LINES WRITTEN A FEW MILES ABOVE TINTERN ABBEY Autosaved

LINES WRITTEN A
FEW MILES ABOVE
TINTERN ABBEY
William Wordsworth

CONTEXT (AO1)
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Written in July of 1798 and published as the last poem of
Lyrical Ballads.
At the age of twenty-three (in August of 1793), Wordsworth had visited the desolate abbey alone. In 1798 he returned to the same place with his beloved sister, Dorothy Wordsworth, who was a year younger. Dorothy is referred to as "Friend" throughout the poem. (whom he addresses warmly in the final paragraph as "thou my dearest Friend, / My dear, dear
Friend“)
Often the poem is simply called "Tintern Abbey." The abbreviated title is effective for clarity's sake, but it is also misleading, as the poem does not actually take place in the abbey. Wordsworth begins his poem by telling the reader that it has been five years since he has been to this place a few miles from the abbey. He describes the "Steep and lofty cliffs," the "wild secluded scene," the "quiet of the sky," the
"dark sycamore" he sits under, the trees of the orchard, and the "pastoral farms" with "wreaths of smoke" billowing from their chimneys.

Form (AO2)
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The poem is written in tightly-structured blank verse
(verse without rhyme) and comprises verseparagraphs rather than stanzas. It is unrhymed and mostly in iambic pentameter. Categorising the poem is difficult, as it contains elements of all of the ode (a classical poem originally meant to be sung), the dramatic monologue and the conversation poem.
In the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth noted: At its beginning, it may well be dubbed an
Eighteenth-Century "landscape-poem", but it is commonly agreed that the best designation would be the conversation poem.

Language (AO2)
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The poem is mostly about how the speaker is able to compare what he sees with his eyes to the memory of the scene he's been carrying around in his mind's eye. The literal eyeball is the barrier between the poet's mind and the scene in front of him.

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Line 24: The speaker uses the simile of the "blind man's eye" to describe the way he was able to see the river valley in his mind's eye during his long absence. It's a negative simile, though – he says that it's not like a "blind man's eye." In other words, his mind's eye sees things almost as clearly as his real eyes.
Lines 82-3: The speaker is saying that when he was the young, boyish "William," his interest in nature was purely visual. Nature had no "interest" for him that wasn't what he could see with his "eye."
Line 106: the speaker is saying that the "spirit" (100) in nature connects everything together, which is why he's "a lover" (103) of all natural things that can be perceived with "eye, and ear" (106). But then he goes on to say that the "eye and ear" are able to
"half create" the things that they "perceive." The speaker is also suggesting that the
"eye and ear" have a kind of consciousness that we're not aware of, so that they "half create" without our even being aware of it.
Lines 117-9: Here the speaker uses the metaphor of "read[ing]" (117) to describe what he thought he could sense from looking at Dorothy's eyes. He also uses synecdoche. He makes Dorothy's eyes stand in for her entire personality. Finally, the speaker uses another metaphor when he talks about the "shooting lights" coming out of her eyes.

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Language (AO2)
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The hermit only appears one time in the poem, at the end of the first stanza. The speaker muses about the possible source of the smoke he sees rising from the trees. Maybe the speaker thinks of a Hermit because he'd like to retire into the woods himself and live in seclusion from the rest of the world to commune with nature.
Lines 21-22: The "Hermit" really stands out to us for two reasons: first, because it's capitalized. Second, the shape of the line. Line 22 breaks off in the middle to end the stanza.
The "Hermit" is "sit[ting] alone," all right – alone at the end of the stanza. That line is actually isolated from the rest of the poem, just as the Hermit is secluded from the rest of the world. Structure (AO2)
Lines 1–24
Revisiting the natural beauty of the Wye fills the poet with a sense of
"tranquil restoration". in large the poem is a recollection of
Wordsworth's visit of 1793. It also harks back in the imagination to a time when the abbey was not in ruins, and dwells occasionally on the present and the future as well. The speaker admits to having reminisced about the place many times in the past five years. Notably, the abbey itself is nowhere described.
 Lines 88–111
After contemplating the few changes in scenery since last he visited,
Wordsworth is overcome with "a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused, whose dwelling is the light of setting suns". He is met with the divine as "a motion and a spirit, that impels all thinking things, all objects of thought, and rolls through all things". These are perhaps the most telling lines in Wordsworth's connection of the
"sublime" with "divine creativity", the result of allowing nature to become "the anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, the guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul of all my moral being".
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AO3

Questions
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Does Wordsworth really use "the real language of men" in "Tintern Abbey," as he claimed he would do in the "Preface to Lyrical Ballads"?
Is the speaker's relationship to nature something that is possible for anyone?
Why does the speaker keep referring to Dorothy's
"wild eyes" (119, 148)? Why are her eyes wild? Is that supposed to be a good thing?
Does the consciousness of the "still, sad music of humanity" (91) have to come from a close relationship with nature, or could it be developed from another source?
If the speaker returned to the banks of the Wye for a third time, do you think his impressions would change yet again?