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How William Wordsworth is close to nature
Nature in poetry
William Wordsworth as a poet of nature
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Tenacious Tintern Abbey
(An Analysis of Tintern Abbey)
One of the greatest poems in the English language has to be, “Tintern Abbey” by William Wordsworth. This passages takes us through a whirlwind of emotions, of a writer who comes back to one of his favorite places in nature, with his sister, and a roar of memories floods his body. He states that it has been five years since he last visited this location, sitting and listening to the nearby river, he writes. Wordsworth goes about describing this wonderful place, going all the way from the trees around him to the curling of the smoke from a nearby Cottage down the hill, he imagines this smoke as a hermit in the deep forest, waking in the morning. Then moving on to writing about his memory of the place in his past. Speaking of the beauteous forms that he would think of, to bring him back to this place when he was away in the noisy city, how this escape brought a tranquil restoration to his soul. There are instrumental things that are included in the poem, that can be put towards the absolute glory of nature, and how us human beings treat this silent beast. He looks into the future, and tells his smaller sister that he brought with him. Wordsworth knows that this place, this sanctuary, will always be an escape for him, and now his little sister. He finds joy in this realization, that what he has found will be a very instrumental in his sister’s life. He hopes to remember this place for the rest of time, and if he did stop, that he would die, and his sister would take his place. This whole passage is about messages that are expressed throughout, in the form of the Past, Present, and Future.
William Wordsworth in his famous passage, expressed a fantastic realization to his past,...
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...om everyday life that he will die, and the memories will live on in his younger sister. Wordsworth tells of a future that is unknown with the life and passage of this life cannot be without the past, it is the instrumental being in how we live our lives. Our future depends on the decisions that we make in the past, it is a circle.
Wordsworth’s, “Tintern Abbey” is a wonder some expression of what our lives partake in, and how the three representations of our lives the; Past, Present, and Future all combine into what we call life today. These three things come together and form the substance of what our lives entail. “Tintern Abbey” makes the realization that just in nature it can rigor these past events and can look forward into the future. Cleary, you can see that Wordsworth definitely knew what he was talking about.
Works Cited
Pearson Volume II Pages 780-785
"Tintern Abbey"'s opening lines prepare the reader for a reunion, notable in tone not only for the sense of anticipation with which the poet apprehends this moment, but equally so for the poignancy which immediately inflects the poem's proceedings. My reading of "Tintern Abbey" takes as its most prominent concern the sense in which Wordsworth's "Revisiting the Banks of the Wye" represents a haven-seeking of sorts. Since his visit to the Wye in 1793, much has happened to Wordsworth: he has found, and relinquished, his first romantic love in Annette Vallon. As a young would-be radical, sympathetic to the ideals of the French Revolution, he finds himself at odds with London's entrenched conservatism. In 1795, after well over a decade of only intermittent contact with his sister, Wordsworth and his beloved Dorothy are reunited at Racedown, at about the same time that they make the acquaintance of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Within two years of this happy occasion, the two Wordsworths will move to Alfoxden to be near Coleridge. The ensuing years of intense friendship and creative discourse will yield, by 1798, the collaborative Lyrical Ballads, to which "Tintern Abbey" belongs. As we consider the tumult and activity that have characterized this period of his life, we might well speculate upon the nature of the thoughts going through Wordsworth's mind as he surveys the Abbey from his vantage on the riverbank; my own temptation is to equate the quietly reflective tone of the poem with the Taoist notion of hsü.
Wordsworth is describing how he is sitting out in a grove, in a peaceful atmosphere and when everything is calm and for him it brings out the gentlemen with emotions. He is also saying that if we take the time to get out and enjoy nature that it will relax us and we will begin to see what is important. He is also hearing the birds singing that brings something to mind, perhaps past love.
