Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey ...

“Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” by William Wordsworth (1807)

Published in Poems in Two Volumes (1807) this explores similar themes of mortality, the loss of the visionary ecstasy of childhood, and the consolation that the philosophical mind offers the mature poet as apparent recompense for that loss. The poem suggests that, though he has lost the capacity to experience the sublime supernatural power of nature he did as a child, those experiences have enduring value for the adult as tantalizing indications that the soul is immortal. Composed nine years after “Tintern Abbey,” the Ode foregrounds the elegiac tone of the earlier poem and employs (while generalizing and developing) its temporal framework of “Then” and “Now.” This framework embraces the child’s rapturous communion with nature and the adult poet’s chastened, ambivalent perspective, emphasizing his loss of visionary perception as the inevitable result of aging. Structurally, thematically, and emotionally, the “Intimations” ode charts similar terrain as the earlier poem, vacillating between sadness and joy, hope and despair, and evidence of loss and gain, as the speaker struggles to find a stable point of reference to ground a continuity of identity, inspiration, and moral resolution amid the degenerating effects of time and the experience of human suffering.

“Frost at Midnight” by Samuel Taylor Coleridege (1798)

Composed just a few months before “Tintern Abbey,” provides a model for the Romantic subjective meditative lyric rooted in the secluded speaker’s observation of nature that Wordsworth was to develop to its full potential in “Tintern Abbey.” Though not as complex in structure and thought as Wordsworth’s poem, Coleridge’s “conversation” poem influenced “Tintern Abbey’s” ode-like transitions and method, in which the speaker’s navigation of memory in tranquility, mediated by the ministering presence of natural beauty, conduces to profound solitary introspection and philosophical musing. Both poems begin with the typically Romantic maneuver of the pathetic fallacy, the ascription of subjective feeling to external objects.

In the opening movements, the speakers’ subjective consciousness focuses on external nature and, in a process of meditative intensification, imagines its reflection in the sounds and images of the landscape, leading to a flood of associative memories and imaginative syntheses. Each speaker emerges from a winding path of recollection and philosophical reflection to address a loved one (Coleridge’s infant son; Wordsworth’s sister Dorothy) with hopeful exhortation and loving benediction in the poems’ conclusions. A three-part rhetorical strategy motivates both poems: The speakers move from the aesthetic contemplation of outward nature in placid seclusion, through the imaginative revivification of their past selves, and back from this subjective solitude out into the social dimension, a return to the world of domestic affections that grounds their longing for permanence in the intimacy of familial love.

“The Eolian Harp” by Samuel Taylor Coleridege (1795)

In this poem, Coleridge entertains the idea of a pantheistic power permeating all of organic nature, voicing a note similar to Wordsworth’s intuition in “Tintern Abbey” of a “presence that disturbs me; […] a sense sublime / Of something far more deeply interfused / Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns […]” (ii. 96-99). Both poems have been seen (and endlessly debated) as primary documents of the Romantic “doctrine” of pantheism, a charge both Wordsworth and Coleridge rejected. A condensed meditation of natural description and theological speculation prompted by the bewitching sounds of a wind-lute resonating in the breeze in Coleridge’s window, “The Eolian Harp” epitomizes the Romantic theory of poetic inspiration as a visitation of a preternatural, unknowable energy, and the idea of “natural supernaturalism” as the enabling ground of the Romantic visionary imagination.