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
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.
relation can be bridged from the poem “Lines Composed A Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” by
Wordsworth desires nature only because of his separateness, and the more isolated he feels the mor...
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.
Seeing into the life of things, then, is seeing into the power of human reflection, which in turn rests on our capacity for recollection. Thus the form of the poem—the constant shifting of the author's attention from one period of time to another—portrays the experiences and recognition's that is the subject matter of the poem. It is in this shifting of attention that the author—and we—come to distance ourselves from those aspects of our lives that trouble us and turn to other experiences that nurture us and give us hope for the future. Moreover, this power of reflection gives us the ability to give shape not just to our experiences of the past but, also, to our expectations of the future. The author has learned that what he becomes is, in large part, the result of what he chooses to make of himself. Making oneself, for Wordsworth, however, comes not in building a career or seeking riches, but in coming to a better understanding of one's own nature and situation. This gives the author tremendous power over his life, but also a great deal of responsibility for it as well.
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.
Wordsworth drew much of his inspiration from nature, noting that man, when in nature, could see Heaven again. The dichotomy of good and evil was less about the wars and angels and devils, and more about the external struggle of man attempting to conquer of nature. His thoughts and writings focus far more on the good elements of life, “[describing] poetry as the ‘breath and finer spirit of all knowledge’” (Hartman 555). According to Wordsworth, man was scorning himself in an attempt to play God. In his poem “The World is too Much with Us” Wordsworth illustrates his point of the sacredness of nature in the line “I’d rather be/ a Pagan suckled in a creed outworn” (Wordsworth). At the time, and even in the moral ideals of today, paganism was seen as evil, and the line was meant to shock the audience into realizing the wrongs of their ways. Likewise, Wordsworth’s reverence toward nature is more than apparent in “The Immortality Ode”. Interestingly, he states that the soul is in Heaven before birth and the longer the soul is living the body; the view of Heaven – or the good – becomes further out of reach. Wordsworth, more or less, attributes evil to aging and withdrawal from
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 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.
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.
Nature inspires Wordsworth poetically. Nature gives a landscape of seclusion that implies a deepening of the mood of seclusion in Wordsworth's mind.
Hirsch, E. D. Jr. Wordsworth and Schelling a Typical Study of Romanticism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960.
"The Poetry of William Wordsworth." SIRS Renaissance 20 May 2004: n.p. SIRS Renaissance. Web. 06 February 2010.