Commemorating the bicentennial of the 1798 Lyrical Ballads implies something about the volume's innovations as well as its continuity. It is no longer possible to believe that 'Romanticism' started here (as I at least was taught in school). Even if we cannot claim 1798 as a hinge in literary history, though, there is something appealing about celebrating the volume's attitude to newness, as well as the less contentious fact of its enduring importance to readers of Romantic-period poetry. What one risks, of course, is the currently ubiquitous accusation that one is repeating the self-representations of an inappropriately authoritative version of Romanticism, as my school-teacher certainly was (though none of us knew it at the time). There is indeed something innately Wordsworthian about the bicentennial, with its celebration of the endurance of a single past event. We recognise this rhetoric of revisitation and futurity: it is the language spoken by the affirming voice of 'Lines written above Tintern Abbey', the concluding statement of the 1798 volume. The poem reads rather like the recitation of a liturgy. Wordsworth recollects his own faith by restating it, and in doing so he discovers its truth and its guarantee of continuity: "in this moment there is life and food / For future years" (ll. 65-6). However sceptical readers have become about the Wordsworthian-Coleridgean creed, the monumental quality of the volume is not entirely a figment of a literary history in search of Great Traditions; 'Tintern Abbey' writes its own future—and the future of Lyrical Ballads 1798 as a whole—as well as writing Wordsworth's (and Dorothy's). We may no longer assent to the idea of 1798 as a new beginning, but we still have to accommodate the volume's own assertions about continuity and change.
The days and times in which these poets lived and their personal lives also had a significant impact upon their works and poems. Wordworth was one of the greatest Romantic poets. He was fed up of the hustle- bustle of city life which he couldn’t cope up with and thus he turned to nature as seen in ‘Tintern Abbey’. He lived during the Frenc...
Wordsworth visualized scenes while he was away, a way for him to feel a spiritual connection until he was able to return. Wordsworth states, “As a landscape to a blind man’s eye: But opt, in lonely rooms, and mid the din Of towns and cities, I have owed to them” (Wordsworth 25-27). Wordsworth gives a sense of conformity and loneliness while being in the towns and cities. That he had his memories of when he was younger to keep him hopeful to return to nature and all the memories he had grasped the memories of. As the society today focuses merely on what they can profit from cities, Wordsworth understood the true meaning of memories. Memories today are mostly captured through social media, and in return being taken for granted. Wordsworth had nostalgic bliss as he replayed his memories, and knowing that in the future he could look back on that day and have the same feeling again. Social media today is destroying our memories and what we can relive in our minds as memories. We can know that when things are posted within social media it will get likes and be shared. However, there are not many people in society today that will remember the true essence of what nature has given to
The locations often carry specific importance in Lyrical Ballads, Primarily because they give meaning to the individual who experiences them. Feeling and surroundings go hand in hand in Wordsworth poems. For example in ‘Lines left upon a seat in a Yew Tree’, the feeling of isolation and melancholy is compounded by his desolate surroundings, even though Wordsworth disapproves of this view, nature being subjective, it is still an important theme throughout. ‘Tintern Abbey’ is arguably the poem where...
To start off, Wordsworth reflects back on the past and what he saw in his first trip to Tintern. In the first lines of Tintern Wordsworth starts ...
This quote is demonstrating Wordsworth pantheistic nature, as he is offering a prayer to nature. He encourages various elements of nature to help protect her, such as asking the moon to shine upon his sister. Wordsworth then says to her that in the future, when she is sad or fearful, the memory of this experience of visiting Tintern Abbey will aid in healing her. He also says that if he has passed on, she can remember the love that he experienced while worshipping nature.
