Lines, William Wordsworth, 1798.

Tinturn Abbey with Elegant Figures,Samuel Colman, 1830.

This blank verse is a conversational poem about Wordsworth’s visits, five years apart, to the banks of the Wye, a few miles above Tintern Abbey. The abbey, in ruins, is the metaphor for the current state of his chaotic life; separation from his family, and the chaotic world he lives in; on the brink of war. The speaker admits to having reminisced about the place many times in the past five years, perhaps suggesting that he is not so much thinking of the abbey as a building, but as a more peaceful time in his life remembered and related to his last visit of the place. The Wye had remained much the same, while the outside world had changed so much, allowing the poet opportunity for contrast.

Although never overt, the poem is riddled with religion, most of it pantheistic; the sacredness of nature. Wordsworth describes the scenery of the Wye as lofty, soft, wild and impressive, seclusion, quiet and silent, and states that when “...the fever of the world, Have hung upon the beatings of my heart...” that he often turns to the revived “picture of the mind” of the Wye and the feelings it invoked as a pillar of strength, as might a religious believer turn to the church and prayer in a time of need. He sees the divine as “a motion and a spirit...”, that “...rolls through all things”, and he perceives nature as “The anchor of my purist thoughts, the nurse, the guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul Of all my moral being”.