It bears close affinity to the genre of the “conversation” poem, a meditative lyric originating in the speaker’s contemplation of nature and addressed to a silent listener (Dorothy Wordsworth, in this case). A locodescriptive poem, “Tintern Abbey” draws upon the 18th-century genre of landscape poetry while transcending the traditional form in the complexity of its tone, subject, and development of thought. In the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth wrote that though he did not venture to call the poem an ode, he hoped that the poem’s “transitions, and the impassioned music of the versification” would meet the lofty purpose, and the aesthetic and structural demands, of the ode form. In form, it resembles the English Pindaric ode, though the apostrophe to “my dearest friend” (the poet’s sister Dorothy) in the final paragraph admits an element of dramatic monologue. The poem consists of five verse paragraphs of varying length written in blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter).
In 1843, Wordsworth recalled that no poem of his had originated under more pleasant circumstances and that he had composed it entirely in his head during the return to Bristol, where it was written down that evening. The poem was occasioned by a short walking tour of the Wye valley in southwest England near the Welsh border that Wordsworth and Dorothy took in July 1798, revisiting scenes that a troubled younger William had first seen during a solo ramble in the summer of 1793. In doing so, the poem envisions a new form of self-consciousness and understanding of the power of the imagination that are distinctively Romantic. In subject, tone, dimension, and form, “Tintern Abbey” marks the climax of Wordsworth’s first great period of creativity, heralds his maturity as a poet, and establishes a model for his mature poetic methodology. The distinctive Wordsworthian themes of the reciprocity of nature and the mind in the formation of individual consciousness and character, the significance of memory for intellectual and spiritual growth, the child’s visionary communion with nature and the loss of that power with age, the attraction toward pantheism and nature mysticism, and the yearning for permanence coupled with the recognition of mortality, are synthesized for the first time in the poem.
0 kommentar(er)
