Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey"
critical extracts
Woodring | Levinson | Vendler | Miall
Woodring, Carl. "The New Sublimity in "Tintern Abbey"." Critical Essays on William Wordsworth, Ed. George H. Gilpin. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990. 11-23. (Original work published 1978)
[15] The poet revisiting the banks of the Wye says, "once again, / Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs." I behold. By contemplation (as the derivation of behold implies) I make them mine to keep. By contemplation, I make them mind. What I perceive I can thus completely hold. Less objectively than it might seem, "The day is come when I repose here." The opening movement is slow, not to suggest physical effort, but partly to elicit questions from the reader, partly to emphasize the importance of the years passed, "five summers, with the length of five long winters," and partly because a poem dedicated to the spiritual effort of evaluation is not yet ready to say why this day is momentous.
The first verse paragraph of 22 lines, which keeps some of its rhetorical devices unobtrusive, openly exploits a series of implied contrasts. England is a green and pleasant land, but the western area described in these opening lines is greener than most. The home counties near London are green, snug, and populous. The absent but normal scene that the reader of "Tintern Abbey" visualizes is rolling country, the hills near enough on each side to give neighborly comfort without crowding the traveler. Along the road, again on each side, neatly trimmed hedges sit in rectangles. They do not "run wild." Green, but less green than the banks of the Wye, the small squares are still hedged in as they continue, with occasional squares of beige or yellow, up the slopes toward the domesticated hills.
In this normal farmscape that Wordsworth imagines into the mind's eye of the reader, the English house, of brick or stone, seems to sit in a clearing, with a coach road or driveway, beds of flowers, perhaps raw dirt where the wagon sits. Chimneys on the steep roofs are often capped by ornamented chimney-pots, from which in Wordsworth's day smoke emerged the year round, for cooking and for warmth. From the road, the traveler saw that the family was at home, because smoke curled from the chimney.
In his Guide through the Lakes, which in general reverts to Burke's antithesis of the beautiful and the sublime, Wordsworth pays especial attention to chimneys. Here too he makes a contrast with the home counties. Following a "View of the Country as Formed by Nature," which is founded on uniformitarian geology but concentrates on the play of light over surfaces -- the human eye experiencing permanence in the transitory -- the second section provides a history of human habitation in the district, and the third advances a program for preserving "the joint work of Nature and time," with its blending of cottage life into the mountain scenery, against the intrusion of garish mansions that dispute Nature's primacy. In a way that illuminates the opening of "Tintern Abbey," he praises the cottages made of native stone, extended organically as needed by each generation, "so that these humble dwellings remind the contemplative [16] spectator of a production of nature, and may (using a strong expression) rather be said to have grown than to have been erected; -- to have risen, by an instinct of their own, out of the native rock -- so little is there in them of formality, such is their wildness and beauty." Then he gets to the chimneys. Some "are of a quadrangular shape, rising one or two feet above the roof, which low square is often surmounted by a tall cylinder, giving to the cottage chimney the most beautiful shape in which it is ever seen. Nor will it be too fanciful or refined to remark, that there is a pleasing harmony between a tall chimney of this circular form, and the living column of smoke, ascending from it through the still air."
Along the Wye, the poet looks down on farms that are not laid out in checks. The plots of cottage-ground are not divided by hedges into rectangles, but by wavering lines of unclipped trees, "little lines of sportive wood run wild." The region looks more like green woods than like populated farms. The farms are like pastures, "Green to the very door." People thrive in this unravished region. Their fathers lived here, and their children will live here; but the trees almost conceal all human activity. Wreaths of smoke are
Sent up, in silence, from among the trees!
With some uncertain notice, as might seem
Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods,
Or of some Hermit's cave, where by his fire
The Hermit sits alone.These lines make their point of contrast by negatives and abatements: "hardly hedge-rows," absence of a clearing "to the very door," smoke sent up "in silence" (a sublime deprivation, according to Burke), "vagrant," "houseless," and "alone" -- yet not really houseless. In the home counties, the houses would give certain notice of busy lives; here the daily work of these families causes no more disruption to the processes of nature than a hermit would. Chimneys in the Lakes are the most beautiful to be seen (heard melodies are sweet); but chimneys along the Wye, not seen at all, are melodies unheard, sweeter and sublime: the unnoisy melody of human life.
