European Romantic Review, 2014
Vol. 25, No. 6, 649– 664, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10509585.2014.963849
Major and Minor Narratives in “Tintern Abbey”
∗
James O’Rourke
Department of English, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL
“Tintern Abbey” tells two distinctly different stories about Wordsworth’s visits to
the Wye valley in 1793 and 1798. While the poem’s major narrative traces a clear
developmental arc from youthful spontaneity to mature wisdom, an oblique minor
narrative tells a cautionary tale about reawakening dormant memories. The major
narrative moves “from joy to joy,” beginning with the memory of being “like a
roe” in 1793 and arriving at the discovery of “something far more deeply
interfused” in 1798, but the minor narrative remembers a different “something”
in the 1793 visit; it recalls being “more like a man flying from something that he
dreads.” The engagement with this dreadful, enigmatic “something” draws the
poem into what Keats called its “dark passages,” where Wordsworth becomes
uncertain about his standing in “the ballance of good and evil.”
The word “something” appears twice in the “Lines written a few miles above Tintern
Abbey,” and I will venture to say that the first “something” that will spring to the mind
of virtually every Wordsworthian reader is the ubiquitously cited
something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man. (97 –100)
This “something” anchors a familiar narrative in which Wordsworth claims that he
experienced the joy of nature spontaneously in 1793, that he finds this spontaneity
diminished in 1798, but that he now finds “Abundant recompence” (89) in “something”
richer, more humane, “more deeply interfused.” The other “something,” which is actually the first “something” in the poem, is “something that he dreads” (72). One reason
why the “something far more deeply interfused” is so much more memorable than the
“something that he dreads” involves the different degrees of referentiality of these two
“somethings.” “Something far more deeply interfused” claims to have an actual metaphysical referent; it is an existent “presence,” a “presence that disturbs me with the joy /
Of elevated thoughts” (95–96), while “something that he dreads” is only a pure shifter.
As a descriptor of the vehicle (a fleeing man) in the simile “more like a man / Flying
from something that he dreads, than one / Who sought the thing he loved” (71–73),
this dreadful “something” is only a figure of speech, and even the “man” it describes
is no more real than the indefinite pronoun (“one”) with whom he is compared.
∗
Email: [email protected]
# 2014 Taylor & Francis
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There would seem to be no point in speculating about the “something” this imaginary
man might be fleeing, since he doesn’t even exist. It could be anything.
I shall argue in this essay that these two “somethings” anchor two distinct and conflicting narratives in “Tintern Abbey.” “Something far more deeply interfused” brings a
satisfying sense of closure to the poem’s major narrative, which traces a developmental
arc from youthful spontaneity to mature wisdom, while “something that he dreads” triggers a supplementary, minor narrative that tells a cautionary tale about reawakening
dormant memories. In using the terms “major” and “minor,” I mean to suggest both
the musical distinction between major and minor keys, where minor keys inflect
their major forms with darker and sadder tones, and Gilles Deleuze’s opposition
between major and minor literatures, where “major” literature is “defined by the
power of constants” and “minor” literature “by the power of variation” (101). The
reception history of “Tintern Abbey” has generally correlated the value of the poem
with its more accessible major narrative, in which Arnoldian affirmations of joy
ensue from the recognition of “something far more deeply interfused,” rather than
with what Keats called the poem’s “dark passages.” While Keats described these passages as markers of a metaphysical and moral uncertainty where “We see not the ballance of good and evil” (1: 181), Jerome McGann’s influential account of “Tintern
Abbey” as an exemplary document of the escapist aesthetic he calls the “romantic ideology” (85–88) recast those shadows as symptoms of political bad faith or false consciousness.1 In recent years, ecocriticism has sought to redeem both the politics of
“Tintern Abbey” and the ethical value of its major narrative by identifying the
poem’s pastoral values as a vehicle of “political emancipation” (Bate, Romantic
Ecology 25). Jonathan Bate places the “something far more deeply interfused” of
“Tintern Abbey” at the center of his effort to displace the “red” romanticism of the
