From Past to Present:

From Past to Present:

Reflections of What Used to Be

Envision five years from now. Driving through the streets, where you drove your old friends to places you remember listening to the radio, looking at the stores that once were your favorite hangouts, cruising through your common shortcuts. Clearly you will have remembered great memories and sad ones, and when you come back, both memories will come again at the places where they had happened. Delve into your past; you probably would not be shocked about some things that haven’t changed to your hometown, such as the high school is still on the same street or your favorite restaurant still carries the same menu. While you take time to think about yourself five years ago, driving through that street, reminiscing, you most likely will have been surprised to how much hasn’t changed since then. Gradually, you have a flashback to how you were as a teenager, the way you saw the environment around you and what was significant.

This is the power of imagination combined with our senses and with this we can build a world of our own just as William Wordsworth did. Reflecting upon the past is not necessarily about what happened then and there at that specific time in life, but how the environment was and will forever keep the memories instilled within us unchanged.

William Wordsworth after he lived there. Visited the Wye valley with his sister Dorothy five years ago, William Wordsworth revisited the Wye valley in July 1798. As Wordsworth viewed the valley, he tries to see what had changed visually and emotionally with his “Lines”. Wordsworth tried to analyze the changes he had gone through. While he did this, he gave some perception into the inner workings of memory. Also, he described the actual time and place of his return visit in the title of the poem and where he is in the area that he elaborately describes.

The title states that he was sitting on a spot, a few miles above an abandoned abbey in the valley of the river Wye; therefore he can see a wide scene that he is going to describe. As he composes the poem, he was “sitting under this dark sycamore” (Wordsworth 10). In the beginning of the poem Wordsworth states three times that “five years have past” since he last visited (Wordsworth 1). It seems as if he continued to want to revisit Tintern Abbey for a long time. Like other poems about scenery and landscape that were made before “Tintern Abbey” in the 18th century, Wordsworth’s poem describes the scenery to us in elaborate detail. He appeals to our eyes and ears using many adjectives and verbs such as, the sound of “rolling” waters, and the “steep and lofty cliffs” (Wordsworth 1-3).

In the poem Wordsworth repeats the first person pronoun, “I” in many parts of his poem in order to indicate his personal involvement with the area around him and how the perspective influences him (Sng 1). There should be more concern toward his point of view on the scene. Critics have often note that Wordsworth does not show the Abbey and the valley as it really appeared in 1798 (Jugel 1). The abbey was actually ruined, and Wordsworth states at the end of the Lyrical Ballads that he wrote the poem while leaving the banks of the River Wye, which makes him below and not above the, Tintern Abbey. Reasonably, Wordsworth used his creative imagination to see what he wanted to see an idyllic landscape. As he gazed down on the vast valley with his eyes, his thoughts visualized a mixture of both the past and the present much as you might look back on your old town five years from now.

The Wye valley landscape