Themes in Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey

The poem ends on an encouraging note as Wordsworth contemplates his experience on the River Wye with his sister. He understands that with time, she will mature and her youthful passions will diminish. Nevertheless, he prays that she may fondly recall this moment together and draw inspiration from nature’s capacity to physically, emotionally, and mentally enliven and uplift her.

In his prayer, Wordsworth further connects nature to memory. He hopes that Dorothy’s mind might be a “mansion” to hold all her memories of nature so that she might be able to remember its beauty for consolation during difficult times. Similarly to how he recalls nature while in the city, Wordsworth imagines Dorothy’s memory as a “dwelling-place” where all the beautiful forms and colors of nature might reside and resurface when called on.

The word “ecstasies” describes a state of overwhelming delight. Here, Wordsworth returns to the theme of maturation, elucidating how age can transform one’s perception of nature. With maturity, youthful passions—“wild ecstasies”—transform into “sober pleasure.”

The speaker contrasts his decaying “genial spirits” to “thy wild eyes” of a new character in the poem, his younger sister Dorothy. Wordsworth and his sister, also a writer and poet, were very close throughout their lives. Through Dorothy, Wordsworth is able to live vicariously and recapture a sense of his more youthful days, intimated in the line when Wordsworth exclaims, “Oh!... May I behold in thee what I was once.” Although he does not mourn the passage of his youth, Wordsworth recalls his memories fondly and nostalgically.

While nature provided the speaker’s younger self an outlet for his animalistic energies, nature now serves a different, more profound purpose. Through metaphor, the speaker likens nature to a variety of roles, including anchor, nurse, guide, and guardian. As these lines indicate, the speaker imagines a kindred, overarching spirit that moves like a guiding force through nature and into the human consciousness.

With his newfound appreciation of nature, the speaker recognizes something he failed to recognize in his youth: a presence that pervades all of nature. With this more philosophical understanding of nature, the speaker imagines that this seemingly divine force inhabits and passes through the ocean, the air, the sky, and “the mind of man.” With various literary devices—the repetition of the word “and,” as well as the use of spondees, specifically the two consecutive strong stresses on the words “round ocean” and “blue sky”—the speaker accentuates his reverence for the enormity and grandeur of nature.

Instead of looking to nature to provide a source of release, the speaker now looks to it for its “ample power / to chasten and subdue.” The verb “to chasten” means to restrain while the verb “to subdue” means to bring under control. Both verbs suggest that over time nature has afforded the speaker the maturity to think inwardly.

The poem undergoes another shift as the speaker considers his current relationship with nature. Instead of finding the chaos and passion within nature, he hears “the still, sad music of humanity.” This phrase intimates a more nuanced and mature appreciation for nature. Wordsworth can find pleasure in its stillness rather than its movement; its melancholy rather than its joyfulness.

The phrase “dizzy raptures” aptly illustrates the speaker’s previous relationship with nature. The former word “dizzy” describes a whirling sensation in the head, while the latter word “rapture” describes an experience of overwhelming emotion. With the power of hindsight, the speaker is able to look back on his passionate, emotional connection with nature. However, as he suggests in the following line, he does not yearn to return to that stage in his life.

The noun “cataract” refers to a large, powerful waterfall that runs over a precipice. As a child, nature was awe-inspiring for the speaker—the cataract, the mountains, and the woods “haunted [him] like a passion.” The overwhelming colors and shapes were like “a feeling and a love,” suggesting that he and nature were connected on an instinctive level.

The speaker romanticizes his childhood, when he possessed a different appreciation of nature. He says, through the use of simile, that he was “like a roe,” or a small deer. He once “bounded” through the mountains and rivers with relentless, youthful energy, yet he never stopped to appreciate it.

In this stanza, the poem shifts tone as the speaker, enlivened by nature, awakens out of his reverie and realizes where he is. Nature has several effects on the speaker: it helps to stir his memory, as well as jolt him out of “dim and faint” thought into the sensuous reality of the present moment.

Through repetition of the phrase “how oft” and its variant “how often” throughout this stanza, the speaker highlights how frequently he has turned to the thought of nature for consolation.

Here, Wordsworth suggests how imagining nature can leave one in a state of reverie—with the death of the body or “corporeal frame,” the mind comes alive as “a living soul.” The “blessed mood”—that state of euphoria and joy the speaker describes above—transcends the corporeal and informs the inner spiritual life instead. In this way, the mind is able to “see into the life of things.”

According to Wordsworth, imagining nature allows readers to cope with our complex and incomprehensible world. By reminiscing on the beauty of nature, readers can reach a “sublime” state—the “blessed mood”—where the burdens of life and all its mysteries are alleviated. Wordsworth employs juxtaposition to demonstrate what the “blessed mood” can achieve. Set against negative terms such as “burthen,” “heavy and weary weight,” and “unintelligible,” the blessed mood instead lightens.

In these lines, Wordsworth’s speaker explains how the best parts of his life were not moments of great heroism. Instead, they were the small, seemingly insignificant actions barely remembered, characterized by “kindness and[...] love.” Wordsworth’s attunements to the subtleties of human experience, memory, and perception were among his great strengths as a poet; it is little surprise that his speaker expresses these qualities.

Since his last visit to the Wye River, Wordsworth’s speaker has spent time living in the city—likely London—where he remembered nature’s “forms of beauty” fondly. His memories of this landscape provided him the necessary “sensations” to sustain him during his weariness “‘mid the din,” the loud urban noises. Unlike “a landscape to a blind man’s eye,” Wordsworth could vividly imagine and recall on nature. Doing so provided “tranquil restoration” that calmed both his mind and body, “felt in the blood, and felt along the heart.”

Here, the speaker’s bird’s-eye view skews his vision. As he looks down at the man-made hedges, he sees that they are “hardly hedge-rows” and more like “little lines / or sportive wood run wild.” His physical view of nature changes depending on his perspective, just as his philosophical view of nature changes depending on his age and stature—a theme Wordsworth touches on later in the poem.