Wordsworth kicks the poem off with two hyperboles. First He says, “Earth has not anything to show more fair:” (1). Here, he is exaggeration this exceptional sight is to help the reader understand how dazzling his view is. Then he says, “Dull would he be of soul who could pass by” (2). Here his exaggeration is that if a person is not captivated by this sight enough to stop then they must have no soul. After these two lines, Wordsworth uses a slew of personification. He says, “This city now doth, like a garment, wear/ The beauty of the morning; silent, bare.” (4-5). Here he is personifying the city by giving it the ability to wear clothes. By doing this, he makes it seem as if London’s beauty is temporary and is just coming from the clothes it decided to wear that day. And on line twelve he says, “The river glideth at his own sweet will:” (12). On this line, the river is being personified and given the ability to control its pace. Then on the next line he says, “Dear God! The very houses seem asleep;” (13). Here the houses are personified by being given the ability to sleep like humans. All of this personification is used, because it furthers the idea that the chances of this happening are low. By making each aspect of London its own entity, he makes it seem like it just so happened that every facet of London was doing the right thing at the right time to create this
Childhood memories allow the speakers in both Tintern Abbey and Locksley Hall to meditate on the past, present and future. Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey uses memory in order to discuss themes of connection to nature and aging. This is done by the previously mentioned bringing forward of past feelings and comparisons to his younger sister. This theme of connection to nature is indicative of the romantic era in which it was written in and which Wordsworth was at the forefront of. Tennyson’s Locksley Hall presents ideas typical of the Victorian era through the speaker’s dramatic monologue. The speaker uses the dramatic monologue form to speak his thoughts on his past love who left him, and what this says about society. Through memory both of these poems illuminate ideas which are typical of the respective eras in which they are written.
"Tintern Abbey" typifies William Wordsworth's desire to demonstrate what he sees as the oneness of the human psyche with that of the universal mind of the cosmos. It is his pantheistic attempt to unfurl the essence of nature's sublime mystery that often evades understanding, marking his progression as a young writer firmly rooted within the revolutionary tradition to one caught in perplexity about which way to proceed socially and morally, and further, to define for himself a new personal socio-political vision. Moreover, "Tintern Abbey" exhibits Wordsworth's eclipsing of the Cartesian belief in a supernatural creator who stands beyond the universe, echoing the ideas of Burach Spinoza, and redefining late eighteenth century deism into a more personal, pantheist revision of nature. The poem's portrayal of the intimate connection with nature implicitly underscores Wordsworth's view on conventional religious belief as one surpassing commonly held interpretations of the supernatural. It conveys Wordsworth's ideal of the universe as bound inextricably within the essence of all that is harmonious and natural -- a "Oneness." It sympathetically depicts the inseparability of "God" from nature, the "material-spirit" of energy that, as Wordsworth portrays it, imbues the life force with
feels his life is like. It is about the past, present, and future Wordsworth. Wordsworth
Many times in life, people go through a time where they visit somewhere special that they will never forget. In my personal experience, I used to live in California, so now whenever I go back to visit, all these memories come back to me about my childhood. In William Wordsworth’s poem, “Tintern Abbey,” he speaks of his visit to a place that he had been before, and all the different things that he felt and remembered when he returned. “Five years have past; five summers, with the length of five long winters!” (Pg. 781 Lines 1-2). This quote from “Tintern Abbey” talks about how it had been five years since his last visit. According to Thomas, Tintern Abbey is a real place, and is located in southeast Wales. This was Wordsworth’s favorite place to visit, as he talks about in his poem. In “Tintern Abbey,” there are three romantic elements, including nature, memory, and transformation.
The author also raises a discussion on the works of Milton. In one of his poems Milton writes a lament for his blindness. Ironically Milton's "endurance in the face of adversity" reappears in Tintern Abbey as Wordsworth gives a dreary account of daily life "rash judgements and greetings where no kindness" is given. In his renewal of tradition Wordsworth intertwined the form of elegy with that of landscape, combining it with "Cowper's feelings for the picturesque and Akenside's pre-romantic sensibility." In choosing to work with this type of genre, he worked tirelessly to incorporate Milton's elegy with landscape and nature. The final product - Tintern Abbey.
This pain and pleasure in Tintern Abbey comes in the third stanza when he writes, “I have felt / A presence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thoughts / …of something far more deeply interfused” (93-96). Having had such a strong connection with nature and experiencing so many emotions because of it, Wordsworth is thrust into this place of mixed feelings because he is no longer blind to the things of the outside world and must face the pain that comes with that realization. Also, in growing through the years, his perspective on nature helps to shape the kinds of memories that he has. Specifically, he writes that “I have learned / To look on nature, not as in the hour / Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes / The still, sad music of humanity” (88-91). He is no longer able to ignore his knowledge from his time away from this beautiful