Wordsworth & Nature

“Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” lines 1-49

            The poem starts out with the narrator a few miles above a place called Tintern Abbey. He talks about the landscape around him. He describes the lofty cliffs, the quiet sky, the dark sycamore, a bunch of hedges, the farms, and then he sees smoke coming from the trees in the distance. He thinks it might be a Hermit just doing his thing. “These beauteous forms, Through a long absence, have not been to me as is a landscape to a blind man’s eye.”(23-24) I think this shows that the narrator doesn’t get out into nature as much as he would like. The narrator has definitely been to Tintern Abbey before because he keeps on saying again. So he definitely misses this place. “In hours of weariness, sensations sweet, felt in the blood, and felt along the heart; and passing even into my purer mind, with tranquil restoration.”(27-30) He feels great about being back, he misses it. A theme of this poem may be that nature restores the soul. The narrator travelled to Tintern Abbey and had deep emotions come out of his soul because he is there. In a previous English class, I studied the book Brave New World. A theme of Brave New World is Man vs. Nature. People of the World State were brainwashed while the people in The Other Place lived in nature and had freedom. I think this poem relates to the Man vs. Nature theme. We need nature to free our mind and find who we are.