Analyzing Wordsworth's “tintern Abbey”

William Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” celebrates imagination and emotion over rationality and reason, and intuition over science. It is the beginning of English Romanticism in the 1800's and Wordsworth was one of the leading poets of that era. He introduced the readers to grasp nature and fully appreciate all aspects of it. “Tintern Abbey” focuses on Wordsworth’s nostalgic experience on returning to the Abbey, but pays much attention to the poem’s theme of emotional beauty and nature. In this poem, the reader finds Wordsworth’s intense and loving memory of natural scenes.

“Tintern Abbey” is a combination of all Wordsworth’s feelings about his past and his love of nature. We consider the first two lines of the poem, “Five years have passed; five summers, with the length/Of five long winters!” ( 24). Wordsworth continually attempts to bring back all the memories he had about his first visit to the Abbey in hopes of reaching a grand, nostalgic moment on his revisit. Because much time has passed, 5 long years, Wordsworth knows that those memories are lost, and he will never feel the same way again. We see the poet opening up his feelings in a similar way in lines 58-67: “And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought/With many recognitions dim and faint…though changes, no doubt, from what I was, when first/I came among these hills…” (65-66). Wordsworth describes the length of time it has been since his revisit to the Abbey, and how his return disappointed him. His memories were not as clear as they were before, and he knew he would not be able to reconstruct those memories he held so dear.

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, or any interest

Unborrowed from the eye.-- That time is past,

And all its aching joys