s ending, when the speaker imagines a time after he has died and describes how the landscape will still be present for his sister. In a way, this section of the poem could be read as though the speaker is in fact uttering it after he has died, when he has truly been “laid asleep in body.” Importantly, this experience of transcendence doesn’t seem to lead the speaker to depart from the setting, but to be more present within it, as the poem ends with him celebrating the landscape in all of its clear specificity.

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• 

  Perception, Creativity, and the Imagination

  Wordsworth and other Romantic poets thought a lot about the nature of the imagination, and especially, with the poetic imagination, or the ability to write and create poems. While “Tintern Abbey” celebrates nature as generally healing and restorative in an increasingly urban world, it also celebrates nature as inspiring and as crucial to creativity. The poem suggests that nature inspires creativity and creative reflection, and that the imagination works actively and dynamically in tandem with the natural world.

  The title of the poem, of course, reveals the role of the natural world in its creation. Specifically, the Wye Valley inspired the poem. Taken more broadly, this suggests that the beauty of the natural world inspires creativity and the writing of poems.

  The speaker goes on to depict the way that people are able to actively observe and record the natural world. The speaker says that the human “eye, and ear” both “half create” and “perceive.” On the one hand, this suggests that while the human mind and imagination are connected to nature, they are also in a sense outside it: people have the ability to “perceive,” or observe, the natural world.

  But the mind is described as not only perceiving nature, but also as “half creat[ing],” or inventing. In other words, the imagination works in a kind of back and forth between observing the world and creating it—interpreting what's being observed, and perhaps turning those interpretations into art. The creative mind thus works actively and dynamically in relationship with nature.

  Finally, the poem’s structure supports this sense of the dynamic between the imagination and the natural world. The poem shifts back and forth between describing the natural landscape and the speaker’s inner experience. These shifts suggest an active, constant movement between the natural world and the working of the speaker’s mind and imagination.

  At a larger level, the poem is something the speaker has made with his imagination, half through observing this natural landscape, and half through creating a form through which to express his experience. The poem as a whole, then, encompasses both the sense of the poetic imagination as inspired by nature, and the imagination working dynamically in relationship with the natural world.

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• 

  Time and Change

  “Tintern Abbey” is a poem about nature, but it is also a poem about the speaker’s past, present, and future selves, and about time and change more broadly. Ultimately, the poem suggests that the passage of time leads to loss, but that it also leads to greater understanding of self and of the world.

  Five years have passed since the speaker first visited this landscape, and he details how much he has changed in this time. Some terms the speaker uses to describe his former self are positive. He compares his younger self to a “roe” (a deer) who “bounded” through the landscape. This suggests that his younger self had a kind of freedom, energy, and spontaneity that the older speaker has lost.

  At the same time, however, the speaker suggests that his younger self had a lot of growing up to do. He says that his younger self enjoyed “courser pleasures” and that even “bound[ing]” through the woods, he was “more like a man / Flying from something that he dreads.” This suggests that the speaker’s former self was unsophisticated and fearful, and that he lacked the self-awareness the older speaker now possesses.

  The speaker thus acknowledges what he has lost in growing older, but also celebrates the changes that have come with the passage of time. The speaker admits that in growing older, he has lost the “aching joys” and “dizzy raptures” that he once experienced, the naïve yet exciting emotional highs and lows of youth. Yet he also praises the “abundant recompense,” or compensation, for this loss. With time, the speaker has learned to “look on nature,” and to hear the “still sad music of humanity.” In other words, growing older has helped him to better see and appreciate the beauty of nature and to have greater knowledge of the world, with all of its sadness and human realities. Implicitly, the poem’s emphasis on self-reflection also suggests that the speaker has gained self-knowledge. He is now able to reflect on his past and present selves with insight and composure, rather than “flying,” or running away from, uncomfortable realities.

  The speaker goes on to predict a similar pattern of loss, change, and growth for his younger sister, in whom he sees his former self and his “former pleasures.” The speaker predicts that with time, his sister’s “wild ecstasies shall be matured / Into a sober pleasure,” and her mind will be a “mansion for all lovely forms.” These descriptions suggest that the sister, too, will grow and change from her current youthful self. These changes involve loss—she will lose the earlier “ecstasies”—but also positive transformation, as her mind, like a mansion, will become spacious and elegant.

