William Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey Theme: C.U. English Honours Notes

Write note on the theme of loss and recompense in Wordworth’s Tintern Abbey.

“Tintern Abbey” is generally regarded as William Wordsworth’s partial account of the balance-sheet of maturity, whose every fabric is a remembered perception given way to reflection. He charts the course of the developing sensibilities much as he did in “Ode on the limitations of immortality”, recollected in childhood, though in a much greater detail. The elemental freshness of child’s awareness gives way to the passionate feeling of youth which again gives way to more sober vision of the man, mediated by the love of nature. The poet’s perception in a strange world takes on a meaning, which, as he grows up, family emerges as the recognition of profound human significance in nature.

Tintern Abbey is based on Wordsworth’s sense of loss and recompense. In this poem, he speaks of that intense absorption of the animal pleasures of the boyhood leading to the joys and raptures of ‘thoughtless youth’. The poet has the abundant recompense, the vision of an integral harmony. But there is a note of difference between the two losses, one in Tintern Abbey and the other in the Immortality Ode. De Quincy in Reminiscences of the English Lake Poets has observed—‘Wordsworth, like his companions, haunted the hills and vales for the sake of angling, snaring birds, swimming and sometimes of the hunting.” It was in the course of those pursuits by an indirect effect growing gradually upon him that Wordsworth became a passionate lover of nature, at the time when the growth of his intellectual faculties made it possible that he should combine those thoughtful passions with his experience of the eye and ear.   

It was in the course of those pursuits by an indirect effect growing gradually upon him that Wordsworth became a passionate lover of nature, at the time when the growth of his intellectual faculties made it possible that he should combine those thoughtful passions with his experience of the eye and ear.

In Tintern Abbey, Wordsworth is actually trying to differentiate his two attitudes to the nature- one is “the coarser pleasures of his boyhood days” and his pleasure of maturity. In fact, Wordsworth begins to describe the various stages of his attitude to nature. This he does with reference to his experience of his second visit Tintern Abbey in the year 1978. Wordsworth revisits Tintern Abbey after an absence of five years. These five years seem to have bottled out his mind, it was ever fresh and familiar to him. Wordsworth indicates the changes that came over in his attitude to Nature in the years of his maturity. In the first stage, Wordsworth had childish pleasures by running over the mountain and by the side of the river. But in the course of time he lost those animal pleasures of his childhood, and he grew up to be a young man, when the animal pleasures of his boyhood were replaced by the passions of youth.

Having made his declaration, Wordsworth gives his first intimation of doubt as to the efficacy of Nature’s presences:

“And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thoughts,

With  many recognitions dim and faint,

And somewhat of a sad perplexity;

The picture of the mind revives again.”

The “sad perplexity” concerns the future and the enigma of the imagination when transposed from past to future time. In this moment of renewed covenant with a remembered and beloved landscape, is-there indeed life and food for the future years.

The process of change is what troubles Wordsworth. He speaks of the third stage of development which is already accomplished and fears of a fourth. The “glad animal movements” of his boyish days preceded any awareness of nature. Then came the time when his perception of natural objects brought an immense joy so that he speaks of the simultaneity of his vision and emotion as “An appetite, a feeling and a love”. That time is past and Wordsworth has lost its aching ‘aching joys’ and ‘dizzy raptures’. He has entered into a third stage and other gifts have recomposed him for such loss. Wordsworth speaks of this stage marked by ‘abundant recompose’. In this nature stage he looks on nature and hears “the still, sad music of humanity”.

The dialectic sensations of the language are important in Wordsworth. The young child has an organic sense that combines seeing and hearing. The older child awakening to the phenomenal world sees a gleam of it, which the mature man cannot see again. But the man gains an intimation of immortality, of his renewed conscience with the young child by hearing a still, sad music of perplexity as he sees the sober colouring in nature. He hears evidence not only of man’s mortality but of man’s inseparable bond with Nature. His greatest recompense is the perception of

“something for more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean and the living air.”

This is the perception that there is someone in nature as well as in the physical world.

Thus Tintern Abbey turns into Wordsworth’s spiritual autobiography, though in a miniature form. In the renewed presence of a remembered scene in Wordsworth composes to pull under his poetic self. All that Wordsworth learns about the loss and gain is ‘a principle of reciprocity’ between the external world and his own mind, and the story of reciprocity becomes the central story of Wordsworth’s best poetry. 

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