Thank you for this beautiful reading. My father recited Wordsworth for us on our walks together throughout his life. These places did become more dear to him as he aged and I cannot read Wordsworth without recalling it to my mind. This was the one morality or religion he could truly feel in his own life and that he wanted us to remember.
Among the many stirring emotions this poem evokes is empathy for a man who has lost his youthful ideals, but not his faith in them. There is good reason to believe that this poem had tremendous value for Wordsworth. Although he did revise many of his other poems, he never made a single revision of Lines above Tintern Abbey. Not a word. Unlike Coleridge, who made several revisions of Frost at Midnight. I think he knew just how good a poem it is, a rare thing for a poet as self-doubt is often a characteristic of the creative mind.
Thank you Adam for these deep dives! As a former English student it is comforting to return to analysing poetry for the sake of it. The reverence you have is infectious and your insights really add to experience. I’ve visited tintern abbey so many times but failed to appreciate the Wordsworth link! cheers
The most pantheistic lines are probably the zenith of the spiritual vision here in these lines: "And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man: A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things." The key word is "interfused," the idea that a sublime and creative power exists within the material world as an interfused spirit. It's hard to call this strictly pantheism, or at least strictly /materialist/ pantheism, since there is also the sense of not only a materially present divinity, but also a spiritually transcendent and interfused divinity to nature. Coleridge likely introduced Wordsworth to the pantheism of Spinoza during this period, so there is a possible direct connection. If we define mysticism as a spiritual insight and practice that operates apart from institutional and confessional religion, it's definitely there in Wordsworth's idea of "natural piety"! Thanks for the question and the kind comment.