  At a structural level, the poem enacts the passage of time and suggests that these experiences of loss, change and growth are part of a larger, natural pattern. The poem is structured around time: it begins with a reflection on the past, moves to reflections on the present, and then imagines the future. The poem thus enacts the pattern of change, loss, and growth that it describes. By including all of this within the larger, interwoven pattern of the poem, “Tintern Abbey” implicitly suggests that the change and loss individuals experience occurs within a larger scope—of the universe, and of time itself.

  The landscape the speaker encounters seems constant and unchanging (it is described as the same as it was five years before), yet readers also know that landscapes do change; forests grow or are cut down; ecosystems develop and are altered by human activity; and the setting of the poem is radically different now than it was at the end of the 18th century. The landscape the speaker encounters, then, is precious partly because it is subject to change, if more slowly, and differently, than the changes individuals experience in their lives.

  This implicit, larger change is present in the poem through the landscape the speaker inhabits. Just as the speaker experiences a sense of awe and wonder in encountering the interconnection and vastness of the natural world, then, the poem contextualizes the changes the speaker undergoes within the broader passage of time in nature and the universe more broadly.

  Finally, it is worth noting that while the poem enacts the passage of time it also, in a sense, “stops time,” preserving a single moment—that of the speaker’s visit with his sister to this place—within the poem itself.

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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey”

• Lines 1-5

  Five years have past; five summers, with the length
  Of five long winters! and again I hear
  These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
  With a soft inland murmur.—Once again
  Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,

  The poem's title reveals that it has a very specific setting: the Wye Valley, on the Welsh side of the River Wye. The title also lets the reader know the context that has led to the poem: a walking tour that Wordsworth took with his sister, Dorothy Wordsworth, in the area. The title even establishes the exact date the poem was written (July 13, 1798)! The title thus grounds the poem in real, lived experience, almost as though it were a diary entry of the speaker.

  Lines 1-5 continue to ground and orient the reader within the landscape and to reveal the speaker’s relationship to it. The speaker begins by saying that it's been five years since he last visited this spot. He emphasizes how long this time has felt to him by noting that each year has contained both a “summer” and “the length” of a “long” winter. This emphasis is heightened by the speaker’s use of anaphora, as he recounts “Five years … five summers … five long winters.” This repetition establishes that the speaker visited this area before, while also implying that the speaker felt the weight of his absence palpably and repeatedly during that stretch of five years that he was away.

  The opening lines go on to paint a lush visual and auditory picture of the scene, as the speaker notes the sound of rivers and streams flowing down from the mountains, as well as the sight of high, impressive cliffs that he recalls from his previous visit. The speaker once more uses anaphora for emphasis, in this case repeating “again” to remark on how he feels upon re-experiencing this landscape. Where the previous repetition of “five” heightened the reader’s sense of how the speaker experienced his time away, here the repetition of “again” heightens the reader’s sense of the restoration and completeness the speaker feels in returning. This repetition suggests that the speaker recalled these aspects of the landscape many times during his absence, and now experiences a kind of relief in the setting, which is the same as he remembered it.

  These opening lines also introduce adjectives important to the sense of the natural world within the poem. The streams and rivers are described as moving with a “soft inland murmur,” while the cliffs are “lofty.” These descriptions suggest that the landscape is, in some fundamental way, private and internally whole (the water moves “inland,” which recalls the word “inward,” and it “murmur[s],” or speaks, but quietly and not in a language known to humans). This sense of internal coherence is heightened by the subtle consonance of /r/ sounds in "rolling" and "murmur." At the same time, the word “lofty” suggests that the cliffs are high—but also that the landscape conveys some truth that is elevated and higher than ordinary human thought.

  Importantly, too, these lines establish the tense in which the poem is written, as the speaker records his current experiences in the present tense: “I hear … I behold.” This use of present tense connects the reader to the speaker’s immediate experience, and also emphasizes the sense that the poem was composed within this very moment, as though the speaker’s words emerged spontaneously and organically upon coming back to this setting.

• Lines 6-8

  That on a wild secluded scene impress
  Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect
  The landscape with the quiet of the sky.