new historicism with a “green” romanticism that anticipates a modern environmentalist
sensibility (Song of the Earth 147; Romantic Ecology 8–9), and Adam Potkay’s paraphrase of Wordsworth’s “something far more deeply interfused” as “a unity sustained
by a rational power or spirit” (395) gives the poem’s assertion of metaphysical “presence” a quasi-theological aura. As the ecocritical celebration of Wordsworth’s ability to
bring his readers into greater proximity to the world of natural objects displaces the political materialism of events with the physical materialism of things, ecocritical readings
of “Tintern Abbey” have come to echo Matthew Arnold’s judgment that Wordsworth’s
poetry is great because of its power to convey “the joy offered to us in nature” (135).2
While “red” and “green” readings of “Tintern Abbey” debate whether Wordsworth’s affirmations of joy are a private and privative indulgence or an expression of
a prescient political sensibility, a smaller number of more skeptical readers have
embraced the “dark passages” of the poem in Keatsian terms. Susan Wolfson characterizes the rhetoric of “Tintern Abbey” as “a fretful stir of qualifications, hesitations,
and perplexed recognitions” (60), and she argues that the new historicism is mistaken
in treating the poem’s contradictions as an occasion for mounting “a critical operation
against the text rather than an activity noted or examined in the text itself” (431). In a
similar vein, William Galperin argues that “‘Tintern Abbey’ is neither a grand affirmation, nor in failing as such, testimony to skepticism’s greater triumph” (80), and David
Bromwich contends that the “motive” of “Tintern Abbey” is “something far more idiosyncratic” than “a wisdom poem” (71). Nevertheless, these skeptical readings of
“Tintern Abbey” do not describe its “dark passages” coalescing into a coherent, independent narrative. Bromwich characterizes these passages as “unassimilated elements
in the poem” (72), while Wolfson contends that the poem’s “qualifications . . . never
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gain full, independent expression,” leaving only “an undertow of questions denied a full
voice and hearing” (60, 61). While these skeptical readings admit doubt about the
poem’s joyous affirmations, they tend to reaffirm the value of its major developmental
narrative by implicitly congratulating Wordsworth for incorporating his existential
doubts into the complexity of his mature vision.
The critical celebration of the recuperative narrative which ultimately recognizes
“abundant recompence” in a memorable “something far more deeply interfused”
depends largely on the accessibility of this story. Its truth is affirmed in a forceful rhetoric of declaration that runs throughout the poem (“again I hear / These waters,” “We see
into the life of things,” “all which we behold / Is full of blessings” [2-3, 50, 134–35]),
and the narrative is grounded in a series of clear binary oppositions: past and present,
summer and winter, city and country, brother and sister, loss and recompense. The concision of the figure “like a roe,” which claims to tell what Wordsworth was like in 1793,
and the authoritative tone of the assertion that “I have felt / A presence . . . Of something
far more deeply interfused,” which describes the more mature self of 1798, belong to an
expository rhetoric that encourages the reader to find a clear message in the poem. The
substantive referentiality of “something far more deeply interfused” offers the critical
reader what Roman Jakobson calls the “homogeneous means of access” for the explication of metaphor as a structure of substitution. In Jakobson’s words,
Similarity in meaning connects the symbols of a metalanguage with the symbols of the
language referred to. Similarity connects a metaphorical term with the term for which it
is substituted. Consequently, when constructing a metalanguage to interpret tropes, the
researcher possesses more homogeneous means to handle metaphor, whereas metonymy,
based on a different principle, easily defies interpretation. (“Two Aspects” 113)
Potkay’s translation of “something far more deeply interfused” as “a unity sustained by
a rational power or spirit” (395) illustrates the referential efficiency of the poetics of
metaphor. The critical metalanguage (“a unity sustained by a rational power or
spirit”) stands in a substitutive relation to the actual words of the poem (“something
far more deeply interfused”) in that both the critical paraphrase and the poetic figure
claim to refer to the same “presence.” The critical text thus mirrors a literary text
which, in this representation, offers unimpeded access to its own meaning.
