The clouds gathering round the setting sun, foreshadowing the poet’s own decline and eventual death, remind him also that another day has ended and this has brought new glories. In the poem, Wordsworth confides that he now loves the brooks more now he is older, and that dawn, and a new day, still fill him with appreciation of the world and all it can offer. Nothing was more difficult for me in childhood than to admit the notion of death as a state applicable to my own being. To the attentive and competent reader the whole sufficiently explains itself but there may be no harm in adverting here to particular feelings or ‘experiences’ of my own mind on which the structure of the poem partly rests. Two years at least passed between the writing of the four first stanzas and the remaining part. This was composed during my residence at Town-end, Grasmere. It remains a powerful poetic meditation on death, the loss of childhood innocence, and the way we tend to get further away from ourselves – our true roots and our beliefs – as we grow older. Philip Larkin once recalled hearing this poem recited on BBC radio, and having to pull over to the side of the road, as his eyes had filled with tears. The things which I have seen I now can see no more … There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, But wait: in the second stanza, we are suddenly informed of the woman’s (girl’s?) death: she lies still and powerless, unable to see or hear, and has become a part of the day-to-day world of nature. This is because of an unidentified ‘she’ who did not seem to be marked by the passing of time or the ravages of nature as other mortals are. Often included as one of Wordsworth’s ‘Lucy poems’, this short lyric is about feeling at peace, as though asleep and existing in a deep calm. The poem contains Wordsworth’s famous declaration, ‘The Child is father of the Man’, highlighting how important childhood experience was to the Romantics in helping to shape the human beings they became in adult life. This simple nine-line poem describes how the poet is filled with joy when he sees a rainbow, and that he has always felt this way, since ‘my life began’ he hopes he will always keep that sense of enchantment with the natural world. The poem is one of the great hymns to tranquillity, quiet contemplation, and self-examination in all of English literature. The scene inspires feelings which the poet connects with small acts of love and kindness, and which can lead to a kind of tranquillity which allows us to ‘see into the life of things’: to understand things in a way we usually cannot. Wordsworth tells us that although it’s been five years since he last clapped eyes on this scene, the memories of the beautiful landscape have often returned to him when he has been in busy ‘towns and cities’ or sitting ‘in lonely rooms’. Well, actually, according to Wordsworth, he didn’t ‘write’ a word of the poem until he got to Bristol, where he wrote down the whole poem, having composed it in his head shortly after leaving the Wye. This poem was not actually composed at Tintern Abbey, but, as the poem’s full title (‘Lines Written (or Composed) a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798’) reveals, was written nearby, overlooking the ruins of the medieval priory in the Wye Valley in South Wales. On that best portion of a good man’s life, Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,įelt in the blood, and felt along the heart But oft, in lonely rooms, and ‘mid the din
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