  

  

• Lines 9-14

  The day is come when I again repose
  Here, under this dark sycamore, and view
  These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts,
  Which at this season, with their unripe fruits,
  Are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves
  'Mid groves and copses.

  

  

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• Lines 14-22

  Once again I see
  These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines
  Of sportive wood run wild: these pastoral farms,
  Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke
  Sent up, in silence, from among the trees!
  With some uncertain notice, as might seem
  Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods,
  Or of some Hermit's cave, where by his fire
  The Hermit sits alone.

  

  

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• Lines 23-29

  These beauteous forms,
  Through a long absence, have not been to me
  As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:
  But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din
  Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
  In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
  Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;

  

  

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• Lines 30-36

  And passing even into my purer mind
  With tranquil restoration:—feelings too
  Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,
  As have no slight or trivial influence
  On that best portion of a good man's life,
  His little, nameless, unremembered, acts
  Of kindness and of love.

  

  

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• Lines 36-47

  Nor less, I trust,
  To them I may have owed another gift,
  Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
  In which the burthen of the mystery,
  In which the heavy and the weary weight
  Of all this unintelligible world,
  Is lightened:—that serene and blessed mood,
  In which the affections gently lead us on,—
  Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
  And even the motion of our human blood
  Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
  In body, and become a living soul:

  

  

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• Lines 48-50

  While with an eye made quiet by the power
  Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
  We see into the life of things.

  

  

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• Lines 51-56

  If this
  Be but a vain belief, yet, oh! how oft—
  In darkness and amid the many shapes
  Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir
  Unprofitable, and the fever of the world,
  Have hung upon the beatings of my heart—

  

  

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• Lines 57-59

  How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee,
  O sylvan Wye! thou wanderer thro' the woods,
           How often has my spirit turned to thee!

  

  

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• Lines 60-67

     And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought,
  With many recognitions dim and faint,
  And somewhat of a sad perplexity,
  The picture of the mind revives again:
  While here I stand, not only with the sense
  Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts
  That in this moment there is life and food
  For future years.

  

  

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• Lines 67-74

  And so I dare to hope,
  Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first
  I came among these hills; when like a roe
  I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides
  Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams,
  Wherever nature led: more like a man
  Flying from something that he dreads, than one
  Who sought the thing he loved.

  

  

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• Lines 74-80

  For nature then
  (The coarser pleasures of my boyish days
  And their glad animal movements all gone by)
  To me was all in all.—I cannot paint
  What then I was. The sounding cataract
  Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,
  The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,

  

  

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• Lines 81-95

  Their colours and their forms, were then to me
  An appetite; a feeling and a love,
  That had no need of a remoter charm,
  By thought supplied, not any interest
  Unborrowed from the eye.—That time is past,
  And all its aching joys are now no more,
  And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this
  Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur; other gifts
  Have followed; for such loss, I would believe,
  Abundant recompense. For I have learned
  To look on nature, not as in the hour
  Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
  The still sad music of humanity,
  Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
  To chasten and subdue.

  

  

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• Lines 95-101

  —And I have felt
  A presence that disturbs me with the joy
  Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
  Of something far more deeply interfused,
  Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
  And the round ocean and the living air,
  And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:

  

  

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• Lines 102-104

  A motion and a spirit, that impels
  All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
  And rolls through all things.

  

  

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• Lines 104-113

  Therefore am I still
  A lover of the meadows and the woods
  And mountains; and of all that we behold
  From this green earth; of all the mighty world
  Of eye, and ear,—both what they half create,
  And what perceive; well pleased to recognise
  In nature and the language of the sense
  The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
  The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
  Of all my moral being.

  

  

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• Lines 114-116

  Nor perchance,
  If I were not thus taught, should I the more
  Suffer my genial spirits to decay:

  

  

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• Lines 117-122

  For thou art with me here upon the banks
  Of this fair river; thou my dearest Friend,
  My dear, dear Friend; and in thy voice I catch
  The language of my former heart, and read
  My former pleasures in the shooting lights
  Of thy wild eyes.

  

  

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• Lines 122-131

  Oh! yet a little while
  May I behold in thee what I was once,
  My dear, dear Sister! and this prayer I make,
  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: for she can so inform
  The mind that is within us, so impress
  With quietness and beauty, and so feed
  With lofty thoughts,

  

  

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• Lines 131-137

  that neither evil tongues,
  Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
  Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all
  The dreary intercourse of daily life,
  Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb
  Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold
  Is full of blessings.