Elsewhere as well Wordsworth commends for our admiration natural places that hide life and power beneath apparent calm, and similarly, the power hidden in cottagers, shepherds, or a nearly inarticulate, eloquent leech-gatherer. In the sea at Calais, and in the child at the poet's side. Nature speaks softly but carries a big stick. In the sleeping city seen from Westminster Bridge, as in the silence of those seemingly houseless woods along the Wye, sounds the unheard music of humanity. People seen seem puny, but those unseen are potent.
At first in "Tintern Abbey" Wordsworth barely hints at the [17] interchange of values between man and Nature in the act of human perception. In sketching the scene along the Wye, he understates the marriage between mind and Nature: The steep and lofty cliffs impress on a wild secluded scene thoughts of more deep seclusion. During the five years since he first saw these groves, draining himself in the muddy flow of existence in rented rooms, he has remembered from the seemingly houseless woods the still sad music of fellow sufferers, all, given such experiences as he has had, capable of little nameless acts of kindness and love. From this day of reaffirmation his companion and dearest friend need have less fear of lonely rooms. Instead of a ruined abbey, a green landscape giving a sense of solitude to gregarious human life becomes emblematic of that life, past, present, and to come.
The visit to the Wye five years earlier, recollected so fervently now, had been an extension of the days on Salisbury Plain, with their visions of savage ancient warfare and their scenes of human dereliction in the present. Indeed, the entire walking tour of 1793 either came hard upon or continued his nightmares
of despair,
And tyranny, and implements of death,
And long orations which in dreams I pleaded
Before unjust Tribunals, with a voice
Labouring, a brain confounded, and a sense
Of treachery and desertion in the place
The holiest that I knew of, my own soul.
(The Prelude, 1805, X:375-381)These terrors and torments of experience and conscience, toned down until they became the Guilt and Sorrow of 1842, are both recapitulated and purged in "the still, sad music of humanity." These, again, are images that could have been expected had Wordsworth found sublimity in physical prowess. But the poem moves irreversibly toward an "aspect more sublime" (line 37), a "sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused" (lines 95-96), a true sublimity not dependent on physical vastness, roughness, darkness, loudness, or violence.
Burke had included an impression of solitude as a category of sublime deprivation. Kant, not in his Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen and Erhabenen (1764) but in his return to the subject in the Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790), emphasized the subjective state of mind put in motion by an object thereby regarded as sublime. In the same year (1790), Archibald Alison's Essays on the Nature of Taste shifted attention from the sublime object to the mind that perceives sublimity. Increasing (or recircling) emphasis on the perceiver was coincident with increased emphasis on the godliness of [18] tranquility . . . .
Levinson, Marjorie. "Insight and Oversight: Reading "Tintern Abbey"." Wordworth's Great Period Poems: Four Essays. Marjorie Levinson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. 14-57.
[15] The representational tendencies noted above -- all of which diminish the determinacy of Wordsworth's poetic subject and object -- seem to me referrable to a single but far reaching textual maneuver: Wordsworth's erasure of the occasional character of his poem. One does not generally expect an ode or odal form to incorporate into its utterance its contextually genetic conditions. One does, however, anticipate from a poem entitled "Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the banks of the Wye during a tour, July 13, 1798" -- by that title, a loco-descriptive poem -- some allusion or attention to the time and place of composition. "Tintern Abbey" does allude, although it does not attend, to the dimension designated by its title. Lines 1-22 -- to all appearances, a series of timeless, spiritually suggestive pastoral impressions -- in fact represent a concretely motivated attempt to green an actualized political prospect and to hypostatize the resultant fiction, a product of memory and desire.
