Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" is Romantic in the way it links nature to holiness and moral goodness. Being in nature elevates the poet. For instance, Wordsworth calls the woods and meadows that he sees around Tintern Abbey:
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being
In his long autobiographical poem "The Prelude," Wordsworth discusses feeling that poetry is a holy calling, and often invokes Milton as a mentor. After his disillusion and depression at the way the French Revolution turned into a bloodbath, Wordsworth returned to the Lake District. There, he came to believe he could make a difference by writing poems that revealed God's presence in nature as well as the goodness of the simple life. In Tintern Abbey, he dwells on the way seemingly small things, such as kind acts or the pleasure derived from being in nature, can have a deep influence ("no trivial influence") on our souls. As he writes:
feelings tooOf unremembered pleasures; such, perhaps,As have made no trivial influence On that best portion of a good man's life;His little, nameless, unremembered actsOf kindness and of love.
The role of memory was also important to Wordsworth as a Romantic poet, and he highlights memory from the start of this poem, noting that it has been five years since he last visited Tintern Abbey. In "The Prelude," Wordsworth discusses how returning to the same places in nature as we get older helps us to understand the changes in ourselves. As we mark the changes in how we react to the same spot, we gain self understanding. In Tintern Abbey, Wordsworth notes that he was more passionate as a younger self:
I cannot paint
What then I was.
The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion
Now, however, in the same place, he realizes he has become more spiritual:
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,
. . . And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts
Wordsworth, the emblem of the Romantic poet, in this poem expresses his strong faith in three Romantic themes: the holy, redemptive qualities of nature, simple living, and memory.
"Lines Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey," by William Wordsworth, is sometimes considered the archetypal Romantic poem for a number of reasons. Essentially, in this poem, Wordsworth is discussing the "aspect most sublime" that is revealed to him by the natural setting of Tintern Abbey, whose beauty has lived in his memory for five years since he was last there. In his Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth stated that poetry arises from "emotion recollected in tranquility," and we see this at work in this poem, as the poet describes how the "tranquil" beauty of Tintern Abbey gives him strength and inspiration when he is not there. Both of these are tenets of Romantic poetry that show the influence of Edmund Burke's ideas on the sublime which appear in most Romantic works. Wordsworth states that
I have owed to them [the views of Tintern Abbey],
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind
On the most basic level, there are two key Romantic traits exhibited in this poem:
1. It focuses on Nature and the power of Nature to inspire the muse
2. It focuses on individualism and the impact a particular place or feeling may have on one person.
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