This page lists my critical observations on two essays, to which I offer various qualifications, objections, and disagreements. It is not intended to be a coherent statement, rather a set of points to start discussion. For an essay-length account of "Tintern Abbey" that incorporates some of these points, see my recent paper in Romanticism on the Net. The third essay by Roe offers its own correctives to Levinson and similar historicists.
Johnston (1983) | Levinson (1986) | Roe (1992) | Works cited
The fulcrum of "Tintern Abbey," says Johnston, is Wordsworth's assertion that he has learned to hear "The still sad music of humanity" (6). What kind of music is this? It is said to be represented elsewhere in the poem by the "din / Of towns and cities," and by the "evil tongues, / Rash judgements, [and] the sneers of selfish men." Johnston seeks to locate these experiences in "the lonely feelings of rejection suffered by a sensitive person in the conditions of intense competitive work in an urban market" (7), i.e., the conditions experienced by Wordsworth in London, particularly in 1795. He seeks to tie it to Wordsworth's possible work on The Philanthropist (10-12).
In August 1795 Wordsworth moved to Racedown with his sister, and in July 1797 to Alfoxden to be near Coleridge. Thus three years have elapsed since his London period and the writing of the poem, and while this period may be included (in the "towns and cities" in which he was consoled by memories of the Wye), it is just as likely that he is alluding to the hostility recently encountered in the Quantocks (of his landlady, Mrs St. Albyn; of John Poole, the minister, brother of their friend and ally Tom Poole). This music is "Not harsh nor grating," perhaps because he is not in a position to consider the suffering and death of either the Revolution or the subsequent war (as Coleridge had done this year in "France: An Ode" and "Fears in Solitude"). Wordsworth was to take on this task seven years later in the great French Revolution books of The Prelude. Meanwhile, for McFarland the phrase universalizes: "its nobility resides in its raising of individual woes to the condition of human life itself" (17).
Yet Johnston makes an effective point about the position of "Tintern Abbey": prior to July 1798 we see Wordsworth's "failure to integrate the sufferings of Margaret, the old Cumberland Beggar, and the Discharged Veteran with scenes of natural beauty . . . or to satisfactorily establish the connection between landscape viewing and social responsibility" (9). He finds that "Tintern Abbey" goes some way to answering this problem, moving from landscape to the "life of things": "it is part of the triumph of the poem to be able to include as full a representation of this process as it does" (12-13).
Adjustments:
I
| imprecision: "Most readers observe that an object does not materialize in the poem before it is effaced or smudged" (14) | consider details of landscape, 1-23: "this dark sycamore"; "sportive wood run wild"; "wreaths of smoke"; or of the mind, 51-62: "gleams of half-extinguished thought"; "recognitions dim and faint": given his intentions, are Wordsworth's descriptions exact enough to be informative? |
| insisting on the Abbey: "Why would a writer call attention to a famous ruin and then studiously ignore it, as it were repudiating its material and historical facticity?" (15) | does Levinson allow Wordsworth's poem itself to answer this? The title, "Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey," situates the poem beyond the Abbey, which goes out of sight past a bend in the river less than a mile upstream. Is the title merely awkward, situating the poet in relation to the Wye Valley's most famous tourist spot? As McFarland puts it, of this and other Wordsworth titles, "their clumsiness is legend" (4). |
| misreading Nature: "a five-year interval during which the narrator's responsiveness to Nature's vital influences seems to have diminished" (16) | or is Wordsworth's response now more vital? He has put behind him the immediacy of the "aching joys" and "dizzy raptures" of 1793 for "A presence that disturbs me with the joy / Of elevated thoughts," "A motion and a spirit." Which seems more vital? |
| a public discourse: "Tintern Abbey" represents "the escape from cultural values," "a portion of rural England" "under the sign of the picturesque" (16-17) | this assumes the shadow of the Abbey; the poem (lines 77-84) distances itself from the picturesque of 1793; its central cultural value is an ethics of response to nature as "the soul / Of all my moral being" (which is also proposed to Dorothy) |