The seemingly nonreferential shifter “something that he dreads” belongs to a more
oblique mode of representation. Jakobson’s observation that metonymy, based on the
principle of contiguity rather than substitution, “easily defies interpretation” is borne
out in the elusive quality of this “something,” which is embedded in a dense
network of contradictory figures. It is located within a comparative simile (“more
like a man / Flying from something that he dreads, than one / Who sought the thing
he loved” [71–73]) that is the second of three closely spaced similes (the only
similes in the poem). This figure of a fleeing man is preceded by a simpler, more
benign simile which claims that “like a roe / I bounded o’er the mountains” (68–
69), and it is followed by the enigmatic statement that “The sounding cataract /
Haunted me like a passion” (77–78). The quick succession of similes, which are all
devoted to self-description, suggests that the speaker is making a concerted effort to
define his own nature; nevertheless, as the speaker moves through these figures, the
similes seem to become less capable of performing their intended explanatory function.
The first simile is direct and efficient; it says that I was like a natural being, “like a roe.”
The second simile is less precise; it does not say that I was exactly like another entity,
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but only that I was more like one sort of person (“a man flying from something that he
dreads”) than another sort (“one who sought the thing he loved”). In the third simile, the
speaker is no longer the subject tenor; he only plays a supporting role in this simile,
which compares a natural object (“the sounding cataract”) to an interior state (“a
passion”), and treats the speaking subject (“me,” now in the objective case) as the
means by which these entities can be compared.
The repeated use of the most overt marker of figuration, the word “like,” prompts
the reader to expect similitude, but what she discovers instead is dissimilitude; these
similes do not seem to agree with each other. Although the first two similes both
claim to describe what the speaker was “like” in 1793, they paint very different pictures;
a “roe” is not like “a man flying from something that he dreads.” The first figure
conveys a sense of youthful spontaneity, but the second describes a subject with a
troubled past. The introduction of this revisionary figure for the speaker’s existence
in 1793, the “man flying from something that he dreads,” triggers a regression to a
time before the poem’s originary “then” of 1793 in order to contrast this troubled
man with “(The coarser pleasures of my boyish days, / And their glad animal movements all gone by)” (74–75), but this expansion of the poem’s temporal frame generates yet another paradox; “glad animal movements,” a type of activity that would seem
to describe perfectly someone who was “like a roe . . . bound[ing] o’er the mountains,”
are now located not in 1793 but in an earlier time of “boyish days” that were “all gone
by” in 1793. The narrative regression to these “boyish days” causes the 1793 self to
become momentarily unavailable to the 1798 speaker, who claims that “I cannot
paint / What then I was” (76–77), but this profession of inadequate self-knowledge
is immediately contradicted by the third simile, “The sounding cataract / Haunted me
like a passion,” which seems to confirm that the 1798 speaker clearly recognizes
what the 1793 self was “like”; he was “more like a man flying from something that
he dreads” than he was “like a roe . . . bound[ing] o’er the mountains.”
Treating these discordant images as incidental static to a developmental narrative of
youthful spontaneity, loss, and mature recompense underestimates both the scale of the
contradiction between the figure of “a man flying from something that he dreads” and
the narrative of a life that proceeds “From joy to joy” (126), and the metonymic coherence of the network of figuration that supplements the aporetic referentiality of the
dreadful “something” that this man is fleeing. The major, pastoral narrative of
“Tintern Abbey” presents the poem as an expression of “the joy in nature that Wordsworth professes to have felt five years earlier and that he imputes to Dorothy in the
present” (Potkay 133), but the credibility of this narrative depends upon the ability
of the figure “like a roe” to offer a more reliable depiction of Wordsworth in 1793
than the figure of a haunted man flying from a dreadful, unnamed “something.”
When these gloomy figures of a fleeing man and a haunting passion revise the
poem’s originary moment of 1793 into a site of trauma rather than inspiration, they
undermine the predictive value of its major narrative, which claims to guarantee a
benign future based on a recognizable similarity between the past and the present.
The therapeutic deduction “That in this moment there is life and food / For future
years” (65–66) describes a future governed by the predictable causality of repetition;
if the encounter with “steep and lofty cliffs” (5) in 1793 has produced a “serene and
blessed mood” (42) in later years even “mid the din / Of towns and cities” (26–27),
then a return to these lofty cliffs in 1798 should provide future access to “lofty
thoughts” (129) that transcend the noise that deforms “The dreary intercourse of
daily life”: “evil tongues, / Rash judgments” and “the sneers of selfish men” (129–
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32). But when the figure for Wordsworth’s encounter with nature in 1793 becomes a
“sounding cataract” that “Haunted me like a passion,” and nature itself takes on the disquieting volume of “the din of towns and cities,” a close reading of “Tintern Abbey”
has to ask: Why has nature become such a loud and haunting presence, rather than
the quietly comforting “sweet inland murmur” that the poem’s initial imagery
promised?
