Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey ...

“Tintern Abbey” is a complex meditation on the value of nature as a source of healing and philosophical wisdom, yet Wordsworth repeatedly questions the veracity and durability of this belief. The poem vacillates between overt affirmations of nature’s restorative, edifying power, and muted voicings of uncertainty as to whether nature will ever “betray / The heart that loved her” (125-126). While the poem celebrates nature’s role as a secular medium of salvation and suggests that the epiphanies it gives rise to can form the basis for his mature philosophy—one that approaches pantheism in the poem—Wordsworth remains troubled by the loss of the direct, unthinking pleasure he once enjoyed in nature, which he now recognizes as a source of renewal. Ultimately, Wordsworth turns toward his sister Dorothy for that renewal, finding mirrored in her “wild” eyes his former enthusiastic response to the picturesque and sublime scenery, a movement that betrays the underlying anxiety of the poem. The rhetorical strategy of “Tintern Abbey,” its shifts and countershifts as the poet seeks to reconcile himself with the process of aging, suggests that Wordsworth is not unqualifiedly certain that nature alone—or the philosophical mind—has fully compensated him for the loss of his youthful, unconscious exultation in Nature’s embrace.