Wordsworth

Wordsworth’s writing encompasses this belief; at birth we are in our highest state of innocence and throughout life we become corrupted and fall into a state of experience. He paints this portrait for us in his two titles “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798” and “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.”

The subjective and meditative lyrical poem “Intimations of Immortality” possesses the theme of man’s inherent goodness. In section I of the poem the first vision the reader sees is pristine. These lines, “There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, / The earth, and every common sight, / To me did seem / Aparelled in celestial light, / The glory and freshness of a dream,” (795) draw the parallel of nature to the divine. This moment of intersection between man and nature show us of Wordsworth’s belief that that the natural world has spiritual power. He compares his “every common sight” in this vision to celestial light. The celestial light being the beginning or Creation, and provided the fact t

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Growing up in this case, is growing into blindness, this blindness causes the soul to abandon his being. He says, “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:” (797). In the following lines, “It is not now as it hath been of yore;- / Turn wheresoe’er I may, / By night or day, / The things which I have seen I now can see no more,” (795-6) Wordsworth makes evident this spiritual blindness from the fall of innocence into experience. ”

Though both poems celebrate the wisdom that comes with experience, “Tintern Abbey” does not have the scene of redemption and revisitation to innocence.

“Hence in a season of calm weather, / Though inland far we be, / Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea / Which brought us hither, / Can in a moment travel thither, / And see the Children sport upon the shore, / And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore” (799).

In section V of “Intimations of Immortality” Wordsworth uses the idea of pre-existence as a metaphor to make his readers feel this sense of innocence and pure spirituality. In Wordsworth’s view, we are spiritual beings and we can never journey back to the state of pristine innocence, but there can be a sense of redemption.

As in “Intimations of Immortality”, the pastoral scene in “Tintern Abbey,” also possesses an engagement of man and nature. “And passing even into my purer mind, / With tranquil restoration: - feelings too / Of unremembered pleasure” (793), Wordsworth is contemplating what it was like to be at Tintern Abbey in an earlier state, a state with less experience, therefore closer to the divine. He personifies nature giving inanimate objects the power to invoke the feeling of love. The sounding cataract

Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,

The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,

Their colours and their forms, were then to me

An appetite; a feeling and a love,

That had no need of a remoter charm,

By thought supplied, nor any interest

Unborrowed from the eye. hat “Heaven lies about us in our infancy,” we know that this moment is a recollection of the state of innocence. The imagination of the redeemed accepts mortality and its limitations while the innocent mind of childhood cannot grasp it.

Romantic writers were not conventionally religious, they instead speak of redemption that lies within the individual.

Approximate Word count = 759
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)

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