Wordsworth
"Tintern Abbey": Further Notes
[From: Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life, Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1989]
" . . . [Tintern Abbey] discloses questions and doubts which
challenge its confidence and beckon to the future--to The Prelude,
Ode to Duty, Ode: Intimations of Immortality . . ." (152)
Tintern Abbey creates its complete and persuasive fiction in two
fascinating high-handed ways. The first is the way of exclusion.
Despite the topographical specificity of the title, which promises
to locate it in an established tradition of landscape poems, Tintern
Abbey strikingly avoids localizing detail. It opens with the evocation
of a particular place--'These waters', 'these steep and lofty
cliffs,' 'These plots of cottage-ground'--but for all its apparent
specificity the scene remains generalized. Wordsworth passes over
everything that gave the area its actual day-to-day character-the
commercial traffic on the river, the charcoal-burners serving
the iron furnaces along its banks, whose smoke, Gilpin notes in
his Observations on the River Wye (1782), 'issuing from the sides
of the hills; and spreading its thin veil over a part of them,
beautifully breaks their lines, and unites them with the sky',
the beggars at Tintern Abbey itself, whose wretched hovels defeated
even Gilpin's capacity for harmonizing everything into the picturesque.
What counts, it soon becomes clear, is not the sequence of verbs
in the opening section which register the scene, 'hear', 'behold',
'view', 'see', but the pronoun 'I', four times repeated. The poet
is concerned not with what is seen in itself, but with the eye
that sees." (152-153)
From personal notes
1. Tintern Abbey:
- Wordsworth's memory compensates for the loss of
of his past by the sad but moving compromise
of including that loss as part of his present self.
- the past appears only as a painful difference from
the here and now, but memory claims the pain
of that difference as an essential attribute of
identity.
- sublime in willingness to embrace great sorrow and
the burden of identity (burden of mystery)
- egotistical in desire to absorb everything into
the self
- what appears to be a loss is a gain
- adult can re-experience thoughtful harmony
III. Tintern Abbey
A. Whole weight of Milton could be found in a person
revisiting
B. Still powerful after a long way away
C. Understand the losses that occur
- play-mate
- primal sympathy w/ landscape
- Adult can re-experience harmony thoughtful
- what appears to be a loss is a gain
- ultimately there are no losses to lament
something out there that gets through
D. Wordsworth
1. Agrees w/ Coleridge
a. sublime is deeply personal
b. since consc. everywhere bound by lang
sublimity indistinguishable from words
2. Are not the same
a. some words not sublime
b. sublime existed in more than one place
c. lies outside the self causing us to take
further definition
d. cap. of a three part existence
in us, outthere,....
E. Landscape
1. deepens into a symb. form
2. word "form" 18th cent
a. outer-structure?
b. inner-structure?
c. unexpected dissolving between barriers
3. In:finite
a. infinite indistnguishable from what is in the
finite
b. like W.W. poetry
4. blind man's eyes (p.210)
a. landscape constituted by many forms beyond
what the visual sense percep. can perc.
b. something allows him to see into the life
of things by the end of the poem
- "things" seek a place in human feeling
5. Mind superior to matter
6. dynamics of W.W.
a. explored something wordless trying to
become a word
-succeeds in doing so
b. The child knows he is natural only when he
knows he is capable of being a poet hen
he uses a metaphor
7. The Natural is know by extreme artifice
I. Tintern Abbey
Adulthood
-giving up past complexity, as far to simply
Last Paragraph
A. Sake!
1. end of prayers
2. what is one's sake?
a. do for my sake
3. was first a legal term:
a. standing someone has when one is not there
b. power to rep. self elsewhere
B. Verse para #3
1. soil & soul linked
a. linked by act of faith
b. a faith in such a linkage
-involves the silent
-the unspeakable
-the unconscious
C. O Sylvan Wye
1. there is a parallel between river & spirit
enacted in lang.
2. Only proof is:
How oft, in spirit,
have I turned to thee, O
Sylvan Wye!
- personal
- words are river-like
-syntax wandering
-self-contracting
-parallels are played with
repetitive & organic
2. Tintern Abbey; Wordsworth
a. nature is internal & immediate
b. a sense of motion
c. idea of nature very diff.
d. look on page, write a line about length
stuck out
e. emphasizing representative nature of exper.
f. diff. of translating outside time/place
g. how can hear where you are & the origin?
h. "murmur"
-duplicating syllables
i. Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey
-psych.
-July 13, 1798; 9th anniversary of Bastille day
B. Tintern Abbey
1. Cistercian monks
a. took vows of silence
b. frag. of a past age
2. Murmur
a. echoic; a sound whose content you cannot
know
b. slight illeg. a beating out of rhythms
3. Capacity of lang. to contain more than the
content of speech; yet time--writing
transforms into
4. Cliffs press thoughts
a. nat. is not something we easily transf.
into symbols of ourselves
b. but presses upon us
5. Landscape
a. activ. strange in the extreme
b. yet in head & transforms are lang.
c. something running wild in the universe
d. "little sportive wilds of wood runs wild"
-poetry is running wild
-unlike Coleridge
e. has at its center an incident
-something--sing or plural?
f. woods are on fire by end
-ordinary lang. can be transformed
into something unpredic. strange
6. trees!
a. present in the text but cannot read
b. more inside that we cannot get out in
words
c. imagination contains contents for which
lang. is not sufficient
d. View all beneath under a sycamore tree
-tree from same root as truth
-that which can't be moved
-mustard tree-mulberry-sycamore
garbled in Biblical transl.
-multi. presences from the outside
Begin the Begin