Students of Wordsworth commonly refer to the poem as "Tintern Abbey"; it even seems to have been something of a convention in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century textbooks and anthologies to print engravings of the Abbey alongside the poem. I suspect that at some point, many readers have wondered why Wordsworth is so specific in the title about the circumstances of his visit, and so vague in the poem. Why would a writer call attention to a famous ruin and then studiously ignore it, as it were repudiating its material and historical facticity? Why not situate his utterance in the bower or dell and avoid the cynosure altogether? Certainly it is noteworthy that Wordsworth's chosen focus is a tract of woodland rather than the monument at hand. And, given the emergence of the religious house as a subject of considerable importance in the later verse, its absence from "Tintern Abbey" looks uncomfortably like a suppression. It seems inadequate merely to suggest, as one critic has done, that had Wordsworth written "Tintern Abbey" after 1875, [16] the Abbey would have been the "centerpiece" of the poem. In order to make sense of Wordsworth's advertised exclusion, one would infer some problem -- in the poet's mind, in the prospect, or in both -- that the poem at once solves and conceals.
We notice as well that the date so suggestively featured in the title announces a conjunction of themes no less public nor problematic than Wordsworth's location. While the poet underlines the strictly personal import of that date (it demarcates a five-year interval during which the narrator's responsiveness to Nature's vital influences seems to him to have diminished), the contemporary reader could have read in the date some far more dramatic meanings. July 13, 1798, marked almost to the day the nine-year anniversary of the original Bastille Day (the eight-year anniversary of Wordsworth's first visit to France), and the five-year anniversary of the murder of Marat, also the date of Wordsworth's first visit to Tintern Abbey.
Why Wordsworth composed for his lofty, psychically searching meditation a title so burdened with topical meanings is the question that motivates this essay. Why this question has gone so long unasked is a matter I take up in the afterword to this chapter. Let me just note that in neglecting to pose that question -- or in failing to investigate the discrepancy between title and poem -- "Tintern Abbey"'s readers have shown a discerning sensitivity not just to the poem's stylistic directives but to its doctrinal dimension as well. Chief among the narratives developed by "Tintern Abbey" is one that appears to explain the text-title incongruity. To read the poem by its own lights is to contrast the narrator's private, abstract, and spontaneous devotion in a natural then psychic fane to the idolatry associated with institutionalized religion, viz, the original uses and meanings of Tintern Abbey, a Cistercian community. This contrast -- a Protestant argument -- cannot but discourage inquiry into the material and, as it were, institutional situation of Wordsworth's discourse. In refusing this propriety, I hope to explain the several stories encoded by that Protestant argument and to explore the uses of these narratives in Wordsworth's political and poetical development.
Specifically, I will suggest that what "Tintern Abbey" presents as, if not natural values, then undetermined and apolitical ones, define a negative ideal: the escape from cultural values. "Tintern Abbey"'s Nature is a place -- a concept -- to fly to, not to seek, and the poem's developmental psychology serves a primarily extrinsic remedial intention: the de- and reconstruction of the scene of writing.
I will show that what Wordsworth offers under the sign of the picturesque is a portion of rural England (overdetermined by his knowledge of urban England), in 1798. What Wordsworth presents as mythic, uninterpretable givens -- e.g., "vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods" -- are the result of socioeconomic conditions whose causes were familiar to the poet and his readers. By attending to these conditions, we find that "Tintern Abbey" is a rather anomalous ode -- its model more "Windsor Forest" (political allegory) than "Eton College," and its object the translation of ideological contradiction into natural variety, national myth, and psychic opportunity.
The poem's prospect is as "determined by events of political history" as is Denham's in Coopers Hill. In each case, the poet occupies a "real hill with a view of an actual stretch of English landscape authentically rich in historical associations," and both vistas include the "ruins of a chapel despoiled by Henry VIII."