  

  

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• Lines 137-142

  Therefore let the moon
  Shine on thee in thy solitary walk;
  And let the misty mountain-winds be free
  To blow against thee: and, in after years,
  When these wild ecstasies shall be matured
  Into a sober pleasure;

  

  

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• Lines 142-149

  when thy mind
  Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms,
  Thy memory be as a dwelling-place
  For all sweet sounds and harmonies; oh! then,
  If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief,
  Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts
  Of tender joy wilt thou remember me,
  And these my exhortations!

  

  

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• Lines 149-158

  Nor, perchance—
  If I should be where I no more can hear
  Thy voice, nor catch from thy wild eyes these gleams
  Of past existence—wilt thou then forget
  That on the banks of this delightful stream
  We stood together; and that I, so long
  A worshipper of Nature, hither came
  Unwearied in that service: rather say
  With warmer love—oh! with far deeper zeal
  Of holier love.

  

  

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• Lines 158-162

  Nor wilt thou then forget,
  That after many wanderings, many years
  Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs,
  And this green pastoral landscape, were to me
  More dear, both for themselves and for thy sake!

  

  

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“Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” Symbols

• 

  The Hermit

  At the end of the first stanza, the speaker imagines that the smoke he sees rising from the trees could be from "some Hermit's cave, where by his fire / The Hermit sits alone."

  Hermits are, traditionally, religious people, who choose to live in isolation (often in remote places) in order to devote themselves more fully to their religious and spiritual practice. Here, the Hermit can be thought of as a broader symbol of spiritual life and of discarding the trappings of daily, mundane existence. By placing a Hermit within this scene, the speaker implicitly suggests that this natural setting, and the natural world in general, makes a more spiritual life possible.

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• 

  The Mansion

  The poem introduces another symbol when referring the speaker's sister’s mind as a “mansion.” While this is a metaphor (her mind is compared to a spacious and beautiful physical place), it is also highly symbolic, since mansions are, of course, symbols of wealth and privilege. This symbol thus works to align some other terms of the poem—in which particular kinds of human thought are described as “lofty” and “elevated”—with an image of literal higher social status and standing. This symbol also stands in for domestic interiors that are refined; it suggests that the sister will likewise be “properly” (according to norms of gender and class) domestic.

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“Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language

• Allusion

  “Tintern Abbey” has two main allusions. First, the title references Tintern Abbey, an abbey (home for nuns or monks) that was built in the early 12th century by Walter de Clare near the village of Tintern, in Wales. Nowhere in the poem does the speaker actually describe the abbey, so its presence in the title functions mainly as an allusion to the abbey and what it represents.

  Abandoned in the 16th century during the Dissolution of the Monasteries under Henry VIII, the ruins of Tintern Abbey later became a symbol of English history and the subject of many representations in British Romantic writing and art. In a sense, it symbolized to the Romantics an earlier way of life in England, one that was picturesque and secluded from the intrusions of society and urbanity, and many visitors came through the area in the late 18th century to view and record the ruins. As part of the title, the allusion to the abbey works to establish the literal setting of the poem while also connecting the setting to the more secluded, spiritual way of life that the abbey represented.

  A second important allusion in “Tintern Abbey” is the reference to “forms” that appears in three places in the poem:

  1. At the beginning of the second stanza, when the speaker says that during his absence the “beauteous forms” of the landscape “have not been to [him] / As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye”;
  2. In stanza 4, when he says that to his younger self “[the] colours and … forms” of the landscape were “[a]n appetite; a feeling and a love,”
  3. And near the end of the poem, when he imagines his sister’s future mind as a “mansion for all lovely forms.”

  In all of these places in the poem, “forms” describes the shapes and impressions of the landscape, but it is also an allusion to Platonic forms. Plato, an ancient Greek philosopher, argued that for everything people encounter day to day, there are ideal, essential forms. For example, while there are many chairs in the physical world, there is an “ideal form” of a chair from which all of these actual chairs are derived. The physical derivations are, Plato argued, only imitations of the true and ultimate forms.

