Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey ...

“Tintern Abbey” is full of visual imagery: the sights of the Wye valley landscape, the speaker’s memory of that beautiful scenery, the appearance of his sister Dorothy, his traveling companion, and the resurrected image of his younger self that he “cannot paint,” all belong to the visual realm. The speaker’s eye is both a literal and figurative organ of vision: a bodily sensory system and a symbol of his manifold capacity for emotional, intellectual, and spiritual awareness. While auditory imagery is also important in the poem (e.g., the mountain streams’ “soft inland murmur” [4]), the eye and vision are the controlling metaphors of “Tintern Abbey.” It is through the eye, primarily, that the speaker takes in the landscape, relives his memory of it, experiences the semi-mystical vision that penetrates “into the life of things” (50), and witnesses evidence of the “motion” and “spirit” that “rolls through all things” (102-104).

In the first paragraph of the poem, the speaker’s eye embraces the pastoral scenery, taking an active role in its composition, framing and altering its details. The eye doesn’t see passively; what, and how, it perceives “impress[es] / Thoughts of more deep seclusion” and “connect[s] / The landscape with the quiet of the sky” (7-8).