| loco-descriptive: "Tintern" is compared to Cooper's Hill (17) | "Tintern" is not the occasion for "a hortatory political discourse" (Cooper's Hill, overlooking Windsor, explicitly addresses the situation of Charles I, the destruction of the monasteries, etc.). By not addressing Chepstow Castle, the Abbey, Monmouth, or Goodrich Castle -- all places with rich historical associations -- Wordsworth evidently has other, primarily non-historical aims in view |
II
| Nature in 1793: "Wordsworth's unhappy separation from Nature ended in 1793 . . . this return, fondly recalled in 'Tintern Abbey'" (18) | "Tintern," on the contrary, seems to emphasise the unhappy context of the encounter with the Wye in 1793, when he was "more like a man / Flying from something that he dreads"; Nature here seems to have been a resort for picturesque forgetfulness, after the trauma he experienced on Salisbury Plain |
| universalizing: "more universal, less particular -- and therefore less fragile -- referents" (Thompson, cited 19) | as a complement to the particular, localized narratives of many of the Lyrical Ballads encounters, which demonstrate dramatically the loss of fraternité? Why would it be inappropriate to generalize in at least this one poem? |
| memory: nature "is a guardian of ground hallowed by private commemorative acts -- Mnemosyne, a deeply conservative muse" (23) | but the approach to Nature in 1793 is represented as inadequate and now superseded, so it is not clear what is conservative here; the after-effects of the first visit, "blessed mood," depend on memory, but transcend it (note the shift to present tense: "we are laid asleep" etc.) |
| history of the Abbey (25-9) | since the Abbey is not in the poem, this history is irrelevant |
| ruin: Tintern Abbey had "the look of a classical temple" (29) | Tintern is a Gothic building, quite different from the classical style |
| "the cottage plots noted in the poem are 'green to the very door' because the common lands had been enclosed some time back and the only arable land remaining to the cottager was his front garden" (30) | Levinson misquotes the poem here, as Charles Rzepka has pointed out to me: Wordsworth's description is of "these pastoral farms / Green to the very door." Wordsworth is attentive to the fertility of the landscape, not who owns it. |
| iron works: "in 1798 with the war at full tilt, the works were unusually active" (29) | incorrect: as Charles Rzepka has shown, the iron works at Tintern were closed down in 1798 due to the bankruptcy of its owner (he abandoned the works in March 1798).* |
| poetics of industry: "the guidebooks sharply regret the despoilation" (31) | this exaggerates: only one guidebook (Ibbetson, 1793) objects in strong terms to the presence of industry; Gilpin and others object to the impoverished houses but not to the iron works; Warner (in 1797) actually finds the sight of the furnaces poetic, like the anonymous author of the poem Levinson has just cited (30) -- an example of the industrial sublime |
| pollution: the river seen by Wordsworth would have been "ouzy, and discoloured" (32) | not evidence of pollution; the river is tidal at Tintern and this produces the ouze (mud stirred up from the river banks); as Coxe (1801) puts it, below Tintern "the water is no longer transparent, and except at high tide the banks are covered with slime" (355). Rzepka was the first to point out this serious misreading by Levinson in his 2000 MLA paper.* |
| evasion: "Wordsworth's pastoral prospect is a fragile affair, artfully assembled by acts of exclusion" (32) | since the poem is set "a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey" none of Levinson's detailed evidence is relevant |
| spots of ground: "more than a little uncomfortable with the political intrusion upon consecrated ground" (32) | Levinson attempts to make an analogy between the Grand Chartreuse monastery (invaded by French forces in 1792) and Tintern Abbey, hence "the aura of enclosure in Wordsworth's authorial ideology" (33). This requires a study of Wordsworth's attachment to particular spots of ground (cf. "Michael"; Poems on the Naming of Places, etc.) |
| mysticism: "produces the deathly isolation of the mind that would find this 'the image of the sole self'" (34) | or, seeing "into the life of things," a grasp through "the affections" on human and natural life; the spirit that is in nature and "in the mind of man," and which he is at pains to share with Dorothy; this seems far from isolation (the hermit as the ideal) |
