Analyzing Wordsworth's "tintern Abbey"

William Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" celebrates imagination and emotion over rationality and reason, and intuition over science. It is the beginning of English Romanticism in the 1800's and Wordsworth was one of the leading poets of that era. He introduced the readers to grasp nature and fully appreciate all aspects of it. "Tintern Abbey" focuses on Wordsworth's nostalgic experience on returning to the Abbey, but pays much attention to the poem's theme of emotional beauty and nature. In this poem, the reader finds Wordsworth's intense and loving memory of natural scenes.

"Tintern Abbey" is a combination of all Wordsworth's feelings about his past and his love of nature. We consider the first two lines of the poem, "Five years have passed; five summers, with the length/Of five long winters!" ( 24). Wordsworth continually attempts to bring back all the memories he had about his first visit to the Abbey in hopes of reaching a grand, nostalgic moment on his revisit. Because much time has passed, 5 long years, Wordsworth knows that those memories are lost, and he will never feel the same way again. We see the poet opening up his feelings in a similar way in lines 58-67: "And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought/With many recognitions dim and faint...though changes, no doubt, from what I was, when first/I came among these hills..." (65-66). Wordsworth describes the length of time it has been since his revisit to the Abbey, and how his return disappointed him. His memories were not as clear as they were before, and he knew he would not be able to reconstruct those memories he held so dear.

Their colours and their forms, were then to me

An appetite: a feeling and a love,

That had no need of a remoter charm,

By thought supplied, or any interest

Unborrowed from the eye.-- That time is past,

And all its aching joys are now no more. (26)

Lines 79-84 represent loss and decay and are another set of themes in this poem. These lines show that his poem itself is a memory; memories can never contain the original content of an experience as it did the first time. Wordsworth's intense emotional pain is displayed throughout these lines. A particular line is: "That time is past/And all its aching joys are no more". The poet clearly tells his reader's that he is extremely upset at the fact that he no longer feels that joys he has felt before, and even though he hears in nature the still, sad music of humanity, he still prefers memory and the sense of nature over intellect and actuality. Wordsworth senses his mortality and realizes that nature ("their colours and their forms...") can not renew his pleasant spirits as much as he wants them to. "Tintern Abbey" also presents the poet to an exploration of identity and self understanding; Wordsworth is in conflict with the natural landscape that is painted in front of him and his mental landscape, two major different forces, and he is trying to find an equal path to both forces so that he can find his self or his destiny.

Another explanation of these lines could be that Wordsworth comprehends the way nature functions --the death