Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

“Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” 167verse paragraph, phenomenal nature, the nature revealed through the“language of the sense,” is described by Wordsworth as the “guide, theguardian” of his heart, and finally as the “soul” of all his moral being(ll. 108–111). This characterization suggests the poet’s recognitionof nature’s role in restoring him to a sense of his own heart, hisown soul—to a sense of what is most essentially inward in himself.That nature is granted the epithet “soul,” as if Wordsworth weresaying that nature at least in one respect was his very essence, is butanother manifestation of his habit of displacing his own inwardnessinto nature. But this displacement turns out to be reciprocal: havingtransferred his sense of self into nature, Wordsworth finds that naturemade immanent leads him back toward himself.At the beginning of the second verse paragraph, we find an exampleof such a backward turning. After having surmised an unseen Hermitat the heart of the landscape, Wordsworth continues to move beyondthe immediacies of the scene by directing his consciousness towardhis past: he transforms his sense of a human presence enclosed in thewoods into an explicit memory of himself “in lonely rooms, and ’midthe din / Of towns and cities” (ll. 25–26). The cave of nature becomesa room in London, the identity of whose inhabitant is now no longerdisguised. The poet’s envisaging of hidden solitude is converted,through a process of association, into an overt memory of his own pastsolitude. This transformation makes more understandable the groundsof the sense of pervading immanence of the opening landscape.Consciousness of self is lodged throughout the scene because, asWordsworth’s eye passes over it, he is simultaneously aware, howeversubliminally, of the previous encounters of his mind with the scene.There was a direct encounter in the year 1793, the time of his firstvisit to Tintern Abbey, and then a series of indirect encounters madepossible by his recalling, through the agency of affective memory, the“beauteous forms” during the period between 1793 and July 13, 1798,the day of his return and his meditation. The landscape, therefore,so strangely immanent, is not simply being seen, but is being seen“again”—the word is repeated four times in the first twenty-two lines.And so it is filled with an implicit history of the poet’s past consciousexperiences with its forms. We might say that it is the richness of thesense of “being seen again” which is, as it were, spatialized into theimmanencies of the scene. We might also say, from this point of view,that Wordsworth’s image of himself in a lonely city room is an image