| complicity: socioeconomic forces evident at Tintern: "Wordsworth had himself abetted those forces, consciously and unawares" (35; and see endnote) | it is hard to see what this might mean: Wordsworth in 1798 was not an employer of labour nor an encloser of land; he had resisted becoming a member of the clergy that was complicit in maintaining social conditions and the class hierarchy; all his public (and much private) writing was in opposition to prevailing conditions |
| regression: "a man already homesick for the memorialized landscapes of his childhood" (35) | Wordsworth was away from the Lake District from 1789; he was about to visit Germany; he is not behaving like a man with homesickness; his imaginative reconstruction of his childhood in the first drafts of the Prelude at Goslar begins his attempt to chart the continuities of childhood and adulthood |
| evading politics: "seeking to purify his mind of political thoughts"; "Wordsworth learns to sever his interests from history" (36) | this seems improbable, given Wordsworth's intense interest in history and politics throughout the 1790s, and his return to the great issues of the French Revolution and British reaction in the 1805 Prelude |
| pastoral farms: threat to "the endurance of those little farms, images of the lifestyle Wordsworth celebrates throughout his poetry": "such spots are doomed" (37) | as if this were inadmissable nostalgia, the conversion of "history to poetry" (37); see comment on p. 32 above. My suggestion would be to pursue the ecological implications of Wordsworth's attention to the local |
III
| suppression: "the primary poetic action is the suppression of the social"; "its fiercely private vision" (37) | why is it obligatory to illuminate the social in every poem? and the poem situates its vision in relation to "The still sad music of humanity" as well as Dorothy; more specifically, by writing and publishing the poem, does Wordsworth make his vision more possible for others? (for example, Mark Rutherford) |
| binaries: objective and subjective, "one freely embodying internal realities, the other slavishly registering external and immutable fact" (39) | this makes a division where none exists: Wordsworth's terms show the dependency of what is without on what is within, hence the "half-create" formulation; to move from "hedge-rows" to "little lines" is to show specifically what is incomplete and stereotypical of ordinary perception |
| randomness: "the narrator's randomly descriptive musings -- sylvan historiography, as it were, that tells no story but that of its own unfolding" (39) | it is hard to see why Levinson thinks this passage (lines 1-23) is "impersonal"; the passage specifies a viewer with a history that inflects the view; and, far from random, the description proceeds from the wide to the specific, "this dark sycamore," then out to a detailed patterning of cottages, hedgerows, and farms, and their intimated inhabitants ("vagrant dwellers," the hermit) |
| mind-body: "'Thinking things' and their products, thoughts, apparently suffer no interference from the material and social world" (40) | this misreads the poem: (1) "In nature and the language of the sense" shows the reciprocity that Levinson claims is missing; (2) and shows Wordsworth's distance from the Cartesian mind-body split; here, as elsewhere, it is the "affections" that mediate mind and senses (on the repudiation of Descartes, see Johnston 17) |
| missing referents: "deeper than what, purer and holier than what?" | to answer Levinson: "Thoughts of more deep seclusion" means beyond the immediate, anticipating the mental state of the "blessed mood"; "with far deeper zeal / Of holier love!" appears to refer to the presence of his "dear" sister, with whom he will now be able to remember the scene; and "something far more deeply interfused" answers itself: beyond the picturesque rapture dependent on the eye, this presence imbues everything, sun, ocean, air, the mind |
| oppression: "the attractively, 'sportively' sprinkled lines of hedges, another emblem of enclosure" (42) | no evidence for enclosure here, especially as the hedgerows have grown out to become trees; this suggests hedges planted long before enclosure, and, being grown out, probably useless for restraining sheep |