[41] The poem employs other, no less disarming discursive strategies. We notice, for example, that Wordsworth's pastoral vision actually foregrounds features that encode potent historical meanings. To the [42] contemporary reader (or viewer) -- and in any context but "Tintern Abbey" -- these details would have indicated the effects of concrete social relations. "These pastoral farms, / Green to the very door" helps establish the monochromatic blend of the separate elements in the scene (one principle of the picturesque), the visual material suggesting a conceptual sequence and affective continuity. As I noted above, however, the green lawns, that figure in the poem as an image of psychic and material wellbeing, are the miserable product of an economic fact and its charged history, as are the attractively, 'sportively' sprinkled lines of hedges, another emblem of enclosure. Ironically, Wordsworth corrects his initial statement ("these hedge-rows") as if to acknowledge its inaccuracy, the result of its objective (here, nonsensational, socially mediated) provenance. True to the syntactic laws of the poem, the formulaic description (the speaker's received, 'objective' knowledge of the identity of those lines: a reified abstraction, or, assumption) is replaced by the truth of sensation (all he can really see from his vantage are lines: his concrete, subjective impression, or, the picture of the mind). Thus evincing scrupulous sincerity, the narrator converts substance into formal property, reality into design, the end result being the suppression of the historical significance of those lines: their cause and effect. This is empiricist idealism of a most seductive kind. Ignorance provides no counterargument. Gilpin's commentary, which Wordsworth carried with him, starkly delineates the general social significance of the landscape. Moreover, we might recall that in "Simon Lee," the narrator observes the impoverished hero -- a man profoundly, existentially disabled by the passing of the old, the 'manorial' organic order -- tilling his front yard, a "scrap of land" that Simon, "from the heath / Enclosed when he was stronger." The detail is one of a series of similar observations, all of them documenting the material, psychic, social, and physical decline of the protagonist. (Only on a spiritual plane does Simon prosper.) We can assume, I think, that the meaning of those hedgerows was available to Wordsworth.
Along these lines, we note that in "An Evening Walk," Wordsworth describes "A peace enlivened, not disturbed, by wreathes / Of charcoal-smoke." Charcoal burning, a maintenance to which many were forced by the economic upsets of the nineties, had to introduce into the poet's consciousness a somber social note. Remember, we are not reconstructing here the response of a determined aesthete (a Thomas Green, "Lover of Literature," see above) but of a poet [43]
whose social engagement was, throughout his life, strong and out-spoken. Hence, perhaps, the self-vexing tendency of the representation. In this context, we observe that the smoke wreathes, which figure in the passage as a kind of natural sacrifice to the benevolent God responsible for the rich harmony of the scene, are perversely demystified by those curious lines, "as might seem, / Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods." The curiosity of the phrase is, of course, its gratuitous allusion to the vagrants. The strictly notional being of these figures ("as might seem ...") marks an attempt to elide the confessed factual intelligence. Or, while the passage explicitly associates the smoke with the cosy pastoral farms, and situates the image as an instance of natural supernaturalism, the 'surmise' identifies the smoke as the effects of charcoal burning. More to the point, it identifies those idealized vagrants -- a sort of metonymic slide toward the hermit/poet -- as the actual charcoal burners who migrated according to the wood supply and the market. Or, more simply, Wordsworth reverses objective and subjective knowledges: he presents real vagrants as hypostatized (archetypal) figures, and positions the scene all gratulant -- an idea tout court -- as unmediated sensory impression. Moreover, we observe that by equating the wanderers with the hermit -- one who possesses even less than they but whose spirit is inversely enriched and exalted -- Wordsworth further discredits the factual knowledge hiding in his representation. Following the text, we forget that hermits choose their poverty; vagrants suffer it.
Another example of this device -- the purloined letter trick -- is the phrase, "little unremembered acts." Thus, according to Karl Kroeber, does Wordsworth "make history out of nature." I would say that Wordsworth does just the opposite. By defining the stuff of history as private, or generally inconsequential, unchronicled, and plastic experience, Wordsworth suppresses all those large, recorded events -- of which Tintern Abbey is so formidable a reminder -- not so obsequious to the imagination.
Finally, lest we focus too closely on the meaning of these scenic elements -- lest we perversely insist on reading them as cultural features -- Wordsworth classifies them in summary as "beauteous forms." The phrase echoes lines 25-28 of "The Tables Turned," another cautionary idealism: "Sweet is the lore which Nature brings: / Our meddling intellect / Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things; / We murder to dissect." By this point, we can appreciate [44] Wordsworth's repetition of the phrase in lines 22-24 of "Tintern Abbey." "These beauteous forms, / Through a long absence, have not been to me / As is a landscape to a blind man's eye." Above (p. 24), I suggested that the formal properties of the assertion under-mine its claim. Or rather, the line, which pronounces the empirically and socially responsible character of the narrator's visioning, at the same time describes his enabling blindness.