Not only do these vexed similes upset the hermeneutic value of the poem’s most
fundamental binary oppositions, the organic relation between the “then” (73, 77, 80)
of 1793 and the “now” (59) of 1798, and the pastoral distinction between the “quiet”
(8) of the country and the “din” (26) of the city; the binary structures of these
similes themselves collapse under the pressure of an oblique referentiality. A simile
promises a clear distinction between the literal and the figurative, and the poem’s
first simile delivers on that promise when it says that “I was . . . like a roe.” As the succeeding similes continue the attempt to describe what I was “like” in 1793, however,
they dissolve the border between the literal status of the tenor and the figurative
status of the vehicle. In formal terms, these similes present their vehicles, “a man
flying from something that he dreads” and “a passion,” as no more real than the figurative “roe” of the first simile, but when one simile says that “something,” which could be
anything, is pursuing “a man,” who is not me, but I am somewhat like him, and that
simile is immediately supplemented by another simile which says that a natural
object haunted me in the way that a hypothetical “passion” would have affected me
if it were actually present, the two similes taken together construct a complex but coherent story along the axes of substitution and causality:
If I am like this fleeing man, and the “something” that he dreads is therefore like the
cataract that haunts me, and the cataract is “like a passion,” this network of substitution,
deflection, and causality reveals both a latent referential inference – “I was haunted by
a passion” – and an elaborate rhetorical effort to bury that literal inference beneath
layers of figuration that transform this “passion” into a hypothetical reference to a forgettable “something” that afflicts someone else, who is only an imaginary figure of
speech.
The metonymic relay that connects this enigmatic “something” to a haunting, but
figurally obscured, “passion” suggests that the dominant trauma that troubled the
1793 visit to the Wye valley had more to do with Wordsworth’s abandonment of
Annette and Caroline Vallon than with his political enthusiasms during his visits to
France. The reception history of “Tintern Abbey” has resolutely resisted this inference.
The Vallons are rarely mentioned in critical commentary on the poem, and when they
do appear, as in Bromwich’s essay (“The French Revolution and ‘Tintern Abbey’” 73),
they are quickly subordinated to the story of Wordsworth’s shifting political allegiances. But identifying the “something that he dreads” with Wordsworth’s political,
rather than his personal, history obscures the significance of the turn to Dorothy as a
supplement to nature in the poem’s final verse paragraph. Wordsworth faces two problems with memory in “Tintern Abbey”: there can be too little, or too much. In the
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poem’s major narrative, which describes Wordsworth’s relationship with physical
nature, the problem with memory is its evanescence, and the solutions are preservative;
Wordsworth’s ability to sublimate physical “forms of beauty” into a metaphysical
“something far more deeply interfused” offers an “abundant recompence” for the corrosive impact of time on the immediacy of youthful experience, and Dorothy’s ability to
“remember me” (146) extends that power beyond her brother’s own mortality. But in
the poem’s minor narrative, which deals with Wordsworth’s participation in human
events, the problem with memory is its persistence; here, it would be better if
memory could simply forget “something” that “haunted me like a passion.” By identifying Dorothy with nature as the two tutors of his “moral being,” Wordsworth
addresses not only memory’s potential lack but its troublesome excess. Dorothy’s
role in the prelapsarian sibling bond formed in the pre-1793 “boyish days” gives the
purity of nature a human form; Dorothy becomes both the witness to her brother’s original “moral being” and the guarantor of that being against the “rash judgments” that
could result from excessive attention to the temporary lapse of 1793. The reader who
chooses not to appreciate the insular purity of the Wordsworth sibling bond with sufficient reverence is consigned to the company of the “evil tongues” and “selfish men”
who leap to such “rash judgments.”
