Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey

2211 Words9 Pages
Poetry Explication – “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey” The poem, “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” dramatizes the conflict between the speaker and his coming to terms with what nature has meant to him during the various stages of his life. The poem is ultimately a reflection of the speaker’s feelings and ideas concerning nature and how it has molded his past memories, his feelings about the present, as well as hopes that nature will continue to positively shape his future as well as the future of his sister. The poem, which was written by Williams Wordsworth in 1798 during the English Romantic literary period, is divided into five stanzas which consist of different lengths. At the beginning of the poem, speaking in the present tense, the audience is told by the speaker that he has returned to the banks of the Wye river as an adult after being absent from this place for five years. The use of repetition is used by the poet, Wordsworth, to better emphasize the act of returning to this place; “Five years have passed; five summers, with the length/ Of five long winters! and again I hear / These waters…” (1-3) “The speaker also uses the phrase “once again” two times, both times in the middle of a line breaking the flow of the text. It is in this way that the reader is introduced formally to the natural beauty of the Wye River area.”1 Throughout the course of “Tintern Abbey, the speaker tells the audience of his great love for nature and of how it has shaped his views on life and the world at large and he describes through elegant poetic writing, different periods of his life and the role in which nature has played in molding his general perspective on living. The speaker holds the belief that “nature is not only an object of beauty and the subject of memories, but also the catalyst for a beautiful, harmonious relationship between two
Open Document