...from William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge Lyrical Ballads [London: J. & A. Arch, 1798] LINES WRITTEN A FEW MILES ABOVE TINTERN ABBEY, ON REVISITING THE BANKS OF THE WYE DURING A TOUR, July 13, 1798. ===== Five years have passed; five summers, with the length | | Of five long winters! and again I hear | | These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs | | With a sweet inland murmur.*—Once again | | Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs, | | Which on a wild secluded scene impress | | Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect | | The landscape with the quiet of the sky. | | The day is come when I again repose | | Here, under this dark sycamore, and view | 10 | These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts, | | Which, at this season, with their unripe fruits, | | Among the woods and copses lose themselves, | | Nor, with their green and simple hue, disturb | | The wild green landscape. Once again I see | | These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines | | Of sportive wood run wild; these pastoral farms, | | Green to the very door; and wreathes of smoke | | Sent up, in silence, from among the trees, | | With some uncertain notice, as might seem, | 20 | Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods, | | Or of some hermit's cave, where by his fire | | The hermit sits alone. | | Though absent long, | | These forms of...
Words: 1451 - Pages: 6
...offer access to the emotions contained in memory. And he argues that the first principle of poetry should be pleasure, that the chief duty of poetry is to provide pleasure through a rhythmic and beautiful expression of feeling—for all human sympathy, he claims, is based on a subtle pleasure principle that is “the naked and native dignity of man.” Recovering “the naked and native dignity of man” makes up a significant part of Wordsworth’s poetic project, and he follows his own advice from the 1802 preface. Wordsworth’s style remains plain-spoken and easy to understand even today, though the rhythms and idioms of common English have changed from those of the early nineteenth century. Many of Wordsworth’s poems (including masterpieces such as “Tintern Abbey” and the “Intimations of Immortality” ode) deal with the subjects of childhood and the memory of childhood in the mind of the adult in particular, childhood’s lost connection with nature, which can be preserved only in memory. Wordsworth’s images and metaphors mix natural scenery, religious symbolism (as in the sonnet “It is a beauteous evening, calm and...
Words: 473 - Pages: 2