The major narrative of “Tintern Abbey” posits both nature and memory, in
Deleuze’s term, as “constants.” “Nature never did betray / The heart that loved her”
(123 –24) because its effects, exerted through memory, are mechanically inexorable
and permanent. In this edifying narrative, both the 1793 and 1798 visits to the Wye
valley reliably provide “life and food for future years” because nature’s “forms of
beauty” seep into the deepest core of being, “my purer mind” (30), without volition;
the resultant “feelings . . . of unremembered pleasure” (31–32) lead automatically to
an awareness of “something far more deeply interfused.” The minor narrative that
issues from the enigmatic “something that he dreads” tells a more equivocal story
about the unconscious processes of memory. In the poem’s minor narrative, instead
of serving as a constant source of spiritual nurture, the Wye valley unsettles Wordsworth twice, both in 1793 and in 1798. If the 1793 trip was undertaken in order to
recover from the turbulent time in France, but the trip was “haunted” by “something”
Wordsworth would rather forget, then it should not have been surprising (but it was)
that a second encounter with “these steep woods and lofty cliffs” (158) in 1798
would reawaken not only memories of the sublime landscape of 1793 but also the feelings of dread that shadowed the first visit. Wordsworth may have sufficiently forgotten
about Annette and Caroline Vallon by 1798 that he once again set out for the Wye
valley with hopes of a pleasant nature excursion, but when he re-encountered the landscape of 1793, he remembered what he was “like” in 1793: The sounding cataract
haunted me like a passion, I was more like a man flying from something that he
dreads than one who sought the thing he loved.
The tension between the two narratives of “Tintern Abbey” is carried out in the
formal structures of iteration and variation that Jakobson calls “poetic grammar”
(“Poetry” 127). The major narrative of originary “moral being,” temporary loss, and
“abundant recompence” dominates the poem’s second verse paragraph, lines 23b–
50, which outlines a clear schematic progression from remembered objects to a
“serene and blessed mood” (38) attuned to “the life of things” (50), and lines 86b–
135, a passage that turns away from the series of convoluted similes at the poem’s midpoint in order to show how an awareness of “something far more deeply interfused”
(97) demonstrates that “all which we behold / Is full of blessings” (135). These passages
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aspire to clarity and predictability, while the minor narrative, which emerges in the first
verse paragraph (lines 1–23a), returns in the convoluted similes of 66b–86a, and concludes the poem in lines 135b–160, displays a rhetorical logic that resists summary
judgment. In a close reading of “Tintern Abbey” that focuses on its major narrative,
John Barrell shows how the grammar of this narrative of loss and recompense reflects
Coleridge’s speculations on syntax. Coleridge’s admiration for the “stately march and
difficult evolutions” of Milton’s poetry is based on the sheer volume of combinations
that typically inform Milton’s syntactic relations. The mastery of a “superior number”
of “thoughts and relations,” and the ability to bring that multiplicity into unity through
“the habit of foreseeing, in every . . . sentence, the whole that he intends to communicate” was, for Coleridge, the sign of a great soul (Barrell 70, 72; Coleridge, Biographia
2: 55; Friend 1: 449–50). Milton’s monumental style, where strings of prepositions and
conjunctions generate scale through aggregation, provides the model for Wordsworth’s
enumeration of
the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man. (95 –100)
Wordsworth is very good at this linguistic-mathematical sublime, and comparing the
relative unobtrusiveness of the deferral of the climatic verb “connect” in the second sentence of “Tintern Abbey” with the ornate syntactic edifice with which Milton prefaces
the invocation “Sing, Heavenly Muse” in the opening of Paradise Lost shows how well
Wordsworth can adapt Miltonic rhythms to the vocabulary of everyday speech. This
cumulative model of syntax serves, as Coleridge advised, to “discover those connections of things, or those relative bearings of fact to fact, from which some more or
less general law is deducible” (Biographia 2: 52–53; Barrell 145). These “general
laws” are clearly stated at regular intervals in the major narrative of “Tintern
Abbey”: “We see into the life of things” (50); “all which we behold / Is full of blessings” (134–35). But not every part of “Tintern Abbey” is able to condense its raw
materials into a “more or less general law.” The more poetically dense and irregular
passages of the poem are subject to seemingly random moments of slippage and
unwanted revelation that leave the speaker at the mercy of unbidden forces of forgetting
and unforgetting.
While the poem’s first verse paragraph begins in an orderly rhetoric of repetition
and controlled variation, it does not ultimately ratify what seems to be its initial
premise: that this spot, which offers so many possibilities of precise deictic recognition,
should therefore enable a perfect repetition of summers that proceed “from joy to joy.”