  By alluding to Plato’s forms, the poem elevates the landscape to this idealized state. At the same time, the allusion aligns the thinking of the speaker and his praise of the landscape with classical thought, which is also considered the origin of Western art and writing. This imbues the poem with a sense of grandeur and authority.

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• Anaphora

  

  
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• Apostrophe

  

  

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• Caesura

  

  

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• Consonance

  

  

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• Assonance

  

  

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• Personification

  

  

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• Simile

  

  

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• Enjambment

  

  

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• End-Stopped Line

  

  

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• Juxtaposition

  

  

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• Imagery

  

  

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• Polysyndeton

  

  

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• Alliteration

  

  

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"Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey" Vocabulary

Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.

• Tintern Abbey
• Murmur
• Behold
• Lofty
• Seclusion
• Sycamore
• Orchard-tufts
• Clad
• Groves and copses
• Pastoral
• Vagrant
• Hermit
• Forms
• Oft
• Pure
• Sublime
• Burthen
• Unintelligible
• Corporeal
• Fretful
• Sylvan
• Wye
• Roe
• Coarser
• Cataract
• Recompense
• Chasten
• Subdue
• Interfused
• Perceive
• Genial
• Prevail
• Mansion
• Wilt
• Exhortations
• Hither
• Zeal

• Tintern Abbey is an abbey (a building that houses monks or nuns) founded in 1131, near the village of Tintern, in Monmouthshire, Wales. The abbey was abandoned in the 16th century, after the Dissolution of the Monasteries under Henry VIII, when England converted to Protestantism. Its ruins remain on the Welsh side of the River Wye (which creates a border between Wales and England). The ruins of the abbey have been the subject of numerous visual representations by British artists, notably by the British Romantic artists J.M. Turner and Samuel Palmer.

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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey”

• Form

  “Tintern Abbey” has 162 lines broken up into five stanzas of varying lengths:

  1. The first is 22 lines long;
  2. The second 28 lines long;
  3. The third 9 lines long;
  4. The fourth 54 lines long;
  5. And the fifth 49 lines long.

  The poem utilizes what are called verse paragraphs, in which each stanza functions similarly to a “paragraph,” containing a single thought.

  Within the poem, this works to express the sense that the speaker is actually speaking to the reader and to his sister. The stanzas vary in length just as, in speaking, one might pause at different intervals in the conversation—not according to some externally imposed time frame or pattern, but according to the organic and natural pauses that arise between units of thought and speech. In a sense, then, the poem creates a form that reflects the organic and varied “forms” or shapes of the natural world, and the natural progressions of human thought.

  The poem also works in several modes, notably as an ode, a dramatic monologue, and a conversation poem:

  • An ode is a poem praising a given subject; "Tintern Abbey" can be read as an ode because the poem as a whole praises the natural world.
  • A dramatic monologue is a form of in which the speaker reflects on his or her experiences and thoughts dramatically, and apparently to him or herself. Much of “Tintern Abbey” reflects this form, however toward the end of the poem it becomes clear that the poem is actually (or also) a conversation poem.
  • This last term is one used specifically to describe a group of poems by Wordsworth and his friend, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In a conversation poem, the speaker addresses someone close to him or her in a way that is both informal and serious.

  “Tintern Abbey” is a conversation poem in that it becomes clear, by the last stanza, that the speaker has actually been addressing his sister within the setting, apparently at the moment of the poem's composition. Thus, the poem can be read as a kind of transcription of an actual conversation or an actual utterance, emphasizing the poem's natural, immediate quality.

• Meter

  “Tintern Abbey” is written in blank verse, a.k.a. unrhymed iambic pentameter. Each line has 10 syllables, which are divided into 5 metrical feet known as iambs. Each iamb contains an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. For example, line 1 reads:

  Five years have past; five summers, with the length

  The poem’s use of blank verse has several effects. First, emerging out of a poetic tradition in which strict adherence to meter was the norm, blank verse was seen at the time "Tintern Abbey" was written as a more fluid, natural, and free way of writing poems.

  • This is because, while a poem in blank verse adheres to a metrical pattern, it doesn’t adhere to the rhyming element traditionally associated with that pattern.
  • Wordsworth was interested in writing poems closer to ordinary human speech, so by discarding the element of rhyme, the poem sounds and feels almost conversational, as though the speaker is addressing the reader directly.
  • In fact, within the poem the speaker addresses his sister, so the mode of conversation and human speech is important to both the poem’s form and its meaning.