| history: "By defining the stuff of history as private . . . Wordsworth suppresses all those large, recorded events" (43) | history is circumscribed in this poem rather than suppressed (Wordsworth in 1793 "Flying from something that he dreads"; hearing "The still sad music of humanity"); his own history is rather the point of the poem; Wordsworth engages with history elsewhere |
| mind-body: "the Cartesian inscription of Wordsworth's simile" (44) | in error again: see note to p. 40 above |
| Nature: "a surface projecting only Nature's 'fairest and most interesting' properties" (46) | Nature elsewhere is often far from "fair," as in the "Salisbury Plain" poems, or in the scene of destruction in the dream of Book V of The Prelude and its preface |
IV
| evasions: "compensation . . . less for a psychic or existential change in the observer than for the changed meanings of the English countryside, the observed" (47) | Levinson (as usual) sees Wordsworth suppressing his awareness of change by retreating to the mind in the "blessed mood"; possibly the choice of location (1-23) is significant in particular because it shows the process of the historical situatedness of human cooperation with nature (the cottage-ground, the hedgerows, etc.); this appears to contrast with the changes in Wordsworth himself over five years |
| the return: at line 59 "is a description of any return to any place by any man" (48) | hardly: Wordsworth's history of picturesque travel in 1793, now superseded in 1798, is clearly distinctive to him |
| detachment: "that blindness which assumes the autonomy of the psyche, its happy detachment from the social fact of being" (48) | autonomy is just what Wordsworth eschews here: he is happy to find "in this moment there is life and food"; he has detailed what, to his earlier memories of the Wye, "I have owed"; and he acknowledges Nature to be "The anchor of my purest thoughts" |
| mind-body: "the work's Cartesian epistemology" (48) | a fundamental misreading of Wordsworth's position |
| consumption: "Wordsworth's transformation of landscape into aesthetic prospect consumes, of course, certain resources" (49) | on the contrary, his publication of the poem transmits and multiplies those resources; nothing is consumed; everything remains available; the consumption model seems quite inappropriate to poetry, other than the use of ink and paper (which is not what Levinson has in mind); this is another version of the suppression schema |
| alien sister: "She is felt to exist on the margins of the speaker's enclosure and to have access both to that haven and to the unimaginable relations outside it. She is the hypostatized, desired alien" (49) | hypostatize: to make into or treat as a subject. By Levinson and other critics Dorothy is too often considered as marginalized in "Tintern," yet Wordsworth gives her a voice: "in thy voice I catch / The language of my former heart"; her presence is made central to his response to the Wye |
| mind-body: "the process effectively sutures the subject-object wound -- in Wordsworth's idiom, heals the breach" (51) | having imposed the Cartesian grid, Levinson now shows how Wordsworth is said to resolve its problem (inauthentically, of course): the poem "invents and idealizes a procedure . . ." |
| history: the poem "represents mind, and specifically memory, not as energy -- a subtle psychic ongoingness -- but as a barricade to resist the violence of historical change and contradiction" (53) | this refers particularly to the last section of the poem: "thy mind / Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms"; but this does not preclude "solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief"; rather than the stasis proposed by Levinson, the poem celebrates a resilience from the recognition and acceptance of change (see my arguments on time) |
V
| map (54), based on McNulty | the route shown is almost certainly incorrect: all travel books describe a visit to the New Weir (or Symond's Yat), which lies on the west bend of the river between Monmouth and Goodrich. Indeed, Gilpin says this "may be called the second grand scene on the Wye" (i.e., after Tintern Abbey); as I have shown, the scene of Wordsworth's poem is probably to be found here |
| the Abbey: "The preposition 'above' gives us the poetic action of 'looking over' Tintern Abbey" (55) | Levinson's own word games have deceived her; "a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey" cannot include a view of the Abbey; the "sweet inland murmur" with Wordsworth's note on tides, places the poem at least beyond Bigsweir bridge; upstream of this point cliffs and a cataract are not found until New Weir |
