“How often has my spirit turned to thee”: Wordsworth’s Idea of Nature in “Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey”

Abstract

This essay examines Wordsworth’s idea of nature as a home in his poem, “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey”. The poem was written when he revisited the banks of River Wye during a tour that he undertook on 13 July, 1798. Generally, a home is a place of rest where people can withdraw from the hustle and bustle of the outside world and can feel a sense of attachment and rootedness. After settling in Grasmere in 1800, Wordsworth began to describe nature as his metaphorical home. Wordsworth wrote poems, such as “Michael” and “Home at Grasmere”, about people who live and feel ‘at home’ with nature. In these poems, Wordsworth describes nature as a fundamental place that offers the following benefits — protection and care, a frame for understanding people’s moral being, deep attachment to moral being of the dweller’s heart. Previous studies have presumed that Wordsworth hit upon the idea of nature as a home after he settled in Grasmere.

  This essay argues, however, that Wordsworth’s idea of nature as a home had already germinated in his poem “Tintern Abbey”, written in 1798 and prior to the poems written by him after he settled in the Lake District. Tintern Abbey was famous as the most beautiful, picturesque site in this valley, which is a ruin described as a place for repose and meditation. For picturesque travellers, the amusement of their travel is a succession of scenes that changes continuously as they travel. Thus, on the one hand, the relationship between nature and traveller becomes transient, constantly detaching from one place (scene) and attaching to another. On the other hand, Wordsworth describes the poet’s deep attachment to this particular place, which sustained though he was absent for long. To avoid loco-descriptive conventions in picturesque writing, Wordsworth’s narrator stands at an unknown spot located ‘a few miles above’ the abbey and exclaims to the river, ‘How often has my spirit turned to thee!’ (57). For Wordsworth, this is a place to which he should return, a ‘nurse’ providing care and protecting his heart from ‘the fever of the world’ and an ‘anchor’ of his ‘purest thoughts’ (110).