  At the same time, the poem’s use of iambic pentameter lifts it out of a truly colloquial or conversational mode into the realm of the lyric, which is associated with music. It also aligns the poem with a classical tradition of tightly structured, metrical poetry, and gives the poem a sense of symmetry and grandeur—important to its themes of the harmony and grandeur of the natural world.

  Importantly, too, iambic pentameter is considered a kind of rising rhythm, since each foot shifts from an unstressed syllable to the more pronounced, emphasized, stressed syllable. This rhythm enacts the sense of hopeful progression within the poem, as the speaker describes how the passage of time has given him—and will give his sister—increased insight, awareness, and appreciation of beauty.

  The poem also includes some important divergences from its meter. For example, line 34 contains clusters of stressed syllables rather than iambs:

  On that best portion of a good man's life,

  This divergent meter makes the line stand out in the poem, while implicitly praising the simplicity and morality of a "good man's life."

  Elsewhere, the divergences are more subtle but equally powerful. For example, line 49 reads:

  Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,

  The cluster of stresses at the end of this line emphasizes the power of the "joy" the speaker evokes. Also, coming as it does at a moment in the poem in which the speaker describes moving out of his ordinary state of mind (and even his body) in a transcendent experience, this line registers a similar shift at the level of the poem's rhythms. Just as the speaker escapes the confines of his own body, the line leaves behind the received pattern and meter of the body of the poem, to arrive at a different kind of music.

  Finally, the poem introduces variation into its metrical pattern by splitting the pentameter of some lines across two lines and two stanzas. Stanzas 1, 2, and 4 all end with a line that is metrically incomplete in its pentameter; the pentameter is then "completed" in the following line and the following stanza.

  Take lines 50-51, between which is a stanza break:

  We see into the life of things.

  If this

  Taken together, this is creates a complete line of iambic pentameter.

  These disruptions register as pauses in the speaker's thoughts, but at the same time emphasize the poem's underlying music and pattern, since the reader, accustomed to the meter of the preceding lines, automatically reads on to reach the truncated lines' metrical conclusion. Implicitly, this aspect of the poem suggests that its underlying music, like the harmony in the natural world that it describes, is powerful enough to withstand disruptions and divergences and even gaps of space or time within the speaker's, and the reader's experience.

• Rhyme Scheme

  “Tintern Abbey” is written in blank verse, meaning that it has no fixed rhyme scheme. This absence of a traditional rhyme scheme is important to the poem, as Wordsworth was interested in writing poems closer to ordinary speech—which, of course, doesn't typically rhyme!

  At the same time, the poem sound echoes and some slant rhymes to create a sense of musicality. For example, the short /i/ sound in the “springs” of line 3 is echoed in the short /i/ of “cliffs” in line 5. Similarly, the short /e/ sound of “impress” in line 6 repeats in the next line with “connect.” While these are not full end rhymes, they do create a suggestion of rhyme and a sense that the poem is working in accordance with some kind of larger pattern.

  There are also some places in the poem where the line endings are even closer to full rhyme or, indeed, are fully rhyming. For example, in stanza four, “hour” in line 91 finds a full rhyme in line 94, with “power.” Then, at the end of the poem, “gleams” in line 151 almost completely rhymes with “stream” in line 153, except for the /s/ sound at the end. These moments of complete and almost complete rhyme give these lines and their meanings greater emphasis within the poem.

  Finally, the poem uses assonance and consonance throughout to create an intricate pattern of sound repetition. In a sense, then, the poem alludes to a kind of larger pattern of rhyme and music even as it reads, line by line, as more natural and varied, as though it is actual human speech.

“Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” Speaker

• “Tintern Abbey” doesn’t specifically identify the poem's speaker by name, age, or gender. At the same time, there are several elements of the poem that suggest the speaker of the poem is the poet, or rather, a crafted representation of the poet, William Wordsworth.

  First, the title, “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798,” connects the poem to specific biographical details about the poet. William Wordsworth did, in fact, go on a walking tour of the Wye Valley with his sister, Dorothy Wordsworth, in July 1798.