Roe is another commentator who suggests Wordsworth's indebtedness to Gilpin's picturesque in "Tintern Abbey." Apart from the fact the Wordsworth distances himself from the picturesque in the poem, the implicating of the viewer with the view in the opening of the poem shows an approach to landscape rather different from Gilpin. As I have suggested (Miall 2000), the opening is rather reminiscent of these unpublished lines probably written earlier that year:
To gaze
On that green hill and on those scattered trees
And feel a pleasant consciousness of life
In the [?impression] of that loveliness
Untill the sweet sensation called the mind
Into itself by image from without
Unvisited: and all her reflex powers
Wrapp'd in a still dream forgetfullness
(Alfoxden Notebook, in Butler 125)
The work of the mind in responding to a natural scene is forgotten and remembered, in a rhythmic process not unlike the larger movements of "Tintern Abbey." In particular, the "reflex powers" seem to anticipate the work of the Wye valley scene in memory, serving to create the "blessed mood." In Gilpin, by contrast, the mind is present, when it enters at all, only as an agent of reaction, or as the producer of imaginary scenes: e.g., at dusk, "A light of this kind, though not so favorable to landscape, is very favorable to the imagination. This active power embodies half-formed images, which it rapidly combines; and often composes landscapes, perhaps more beautiful, if the imagination be well-stored, than any that can be found in Nature herself" (Wye 64).
Crowe's Lewesdon Hill (1788) is seen as an influence (120-23). The difficulty here is that Crowe's is a prospect view from a summit, whereas Wordsworth is located by the river under a sycamore tree. Thus his vision is closer and more detailed than the vista that Crowe provides, which by being more distanced is more generic ("the variegated scene, of hills / And woods"). And Wordsworth seems to avoid any Miltonic sublime that would "recover Eden" ("orchard-tufts" seems too allusive to count): this is the fallen world, inhabited "as might seem" by "vagrant dwellers." But Roe goes on to affirm this interpretation of "Tintern" in rebutting historicist views: by suggesting Wordsworth's echoes of other texts, he argues, "his prospect is no longer Edenic"; his landscape "is the location of history as much as the ruined abbey" (125).
Ideology: Roe outlines the critique of the picturesque tradition by such critics as John Barrell, Ann Bermingham, and others, and shows how the "overlooking" of landscape by the picturesque viewer is, according to McGann and Levinson, said to lead to the erasure of historical realities at Tintern Abbey by Wordsworth. Roe seeks to dissociate the poem from this ideology by showing the intertextual links of the poem with Shakespeare, Milton, Crowe, Thelwall, and representations by Coleridge and others of imprisonment (including on the banks of the Wye at Chepstow Castle). Thus, he concludes, nature is "the radical source of human renewal expressed through 'acts / Of kindness and of love'." (134).
Butler, James, ed. The Ruined Cottage and the Pedlar (The Cornell Wordsworth). Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1979.
Gilpin, William. Observations on the River Wye, and several parts of South Wales, &c. Relative chiefly to Picturesque Beauty: Made in the summer of the year 1770, 5th edition. London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1800.
Johnston, Kenneth R. Wordsworth and The Recluse. New Haven: Yale UP, 1984.
Johnston, Kenneth R. "The Politics of 'Tintern Abbey'." The Wordsworth Circle 14.1 (1983): 6-14.
Levinson, Marjorie. "Insight and Oversight: Reading 'Tintern Abbey'." Wordworth's Great Period Poems: Four Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. 14-57.
McFarland, Thomas. William Wordsworth: Intensity and Achievement. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992.
Miall, David S. "Locating Wordsworth: 'Tintern Abbey' and the Community with Nature." Romanticism On the Net 20 (November 2000).
Roe, Nicholas. "The Politics of the Wye Valley: Re-Placing 'Tintern Abbey'." The Politics of Nature: Wordsworth and Some Contemporaries. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992. 117-136.
Rzepka, Charles. "'Their Fearful Employment': Progress, Prospect, and the Picturesque 'On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye'." Paper presented to the Congress of the Modern Language Association, December 2000.
Document prepared November 25th 2001 / Updated August 20th 2007