Let the misty mountain-winds be free
To blow against thee . . .
After my last day of classes at Oxford, I rented a car and headed for Tintern Abbey, just over the border, in Wales. Years before I’d discovered the Wordsworth poem, Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey (On Revisiting The Banks of the Wye During A Tour, July 13, 1798). From first reading, it’s opening lines (out of 159 lines) captured me, magically. This was my chance for a pilgrimage.
I was traveling with a Bread Loaf buddy. Poor thing! Trish withstood many a scrape with hedgerows, as I unsuccessfully maneuvered driving on the “wrong side of the road.” Excitement rose as we drove the curving, rising road. And then, there it was.
In all of English Romanticism,* William Wordsworth’s Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey (On Revisiting The Banks of the Wye During A Tour, July 13, 1798) is one of the most celebrated poetic introspections on self, countryside, and the wisdom that comes with the passage of time.
Listen and delight: https://downloads.bbc.co.uk/arts/romantics/audio/mp3/wordsworth_tintern_abbey.mp3
Five years have passed; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a sweet inland murmur. — Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
Which on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect
The landscape with the quiet of the sky.
How often we find the sublime in nature and return to it in memory!
If I should be, where I no more can hear
Thy voice, nor catch from thy wild eyes these gleams
Of past existence, wilt thou then forget
That on the banks of this delightful stream
We stood together.
Wordsworth was speaking to his sister, Dorothy. For me, I always think of my older brother, Mike, once close, then estranged, always loved.
But oft, in lonely rooms, and ‘mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind
With tranquil restoration.
Wordsworth claimed to have composed the poem entirely in his head, beginning it upon leaving Tintern and not jotting down so much as a line until he reached Bristol, 22 (winding and hilly) miles away on foot. Revisiting the natural beauty of the Wye after five years fills the speaker with a sense of tranquil restoration, the idea that Nature can influence, sustain, and heal the mind.
I mean c’mon! Who comes up with lines like this:
“a sense sublime/ Of something far more deeply interfused,
/ Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns”
https://poemanalysis.com/william-wordsworth/lines-composed-a-few-miles-above-tintern-abbey/
https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/poetry/tintern-abbey
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303763804579184201668878382
