Lines Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey Essay

With the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution and the violence of the French Revolution, England was experiencing war, unsanitary cities, and the development of greater and taller buildings. As a result of industrialization and the business of cities, British author, William Wordsworth visits serene places in order to find peace. Wordsworth shares his getaway from reality in “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” where he revisits Tintern Abbey along with his younger sister, Dorothy, after five years. Compared to his experience five years earlier, Wordsworth reacts differently to the calmness of Tintern Abbey. During this new reaction, Wordsworth relates his emotions to the cycles of life. In “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above
However, when Wordsworth revisits Tintern Abbey, he is filled with the same feeling of, “sensations sweet, / Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart,” (781). Wordsworth remembers as a young boy, “bounding through the countryside like an animal,” (“‘Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey’” 2). As being a young boy is apart of Wordsworth’s interpretation of the cycles of life, his development into a grown man with wisdom is also apart of the cycles of life. Wordsworth’s stay at Tintern Abbey five years later highlights his transformation to maturity where, “Wordsworth develops the ability to see a level of reality beyond sensory impressions such as: the spirit underlying the myriad forms of nature,” (Robinson 4). This connects to the cycles of life because in an analysis of Wordsworth’s growth, an adolescent feels a spiritual kinship, as an adult loses both feelings during the earlier stages of his life; therefore leading to a search for recompense (“‘Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey’” 2). Wordsworth’s “less passionate and more thoughtful,” (Robinson 4) perceptions as a grown man also relate to how as his aspect of Nature turns into an aspect of
As a young boy, Wordsworth recalls, “For nature then (the coarser pleasures of my boyish days and their glad animal movements all gone by) to me was all in all.” (783). Therefore, when Wordsworth once looked at Nature as his playground, he was experiencing a cycle of life. Much of the poem is derived from humane and serious analysis of the cycles of gain and loss throughout human life (“‘Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey’” 2). When Wordsworth revisits Tintern Abbey after five years, Nature losing its youth is seen as the loss; whereas, now, Wordsworth sees God through Nature which is the gain. In “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” seeing God through Nature is depicted as a gain when Wordsworth says, “well pleased to recognize/In nature and the language of the sense,/The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,/The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul/Of all my moral being,” (783-784). Through Nature, Wordsworth now senses the presence of something far more subtle, powerful, and fundamental in the light of his “purest thoughts,” “guardian of his heart,” and “all of his moral being.” (783-784). While Wordsworth continues to connect with God through Nature, his younger sister, Dorothy, begins to