Instead of arriving at a summary “general law,” this passage describes the attenuation of
the full, natural presence initially signified by “summer.” The first words of the poem,
“Five years have passed; five summers,” seem to suggest a future of perfect repetition;
the identity of years with summers, and the predictable sameness of all summers, seems
to offer a promise of eternal recurrence. The wish expressed in this iteration is clear: A
return to the site of my summer of five years past should provide a repetition of my
experience of five years past. But this promise is immediately qualified by the inelegant
redundancy of “the length / Of five long winters,” a figure that, in dividing summers
from each other, identifies a force that belies the promise of inexorable organic
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continuity. The repetitive “agains” (2, 4, 9, 15) that appear in each sentence of this paragraph reiterate the desire for a precise repetition of the experience of five years past, and
the prospect of the fulfillment of that desire is supported by the deictic specification of
objects that, in each sentence, immediately follows the main verb: “again I hear / These
waters”; “Once again / Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs”; “I again repose / Here,
under this dark sycamore”; and “Once again I see / These hedge-rows” (2–3, 4–5, 9–
10, 15–16). As these sentences lengthen and develop greater syntactic variation,
however, the promise of identity in repetition becomes more tenuous. The first
deictic presence, “these waters,” has a clearly identifiable source and a single attribute,
a “sweet inland murmur,” which requires only the prepositional connector “with.” The
second deictic object, “cliffs,” interpolates two adjectives, “steep and lofty,” between
deixis and object, and acquires a dependent clause, “Which on a wild secluded scene
impress / Thoughts of more deep seclusion” (6 –7). The echoing iteration of the
“secluded scene” and “thoughts of more deep seclusion” suggests a perfectly fitted
relation between nature and thought, but this symmetry is compromised by an anomalous preposition – “on,” rather than “in” – and by the addition of a syntactically
ambiguous clause, “and connect / The landscape with the quiet of the sky” (7–8). If
these cliffs had simply impressed thoughts “in a wild secluded scene,” the thoughts
would have been implicitly impressed on the speaking subject, a “thinking thing,”
but the phrase “on a wild secluded scene” suggests that these deep thoughts belong
to the landscape itself. The final clause of this sentence, “and connect / The landscape
with the quiet of the sky,” similarly blurs the distinction between “thinking things” and
“objects of all thought” (102) through its syntactic ambiguity. This clause both compounds the main clause (“I behold these cliffs, and I connect the landscape with the
quiet of the sky”) and parallels the dependent clause (“these cliffs impress thoughts
on the scene, and they connect the landscape with the quiet of the sky”), leaving uncertain whether the mirrored reflection of the secluded scene and secluded thoughts is halfcreated or simply perceived. This ambiguity is offset by a phonetic presence that culminates in the double alliteration of the sentence’s final image, “the quiet of the sky.”
As Bate argues, in this image which is, in the most literal sense, an unremarkable
feature of everyday life, Wordsworth “makes us hear sound – or, more precisely,
the sound of silence” (Song 145). The silence that the poem demands and to which
it rewards attention is not, however, the silence of the actual sky, but the quiet that is
necessary in order to hear the words of the poem. The image of “the quiet of the
sky” combines two alliterative lines, the “k” consonance that runs throughout the sentence and accelerates in its final words (cliffs, secluded, seclusion, connect, landscape,
quiet, sky), and an assonance that culminates in an open vowel ending (quiet, sky). The
phonetic effect of this open vowel allows the expansive reach of “the quiet of the sky”
to offer a release from the dominant natural force in this scene, the geological pressure
of cliffs impressing depth upon seclusion. An ear laid open to the “quiet of the sky” will
later hear the phonetic and semantic values of this phrase echoing in the synaesthetic
“eye made quiet” (48), where it will find its access to the “life of things” (50) in this
supersensible calm.
The phonetic presence of the “quiet of the sky” asks the reader to enter into a physical state of deep quiet in order to join the speaker in the contemplation of the material
abundance of endless summers. As the representation of that abundance comes to
demand increasingly complex syntactic formations, however, the promise of a totalizing condensation of material presences into a single principle that could be called
“summer” is compromised. The penultimate sentence of this paragraph initially situates
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the speaker in a firmly grounded “Here,” surrounded by three deictic presences: “this
dark sycamore,” “These plots of cottage-ground,” and “these orchard-tufts” (10–11).
