Many of the other most famous poems from Lyrical Ballads – Wordsworth’s own ‘We Are Seven’, ‘The Idiot Boy’, ‘Simon Lee’, and ‘Anecdote for Fathers’, not to mention Coleridge’s long narrative poem ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ – are narratives, not meditative lyrics. Here it’s worth remembering the significance of the title of the collection to which ‘Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey’ was a last-minute addition: ‘ballads’ are poems which tell a story and have some narrative interest, a quality which ‘Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey’ notably lacks. The features we now most readily associate with Romantic poetry – the lyric focus on the personal thoughts and feelings of the poet, and the way the individual links with his or her natural surroundings – were brought to new heights in this poem. ‘Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey’ represented a turning-point in Wordsworth’s career, and in the development of English Romanticism. ‘Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey’: analysis He entreats Dorothy to remember this, and to remember their visit to the Wye valley in the years to come. Wordsworth goes on to say that Nature – personified as female, as so often in poetry – is full of ‘blessings’, no matter what life may bring. Because they’re brother and sister and have spent their lives together, looking at Dorothy reminds Wordsworth of the boy he was: she is a short-cut back to his childhood. In the poem’s final verse paragraph, Wordsworth addresses his companion with him by the banks of the river Wye: his sister, Dorothy. My dear, dear Sister! and this prayer I make, My former pleasures in the shooting lights The language of my former heart, and read ![]() My dear, dear Friend and in thy voice I catch ![]() Of this fair river thou my dearest Friend, If I were not thus taught, should I the more Wordsworth concludes this verse paragraph by stating that nature is like a parent or guardian to him in this respect, in inspiring him to great thoughts. However, he resists the urge to become sentimentally nostalgic or to lament his lost youth, because he reasons that he has gained things by becoming older and wiser: back then, he enjoyed nature when in his ‘thoughtless youth’ (‘thoughtless’ carrying a suggestion of ‘uncaring’ as well as ‘unthinking’ or ‘unreflective’), but now it carries deeper significance because he can hear the ‘still, sad music of humanity’ within it.Īlmost oxymoronically, Wordsworth tells us that this sad quality ‘disturbs’ him ‘with the joy / Of elevated thoughts’: he is disturbed, but the disturbance is a welcome one, for it leads him to reflect and grow wiser. Wordsworth then shifts his focus to his past self, reflecting that when he first went among nature like this, he was a carefree boy who went eagerly to nature, rather than going to it because was fleeing from something (i.e.
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