“Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey” is one of the best poems written by William Wordsworth showing his spiritual growth and his great love for his sister Dorothy in powerful blank verse.
On revisiting the Banks of the wye five years after his first visit, the poet finds that he has visited the place, he enjoyed the sights and sounds of Nature with his senses. Although he says that he cannot point what he was then, he gives as a vivid picture.
“I can not paint what then I was. The sounding cataract haunted me like a passion: the tall rock, the mountain, the deep and gloomy word, their colours and their forms, were then to me an appetite”.
During the five years I spent in towns, the beautiful scenes were always with the poet. In the midst of the din of towns and cities, he owed to those scenes sweet sensation in hours of weariness; “felt in the blood, and felt along the heart, and passing even into my purer mind, with tranquil restoration.”
Besides this, another gift of a more sublime nature, was received by the poet. It was a trance like nature that serene and blessed mood. In which the affections gently lead us on until, the breath of this corporeal frame. And even the motion of our human blood almost suspended, we are laid asleep in body, and become a linking soul.
During these five years the poet heard quite often ‘the still sad music of humanity’ and so he has learnt to look at Nature differently. He has now an elevated thoughts of ‘same thing far more deeply inter fused’ to wrote:
“And I have felt a presence, a presence that disturbs me with joy of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime noise a welling is in light of setting. And the round ocean and the living curls. And the blue sky, and in the mind of man. A motion and a spirit, that impels all thinking things, all objects of all thoughts and rolls through all things”.
This is indeed magnificent poetry which embodies something like oriental mysticism of the Upanishads suggesting the enrolling of the same spirit through all things.
Dorothy, who is in Wordsworth company, is now what her brother was five years ago:
“……..in thy voice I catch the language of my former heart, and rand my former pleasures in the shorting lights of thy wild eyes”.
Obviously the poet is in love with his sister, Batson has explored the nature of this Nature of this love and says that by presenting the death of Lucy Wordsworth ultimately kills this immoral love in him.
The poet tells his sister that nature never betrayed his heart and so he loves her. She gives her worshipper cuteness, beauty and lofty thoughts against which ‘the dreary intercourse of daily life’ cannot prevail. He then expects that after his death Dorothy will remember how she stood with her brother on the bank of the wye and enjoyed the sights and sounds of nature. She will remember him as a worshipper of Nature.
In this poem Wordsworth thus shows how by storing the memory with the sights and sounds of nature. One can triumph over the dreary intercourse of daily life and achieve tranquil beauty and lofty thoughts. Describing the kinds and quality of poetry Mathew Arnold remarks that poetry that shows how to live its moral poetry. So, lines composed a few miles above ‘Tintern Abbey’ is not only of autobiographical and mystical significance but also of great moral value. The primary pattern of thought which revealed in glad observation of natural objects undergoes with the growth of the poet and neuters a sublime height in recording his spiritual vision of spirit that rolls through all things’.
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