The title of the poem “Lines written a few miles above
Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the banks of the Wye during a tour, 13 July 1798,”
was mercifully shortened in conversation by its author and his circle to “Tintern Abbey.” But it’s important to keep the longer title in mind because Wordsworth
wanted to summarize the change and reconnection to the natural world that the
trip meant for him.
The 28-year-old poet was trying to make sense of the
turbulence in his political beliefs and personal life wrought by the French
Revolution in that decade. (While in France, he had fathered an illegitimate
child by his mistress, then was prevented from returning to the country by the
Reign of Terror and the wars that ensued on the Continent shortly thereafter.
His growing disgust with Napoleon led him to shed his onetime radicalism.)
The French Revolution might be thought of as an
experiment in a new kind of relation among men through government. Wordsworth
used the word “experiments” to describe most of the poems in the collection he
issued anonymously two months after his ecstatic pastoral experience by the Wye
with his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, which,
he noted, were written chiefly to “ascertain how far the language of
conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the
purposes of poetic pleasure.”
More concisely, Wordsworth wrote in an 1800 preface to
the Lyrical Ballads, he was hoping for “fitting to metrical arrangement
a selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation.”
Rather than the public controversies in which the
likes of John Dryden and Alexander Pope engaged, these works focused on the
private and the subjective, the local and even rural. In giving voice to “the
commonplace” in the speech of men and women, Wordsworth would indelibly
influence later poets such as Thomas Hardy and Robert Frost.
Moreover, to an extent never before explored,
Wordsworth’s poems did not directly address religious beliefs, but found in
nature overwhelming elements of the divine. In this way, he inspired American
Transcendentalists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.
Wordsworth scholar Stephen Gill referred, in his notes
for the poet’s Major Works, to 1798 as the “annus mirabilis”
(Latin for “miraculous year”) for him and Coleridge.
The two young men, along with Wordsworth’s devoted
sister Dorothy, couldn’t get enough of each other’s company, on walks taking in
the rural landscape”—or, as Coleridge observed in his Notebooks, “The
flames of two Candles joined give a much stronger Light than both of them
separate.
Coleridge contributed to Lyrical Ballads
several of the poems that established his enduring fame, including “The Rime of
the Ancient Mariner,” “The Foster-Mother’s Tale,” and “Nightingale.” Wordsworth
managed to make a last-minute addition to the volume with “Tintern Abbey.”
Indeed, he composed the poem so rapidly, judging from his description below, that
the verses could have written themselves:
“No poem of mine was composed under circumstances more
pleasant for me to remember than this. I began it upon leaving Tintern, after
crossing the Wye, and concluded it just as I was entering Bristol in the
evening, after a ramble of 4 or 5 days, with my sister. Not a line of it was
altered, and not any part of it written down till I reached Bristol.”
Several years later, when Wordsworth, strongly
encouraged by Coleridge, attempted a more ambitious project, he was more self-critical,
unable to summon the spirit of transport that enabled him to write “Tintern
Abbey” so rapidly. Though he finished “The Prelude” (only one-third of this
larger work), he refused to publish it during his lifetime. His wife Mary only
did so after his death 45 years later.
The friendship of Wordsworth and Coleridge had its own
bumps along the way. In the last quarter-century of their relationship, the two
poets became estranged over misunderstandings, and even when the breach was healed
their easy onetime intimacy was gone for good.
But in this first phase, when they were young and unburdened
by ill health (Coleridge’s addictions to laudanum and opium) and family tragedies
(deaths of Wordsworth’s young son and daughter a couple of years apart), they
embarked on what Adam Sisman, in his dual biography The Friendship,
called “their joint mission, to fulfill the hopes of a generation disappointed
at the failure of the French Revolution: nothing less than a poem that would
change the world.”
For the Romantic movement of which Wordsworth and
Coleridge formed the leading edge—and for the hundreds of thousands of nature
and poetry lovers sustained by “Tintern Abbey” in the 225 years since—it became
a matter of faith that “Nature never did betray/The heart that loved her.”
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