“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:
- 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”;
- 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,”
- 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.