In the dependent clause that follows, however, the proliferation of objects in the
visual field initiates a movement away from distinction and specification, as objects
begin to dissolve into their sensory antecedents in a “green and simple hue”:
The day is come when I again repose
Here, under this dark sycamore, and view
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. (9 – 15)
The more material presence the speaker invokes, the more that materiality exerts the
dispersive power initially attributed to long winters. The final, and longest, sentence
of the paragraph initially connects only one deictic object to its main verb (“I see /
These hedge-rows”) and screens another object of “uncertain” origin behind a veil of
indistinction:
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,
Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods,
Or of some hermit’s cave, where by his fire
The hermit sits alone. (15 –23)
The extended main clause says that “Once again I see . . . wreathes of smoke,” but for
the first time a direct object has no deictic modifier; after “Five years have passed,”
these “wreathes of smoke” cannot be the identical “these wreathes of smoke.” The imagistic contrast is clear between the solid presence of “this dark sycamore,” which provides the full recovery of an “again” moment, and the loose amalgam of “little lines of .
. . wood” that may or may not be hedge-rows, and “wreathes of smoke” that “might”
come from one source “or” another.
This “or” is the first use of that ambiguous connector in the poem. Bromwich calls it
a “Miltonic ‘or’ that vaguely amalgamates” (77), thus allowing the serial “ofs” that link
“vagrant dwellers” and “some hermit’s cave” to serve the same cumulative logic that
joins the “ofs” in “the joy / Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime / Of something far
more deeply interfused,” but while “elevated thoughts” lead directly to a sense of
“something interfused,” the “or” that stands between “vagrant dwellers” and “some
hermit” opens up significantly different possibilities. This hermit could be a literal,
material presence in the rural landscape, a neighbor to the charcoal-makers of the
Wye valley, or, as he “sits alone,” he could be a metaphoric projection of the speaker’s
existence in urban “lonely rooms” (26). In the poem’s minor narrative, the alone/lonely
echo is carried forward by loosely metonymic, phonetic associations into the fourth
verse paragraph, where “the deep rivers, and the lonely streams” (70) bring the aura
of the city to the “man / Flying from something that he dreads” (71–72). The compound
adjectives used here to describe the landscape (deep and lonely) create an alliterative
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J. O’Rourke
displacement of the epithetic double adjectives in the poem’s initial landscape, “the
steep and lofty cliffs,” and revise their affect: “deep seclusion” now becomes
“lonely.” This alliterative, double adjective formation (steep and lofty, deep and
lonely) is then re-echoed and further darkened in “the deep and gloomy wood” (79)
that surrounds the “sounding cataract” (77).
Wordsworth adopts these antipastoral images that transform the “steep and lofty”
landscape into one that becomes first “deep and lonely,” and then “deep and gloomy,”
from Burke’s “Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and
the Beautiful.” Burke cites both “the sound of vast cataracts” and the “darkest woods”
as examples of sublime imagery, and he compares the “darkest woods” to the
“gloomy pomp” of Milton’s description of Death (250, 231–32). James Chandler has
described the powerful influence of Burke on Wordsworth during the late 1790s, in an
argument that has significant implications for the ecocritical celebration of “Tintern
Abbey” as a nature poem. Chandler argues that Wordsworth’s conception of “nature,”
drawn from Burke, is not a Rousseauean ideal of an organic moral force that is superior
to social custom but is instead a form of “second nature,” a spontaneity generated from
the cultivation of moral habits (Chandler 74). Chandler cites the catastrophe that results
when Vaudracour, following a Rousseauean model, “entrust[s] himself / To Nature for a
happy end to all” (79), and “Tintern Abbey” becomes tinged with a similar sense of regret
when it describes the effects of following “Wherever nature led”:
when like a roe
I bounded o’er the mountains, by the sides
Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams,
Wherever nature led; more like a man
Flying from something that he dreads, than one
Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then
...
