Analysis of Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, The Prelude, The World is Too Much with Us, and London, 1802
One of our greatest fears is the fear of death. Immortality is something any of us would take in a heartbeat, so we do not have to face death. But this is something that we cannot run away from. Mortality is an unpleasant thought that sits in the back of our minds form our day to day lives. Yet, this fear is something that is developed more over time as we grow older. Children believe that the world is such a wonderful place, they fell invincible. They also have wonderful creative skills and imaginations which is often revealed to us when they can play one game for hours at one time. Yet, as a child ages, this imagination and creativity can disappear. This is what William Wordsworth is terrified of. Wordsworth is an English poet as well as his colleague Samuel Taylor Coleridge published the first edition of Lyrical Ballads and it changed everything as mentioned Evelyn Toynton, “In early 1798, Coleridge and a little-known poet named William Wordsworth decided to publish a joint volume of their poems.” (Toynton, Evelyn). William expressed this fear of premature mortality of the imagination in each of his works, Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, The Prelude, The World is Too Much with Us, and London, 1802.
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 ...
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... with Us. Lastly, Wordsworth’s poem London, 1802 also shows his fear of premature mortality of the imagination. All of these works contain his fear of losing imagination and how man should return to nature.
Works Cited
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Magnuson, Paul. "The Gang: Coleridge, the Hutchinsons & The Wordsworths in 1802." Criticism 4(2001):451. eLibrary. Web. 11 Mar. 2014.
Peters, John G. “Wordsworth’s TINTERN ABBEY” The Explicator(Washington) , Winter 2003, Vol. 61, Iss. 2, pg. 77 : eLibrary. Web 05 Mar 2002
Richey, William. "The Christian Wordsworth, 1798-1805." ANQ 1(2003):57. eLibrary. Web. 11 Mar. 2014.
Toynton, Evelyn. "A DELICIOUS TORMENT: The friendship of Wordsworth and Coleridge." Harper's. 01 Jun. 2007: 88. eLibrary. Web. 10 Mar. 2014.
Wordsworth, William. “The Thorn.” The Longman Anthology of British Literature: Vol. 2B. Ed. David Damrosch, et al. New York: Longman, 1999. 319-325.
The Norton Anthology English Literature. Ed. M.H. Abrams. New York: WW Norton, 2000. 238-50 Wordsworth, William. "
G. Ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Romantic Period. New York: Norton, 2000. Barth, Robert J. Romanticism and transcendence: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the Religious Imagination. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003.
In “Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” we find the purest expression of Wordsworth’s fascination with friendship.
The speaker of “Lines Composed of a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” is Wordsworth himself. He represents Romanticism’s spiritual view of nature. His poetry is written
Henry David Thoreau implies that simplicity and nature are valuable to a person’s happiness in “Why I Went to the Woods”. An overall theme used in his work was the connection to one’s spiritual self. Thoreau believed that by being secluded in nature and away from society would allow one to connect with their inner self. Wordsworth and Thoreau imply the same idea that the simple pleasures in life are easily overlooked or ignored. Seeing the true beauty of nature allows oneself to rejuvenate their mentality and desires. When one allows, they can become closer to their spiritual selves. One of William Wordsworth’s popular pieces, “Tintern Abbey”, discusses the beauty and tranquility of nature. Wordsworth believed that when people
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.
In "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey," William Wordsworth explains the impact of Nature from Tintern Abbey in his every day life. "Tintern Abbey" shows the great importance of nature to Wordsworth in his writings, love for life, and religion. The memories he has of Tintern Abbey make even the darkest days full of light.
Wordsworths “Preface to Lyrical Ballads” is his ideas on how he is going to be writing his poetry. In the “Preface to Lyrical Ballads” The Principal Object of the Poems. Humble and Rustic Life (Wordsworth 434) he discusses how in his poems he wants to create a situation in common life and have all different kinds of people relate them to a personal experience they once had in a common language,“ To throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mid in an unsual way; and ,further, and above all, to make these incidents and situations interesting by tracing them truly through not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature: chiefly, as far as regards the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement.” by saying this in this stanza one can directly relate it to how he then writes “Tintern Abbey”. In “Tintern Abbey” Wordsworth uses this imagination to make things like walking through a abbey with your sister can become a magical incident that sends...
"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.
In the latter part of the romantic period, Wordsworth, as a part of his lyrical ballads, wrote “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal.” Although not initially intended, the poem eventually became part of a series labeled as the “Lucy Poems.” The five poems, in some way or another, address loss, separation, and their connection to nature. Recent analyses have yielded interesting results in interpreting the poem. Because of the ambiguity present within the lines, varying interpretations have emerged.
William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge spearheaded a philosophical writing movement in England in the late 18th and early 19th century. Although Wordsworth and S.T. Coleridge are often considered the fathers of the English Romantic movement, their collective theologies and philosophies were often criticized but rarely taken serious by the pair of writers due to their illustrious prestige as poets. The combined effort in the Lyrical Ballads catapulted their names into the mainstream of writers in 1798 and with this work; they solidified their place in English literature. Although, most people fail to note that the majority of Coleridge's and Wordsworth's work was him simply bending and breaking particular rules of poetry that were in place during his time and in order to fully understand his work, one must fully understand his views of poetry itself.
Jones, John. The Egotistical Sublime, A History of Wordsworth’s Imagination. London: Chatto & Windus, 1960.
In William Wordsworth’s poems, the role of nature plays a more reassuring and pivotal r ole within them. To Wordsworth’s poetry, interacting with nature represents the forces of the natural world. Throughout the three poems, Resolution and Independence, Tintern Abbey, and Michael, which will be discussed in this essay, nature is seen prominently as an everlasting- individual figure, which gives his audience as well as Wordsworth, himself, a sense of console. In all three poems, Wordsworth views nature and human beings as complementary elements of a sum of a whole, recognizing that humans are a sum of nature. Therefore, looking at the world as a soothing being of which he is a part of, Wordsworth looks at nature and sees the benevolence of the divinity aspects behind them. For Wordsworth, the world itself, in all its glory, can be a place of suffering, which surely occurs within the world; Wordsworth is still comforted with the belief that all things happen by the hands of the divinity and the just and divine order of nature, itself.