Vendler, Helen. "Tintern Abbey: Two Assaults." Bucknell Review 36.1 (1992): 173-90.
[176]. . . "Wordsworth cancels the social," Levinson continues, "less by explicit denial and/or misrepresentation than by allowing no scope for its operation" (38).
This is the old story of the dissatisfaction of the social critic with the lyric. Where are the characters? where is the plot? where is the social detail? where is the investigation into social status? where is the history? where is the scenery? where is the quotidian? where is the class war? Lyric poets themselves also feel these discontents, and the history of lyric shows a periodic tendency (from Donne through Browning to Ginsberg) to want to represent the social surround. There is an equally periodic tendency of poets toward the private and absolute lyric, aiming at either semantic concision or musical refinement of a high order, of which Mallarmé has become the modern example but which George Herbert would exemplify as well. If one wants to say, "Wordsworth cancels the social," or to speak of "the spirits [Tintern Abbey] must suppress" (39), one can as truly say that a drawing "cancels" the oil painting it might have been, or that a solo partita "suppresses" the symphonic mode it might have been written in.
Levinson's argument brings up the very interesting theoretical question of how one knows when something that is not present has been "suppressed" or "cancelled" (words Levinson uses as pejoratives). We are used to seeing a good deal scratched out in manuscript, but we are also accustomed to ratifying the taste of the composing author whenever we see a reason -- musical, semantic, or philosophical -- for the deletion, and we do not treat it pejoratively, but rather admire it. Wordsworth certainly did have, as Levinson says, historical interests and political commitments, visible in many poems, even later poems about abbeys. And his poetic project is, at least in many pieces, an autobiographical one (as it seems to be here, given the speaker's mention of his sister). We have become sophisticated enough about prose autobiography to know that the persona of the autobiographer is not necessarily his full quotidian persona -- that an autobiography of religious conversion, for instance, may say nothing about the author's [177] domestic life, however full and historically important it may have been. We speak of shaping a work toward its end; are we to deny that privilege to a poet? A shadow-presence, continually suggested by unmistakable signals, can be a powerful part of a lyric; but a context not suggested within the poem by a continuous shadow-play can scarcely be invoked as a real suppressed or cancelled presence in a poem. Levinson invokes Wordsworth's historical and political interests as, in some sense, what ought to be in the poem, along with the history of the Protestant Reformation that left the Abbey a ruin, the charcoal-burning industry that might have been the cause of the wreaths of smoke, the enclosure policies that produced the pastoral farms, the unemployed, and so on.
What would count as evidence that these have been "suppressed"? Levinson seems to believe that anything that can be, by a critic, attached to a phrase in the poem must have been subliminally causative of it. The title, for instance, mentions the Abbey as the nearest landmark only to situate the prospect where the poem was mentally composed. It does not seem to me that Wordsworth, who was perfectly conscious, as a tourist, of the historical facts about the ruin of English abbeys during the Reformation, had to work at suppressing those facts in writing the poetry he wanted to write. The wreaths of smoke serve in the poem as a way station for the eye to lead it down from the cliffs to a human focal point in the horizontal plane; as a visual marker, the smoke is its own excuse for being. Its presence does not mean that Wordsworth had to purge thoughts of the charcoal-burning industry from his head before or after inserting the smoke into his landscape.
Levinson's metaphors of suppression and cancellation assert that because Wordsworth knew about history or industry he had to work some sort of violence on them before he could write a poem lacking their presence. This statement would be true perhaps of the work of some minds; it may be true, say, of the lyrics of Joyce or Faulkner, all poor stuff, where one feels no material body in the poem at all, and where one knows that the author's narrative talent eventually led him to seek out social and historical material. But materiality can be other than factual. In lyric poetry, materiality is chiefly a property of words, not of images nor of propositions, and the social dimension can appear in lyric both as the history of any single word preceding its use in the given poem, and the transformation of that history, if any, by the new use of the word in that poem.
Miall, David S. "Locating Wordsworth: 'Tintern Abbey' and the Community with Nature." Romanticism On the Net 20 (November 2000). http://www.erudit.org/revue/ron/2000/v/n20/005949ar.html
Complete essay available.
Document prepared January 31st 2005