Enlightenment, Maturation, and a Shot of the Past
(3 Themes from Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey)
This is an essay composed a few hours after Mcgee’s lecture on the theory of Platonics. This lecture left me feeling sentimental and as if I’m on a higher plane of thought. These feelings tied directly into the themes of Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, a poetic essay written by William Wordsworth. Wordsworth wrote this poem while at Tintern Abbey, five years after his first trip; the poem is considered to be the model for the romantic era. The central themes on display are the young to old dichotomy, life through nature, and the splendor of childhood; these are identified clearly in Tintern Abbey. As the poem begins, the first of these themes we start to see is the transformation from youth to a higher state of mind in later years. In youth we are infatuated with that of which we can experience with our senses. As we mature we begin to have enlightened thoughts. In old age there is a yearning for things which are not material such as love and freedom. This theme is heavily influenced by Wordsworth’s immersion in the theory of platonics. These things are evidenced when Wordsworth writes,”For I
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This is depicted the most clearly when Wordsworth describes his power in nature, “While here I stand, not only with the sense of pleasant pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts that in this moment there is life and food for future years.” Those who are old seek nature for something they love, instead of running through being led about by whims. There is a tranquility and appreciation for the experiences of youth. However, nature is now the guide to the heart and something to be learned from instead of something to be taken advantage of. With these thoughts there is a realization that the splendor of childhood is not a feeling to be
(ll. 19-24) Wordsworth’s famous and simple poem, “I wandered lonely as a cloud,” expresses the Romantic Age’s appreciation for the beauty and truth that can be found in a setting as ordinary as a field of daffodils. With this final stanza, Wordsworth writes of the mind’s ability to carry those memories of nature’s beauty into any setting, whether city or country. His belief in the power of the imagination and the effect it can have on nature, and vice a versa, is evident in most of his work. This small
In “Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” we find the purest expression of Wordsworth’s fascination with friendship.
When she feels sad or lonely, he wants her to remember what he told her about nature because he believes that if his sister where to recall him, he will gain eternal life. The idea of “Lines composed of a few miles above Tintern Abbey” expresses Wordsworth sensational admiration for nature and feels a deep power of delight in natural things. He exclaims how at a moment of sadness, he turns to the nature for peace of mind and inspiration. As he becomes serious about the nature, it gives him courage and spirit enough to stand there with a sense of delight and pleasure. He lets the reader know that even though his boyish days are gone, he doesn’t ponder on it or mourn for its loss.
Wordsworth desires nature only because of his separateness, and the more isolated he feels the mor...
To begin, Wordsworth shows fear of mortality throughout the lines in the poem The World is too Much with Us. He explains that we continue to waste our lives by only being concerned with material things. Once we start caring more about money, we are lost! The speaker claims that our obsession with "getting and spending" has made us insensible to the beauties of nature. "Getting and spending" refers to the consumer culture accompanying the Industrial Revolution that was the devil incarnate for Wordsworth .(Shmoop Editorial Team) We lose our chances to do better and accomplish things when we give away our hearts because we become enthralled with love. Soon we become blind from what really matters in life and drift away from Nature. We take for granted the little things in life and become out of tune.
Primarily in Lines composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey the mortality of creativeness and imagination is expressed by Wordsworth. This is a poem about the beauty of an old cathedral called Tintern Abbey. He hasn’t been there in five years and he brought his sister along. Even though imagination isn’t immortal, there is a way to reclaim it, “That time is past, / and all its aching joys are ...
William Wordsworth was raised amid the mountains in a rustic society and spent a great deal of his childhood outdoors, in what he would later remember as a pure communion with nature. The life style that he led as a child brought him to the belief that, upon being born, human beings move from a perfect, idealized realm of nature into the destructive ambition of adult life (Phillips). Wordsworth's deep cynicism to the materialistic ambition of the Industrial Revolution during the early nineteenth century is evident in this sonnet. Images and metaphors alluding to mankind's greed, nature's innocence, and the speaker's rejection of accepted principles all serve to illustrate the speaker's passion to save the decadent era of the early 1800s.
William Wordsworth existed in a time when society and its functions were beginning to rapidly pick up. The poem that he 'Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye', gave him a chance to reflect upon his quick paced life by taking a moment to slow down and absorb the beauty of nature that allows one to 'see into the life of things'; (line 49). Wordsworth's 'Tintern Abbey'; takes you on a series of emotional states by trying to sway 'readers and himself, that the loss of innocence and intensity over time is compensated by an accumulation of knowledge and insight.'; Wordsworth accomplishes to prove that although time was lost along with his innocence, he in turn was able to gain an appreciation for the aesthetics that consoled him by incorporating all together, the wonders of nature, his past experiences, and his present mature perception of life.
Wordsworth begins the journey into "Tintern Abbey" by taking the reader from the height of a mountain stream down into the valley where the poet sits under a sycamore... ... middle of paper ... ... together even after his death. Over two hundred years after it was written, "Tintern Abbey" continues to uphold the essence of William Wordsworth's beliefs and continues to touch the emotions of its readers. Even though, here in the twenty-first century, the term real-world has a connotation of life in the fast-lane, the real world - the natural world - of Wordsworth's time still holds a place of eminence both in literature and in the hearts of its readers.
Nature inspires Wordsworth poetically. Nature gives a landscape of seclusion that implies a deepening of the mood of seclusion in Wordsworth's mind.
The poems, “Above Tintern Abbey” and “Intimations of Immortality written by the poet, William Wordsworth, pertain to a common theme of natural beauty. Relaying his history and inspirations within his works, Wordsworth reflects these events in each poem. The recurring theme of natural beauty is analogous to his experiences and travels.
"The Poetry of William Wordsworth." SIRS Renaissance 20 May 2004: n.p. SIRS Renaissance. Web. 06 February 2010.
The fifth stanza of Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” is especially interesting to me because of the images it presents. It is at this point in the poem that Wordsworth resumes his writing after a two-year hiatus. In the fourth stanza, he poses the question, “Whither is fled the visionary gleam?” Stanza five is the beginning of his own answers to that question. Contrary to popular enlightenment ideas, Wordsworth suggests that rather than become more knowledgeable with age, man if fact is born with “vision splendid” and as he ages, that vision “dies away” and he left empty.
Hirsch, E. D. Jr. Wordsworth and Schelling a Typical Study of Romanticism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960.
He is writing the poem as if he were an object of the earth, and what it is like to once live and then die only to be reborn. On the other hand, Wordsworth takes images of meadows, fields, and birds and uses them to show what gives him life. Life being whatever a person needs to move on, and without those objects, they can't have life. Wordsworth does not compare himself to these things like Shelley, but instead uses them as an example of how he feels about the stages of living. Starting from an infant to a young boy into a man, a man who knows death is coming and can do nothing about it because it's part of life.