  The speaker then remarks that five years have gone by since he last visited this setting. Wordsworth had previously visited the area five years before, when he was 23. Later in the poem, the speaker addresses his younger sister. Historical context suggests that this sister can be read as the poet’s sister, Dorothy, who was one year younger than her brother.

  Other clues suggest that the speaker is male, and young (or young enough to go on a walking tour of this valley) but not as young as he once was. The speaker’s descriptions of outgrowing some of his youthful energy fit as a representation of the twenty-seven-year-old poet. Later in the poem, the speaker’s descriptions of nature as a kind of ideal feminine figure, who nurtures and cares for the speaker, reinforces the sense of the speaker as a man articulating norms of gender that were standard for his time.

  Finally, while a strong argument can be made that the speaker of the poem is closely identified with Wordsworth, it is also worth noting that the speaker is a particular representation of the poet. What the speaker sees, feels, and says within the poem are still all aspects of a self and sensibility crafted on the page. In this case, the speaker of the poem might be understood as a kind of mythical version of the poet, a romanticized version of the human poet, that is based upon Wordsworth but still exists independently.

“Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” Setting

• There are several settings, and several ways to understand setting, within “Tintern Abbey.” The most obvious setting is the one the title establishes: the Wye Valley, on the banks of the River Wye, in Wales. This area is home to the ruins of Tintern Abbey, built in 1131 and abandoned in the 16th century when England converted to Protestantism under Henry VIII. Interestingly, although the Abbey is mentioned in the title, nowhere in the poem does the speaker actually describe it, focusing instead on the natural attributes of the surrounding landscape. In a way, the poem as a whole is entirely about this setting, as it explores how a beautiful natural landscape can rejuvenate and restore the human soul.

  At the same time, the poem incorporates other settings, which are juxtaposed with the beauty of this natural place. The speaker recalls time spent in urban towns and cities, and through his descriptions makes these settings palpable and present. He also imagines a time in the future when his sister may live alone in an unknown setting, yet within her mind will continue to be able to return to this one.

  It is also worth noting that the setting of “Tintern Abbey” is a particular, crafted representation of the actual landscape of the Wye Valley at the end of the 18th century. Historical research has shown that this area was visibly industrialized; someone visiting would have heard the activity of an ironworks and seen a river polluted with iron and copper ore. The speaker leaves these industrial elements out of his descriptions, instead presenting the landscape as wild and untouched. Thus, the setting of “Tintern Abbey” is both the actual Wye Valley and an imaginative version of it—as the speaker says within the poem, “half create[d]” and half “pereceive[d].”

Literary and Historical Context of “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey”

• Literary Context

  Wordsworth wrote “Tintern Abbey” in 1798 and included it as the final poem in the collection Lyrical Ballads— a landmark collection of poems published with his friend and fellow poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, that same year. In fact, Wordsworth is said to have so valued “Tintern Abbey” that he halted the publication of Lyrical Ballads, which was already in process, to be able to include the poem as its final piece.

  Lyrical Ballads as a collection is now considered to have signaled the beginning of the British Romantic movement in literature. Wordsworth and Coleridge sought to challenge what they saw as the elitist, detached, and pretentious forms of 18th-century poetry in England; they wanted to create poetry that was closer to ordinary human speech and could be read and appreciated by ordinary people. As part of this, in their poems they emphasized rural life and the natural world, which they saw as restorative and the answer to the corrupting influences of society.

  In their thinking, they drew on the work of the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who emphasized the value of the individual human being, and whose writings helped to influence the French Revolution. These tenants became the central guiding principles of Romanticism, a movement that sought to emphasize the beauty, purity, and grandeur of the natural world and value human experience up to that point excluded from “high art,” including rural life and working-class realities.

  On its own terms, and as part of a collection that established the beginning of the Romantic Movement, “Tintern Abbey” has had a lasting influence on British and American literature. Its views of nature and of rural life as restorative, and its implicit view of the poet as an inspired, privileged observer, have continued to shape approaches to poetry and literary criticism well into the 20th century and even today.

