Lines Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey Analysis

Author Thomas Wolfe defined the true Romantic feeling as “not the desire to escape life but to prevent life from escaping you”. William Wordsworth’s poetry clearly captures this definition; he uses powerful and meaningful vocabulary to express this desire. In his poem Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, Wordsworth writes about his visit to the valley of River Wye and the ruins of Tintern Abbey with his sister. You can certainly tell that he is at peace with nature when he composed the poem—he uses nice, serene vocabulary like: “These beauteous forms, through a long absence, have not been to me as is a landscape to a blind man’s eye: But oft, in lonely rooms, and ‘mid the din of towns and cities, I have owed to them 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—feelings too of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps, as have no slight or trivial influence on that best portions of a good man’s life.”(709). The Prelude was composed during the early days of the French Revolution. It’s a rather optimistic and hopeful poem. You can tell just by the way he writes and describes every aspect of France’s “golden hours”. Wordsworth writes: “O pleasant exercise of hope and joy! For mighty were the auxiliars which then stood upon our side, us who were strong in love! Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very Heaven! O times, in which the meager, stale, forbidding ways of custom, law, and statute, took at once the attraction of a country in romance!”(714). London 1802 is more of a criticism of England. In the poem, Wordsworth basically talks down about the country as well as the men who live there. He suggests that seventeenth-century English poet John Milton’s return would better the country: “Milton! Thou should’st be living at this hour: England hath need of thee: she is a fen of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen, fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower have forfeited their ancient English dower of inward happiness. We are selfish men: oh! Raise us up, return to us again; and give us manners, virtue, freedom, power. Thy soul was like a star and dwelt apart: thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea: pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free, so didst thou travel on life’s common way in cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart the lowliest duties on herself did lay.”(718). After reading three of Wordsworth’s romantic pieces, I realized that his poetry actually does live up to Thomas Wolfe’s definition. He writes of optimism, hopefulness, and ambition. While reading, one can tell that he definitely reflected upon the desire “to prevent life from escaping us.”