  While Wordsworth himself is seen as being influenced by the philosopher William Godwin, the writings of Rousseau, and his friend Coleridge, a less acknowledged but crucially important literary influence can be found in his sister, Dorothy Wordsworth—the “dear, dear sister” of the poem. Dorothy, too, was a writer, though she primarily wrote in journals, notably what are now known as the Grasmere Journals. Her writing is striking for its observation and precise detail, and scholarship has found that Wordsworth drew on her writing for many of his own poems. For example, his poems “Beggars” and “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” use images and phrases from Dorothy’s journals, without attribution. Many modern scholars now see Dorothy as an unacknowledged collaborator in Wordsworth's work.

  Historical Context

  Two historical movements are important to understanding “Tintern Abbey” and Romanticism as a whole: the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution.

  Beginning in 1789, the French Revolution involved the uprising of the French working class and poor against the monarchy and the system of monarchical power. It brought with it a vision of true democracy, in which each person would have equal rights and the power to participate in governance. By 1798, at the time “Tintern Abbey” was written, France had seen the rise of the Paris Commune and the Reign of Terror, and by 1804 Napoleon would declare himself Emperor, overturning the principles of liberty and freedom that had guided the original uprising. Yet the French Revolution had a lasting change on the European political landscape. It signaled the beginning of the end of absolute monarchies as a system of governance in Western Europe, and ushered in republics and liberal democracies as political systems.

  These democratic values were important to Romanticism. In turning away from art that only represented bourgeois and wealthy ways of life, these writers and artists, including Wordsworth, sought to celebrate the human life and dignity of those who had conventionally been disregarded, including people living in rural settings and the working poor.

  Secondly, “Tintern Abbey” was written during the Industrial Revolution, a time when rural areas throughout Europe were being transformed into centers of industrial production. In emphasizing the natural world and rural life in their poems, the Romantic poets, including Wordsworth, expressed their resistance to these industrial changes. They viewed nature and life in rural settings as more simple and pure than urban life and urban society, and they shared with Rousseau the belief that society is essentially corrupting to the human spirit. Within the poem, the speaker sees the Wye Valley as a place that is still pure, untouched, and intact. He celebrates the restorative power of this landscape, and implicitly seeks to preserve it.

  Interestingly, despite the poem’s juxtaposition of the pure, untouched landscape of the Wye Valley and industrial settings, recent scholarship has found that the setting of the poem was actually, at the time the poem was written, significantly industrialized. A visitor to the Wye Valley at the time would have seen an ironworks in the area, and the River Wye was polluted and rust colored from iron and copper ore. Workers at the ironworks actually lived within the ruins of the abbey.

  Meanwhile, scholars have suggested that the “wreaths of smoke” the speaker sees within the poem were likely smoke from the ironworks, and that the people he describes as “vagrant dwellers” were people who, within the area at the time, were displaced and impoverished by war. Arguably, the speaker erases this evidence of industrialization and local suffering in order to make the landscape fit into the poem’s philosophical and aesthetic worldview.

More “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” Resources

• External Resources

  • Visual Depiction of Tintern Abbey — View an 1835 visual depiction of Tintern Abbey by the British artist Samuel Palmer. Like Wordsworth’s poem, this depiction removes evidence of the local people and industry in the area, presenting a Romantic vision of the ruins of the abbey within a natural landscape.

  • Biography of William Wordsworth — Learn more about Wordsworth's life and work via the Poetry Foundation.

  • Facsimile of Dorothy Wordsworth's Journals — View a facsimile of two pages from Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals, and read about an example of how Wordsworth used her imagery and writing in his poems.

  • British Romanticism — Read more about the British Romantic movement at the Poetry Foundation website.

  • Essay about "Tintern Abbey" and Facsimile Images of Lyrical Ballads — Read an article about the poem and view facsimile images of the original Lyrical Ballads, at the British Library.

• LitCharts on Other Poems by William Wordsworth

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  • It Is a Beauteous Evening, Calm and Free

  • I Travelled Among Unknown Men

  • I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

  • Lines Written in Early Spring

  • London, 1802

  • Mutability

  • My Heart Leaps Up

  • Nuns Fret Not at Their Convent’s Narrow Room

  • Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood

  • She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways

  • She was a Phantom of Delight

  • Strange fits of passion have I known

  • Surprised by joy—impatient as the Wind

  • The Solitary Reaper

  • The Tables Turned

  • The World Is Too Much With Us

  • Three Years She Grew in Sun and Shower

  • To a Snowdrop

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