To me was all in all. (68 – 76)
The transitional term in this passage between the first simile (the innocent roe) and the
second (the fleeing man) is “Wherever nature led.” If it is truly the role of “nature,” or
first nature, to instruct second nature, serving as “The guide, the guardian of my heart,
and soul / Of all my moral being” (111–12), it is difficult to reconcile this tutelary function with the account of “nature” transforming someone who is “like a roe” into “a man
/ Flying from something that he dreads” within the terms of a nature poem. The tension
between these seemingly discrepant accounts of nature’s tutelage becomes less
mystifying if “Tintern Abbey” is viewed not as a nature poem but as what Bromwich
describes as an “implicit apology” (73). In a narrative that is at least coherent if not
entirely persuasive, “nature” plays a central role in Wordsworth’s excuse that he has
always been constant; “led by her” (Prelude 1.372), he has followed “wherever”
nature took him: through the innocence of “glad animal movements” in his youth,
into the fall of 1793, and now into the recovery of his “moral being” in 1798.
In the poem’s final verse paragraph, Dorothy and Nature serve as the instruments of
that recovery, but the metonymic rhetoric of the paragraph casts doubt on their ability to
guarantee a future progress “from joy to joy.” If the poem itself, like the two visits to the
Wye valley, represents yet another attempt to master yet another trauma, it comes up
against the rule of repression, which is that something that disappears from one
place inevitably turns up somewhere else. The “man flying from something that he
dreads” is banished from “Tintern Abbey” by “lofty thoughts” like “a sense sublime
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of something far more deeply interfused,” a perception that is not so much an epistemological discovery as it is an assertion of moral equilibrium. But this equilibrium only
occupies a narrow, domestic sphere in the poem’s final verse paragraph, where it
holds at bay the public world:
neither evil tongues,
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all
The dreary intercourse of daily life,
Shall e’er prevail against us. (129 –33)
The moral persona that Wordsworth claims in “Tintern Abbey” has a double address.
Its public face encompasses “The still, sad music of humanity” (92), while its private
dimension is ratified in a “prayer” (122) that joins only two communicants, brother
and sister. The figures that threaten this insular bond are linked metonymically, as
figures of exposure; the fleeing man and these wagging tongues represent the threats
to Wordsworth’s ability to speak with a moral authority that can proclaim that he
has discovered in nature “the anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, / The guide,
the guardian of my heart, and soul / Of all my moral being” (110 –12).
The “exhortations” (147) to Dorothy to remember a truer, more originary identity
than the fallen self of 1793 give her the responsibility of the little maid in “We Are
Seven,” who insists that her “seven” is ontologically truer than her interlocutor’s counterproposals of “five,” “dead,” and “heaven.” Dorothy’s ability to maintain an absolute
faith in her brother’s immutable “moral being” protects Wordsworth not only from
social censure but from the unnameable force that has taken away the little maid’s siblings: “If I should be, where I no more can hear / Thy voice” (148–49). This euphemistic “where,” like the “something that he dreads,” avoids naming something that can
transform a narrative of benign repetition into one of hazardous temporality. The
final sentence of “Tintern Abbey” seems to enlist the physical solidity of nature to
reinforce the power of Dorothy’s memory, so that both serve as bulwarks against the
dematerializing forces of “wandering” and “absence”:
Nor wilt thou then forget,
That after many wanderings, many years
Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs,
And this green pastoral landscape, were to me
More dear, both for themselves, and for thy sake. (156– 60)
The echoes of the poem’s initial imagery convey a sense that “Tintern Abbey” has completed the circular form that M. H. Abrams calls “the Greater Romantic Lyric,” and
McGann’s complaint that “At the poem’s end we are left only with the initial
scene’s simplest natural forms: ‘these steep woods and lofty cliffs, / And this green pastoral landscape’” (88) registers his dissatisfaction with the perceived autonomy of the
poem’s major narrative. But the final imagery of “Tintern Abbey” does not exactly
repeat its initial forms; the interpolation of the word “woods” into the original
formula of “steep and lofty cliffs” echoes both the “houseless woods” (21) of the
lonely hermit and “the deep and gloomy wood” (79) that constituted the second
phase of the phonetic displacement of a “steep and lofty” scene into one that first
became “deep and lonely,” and then “deep and gloomy.” The ease with which the
slight phonetic variations of these adjectives can dissolve a steep and lofty landscape
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J. O’Rourke
into one that is deep, lonely, and gloomy does not bode well for nature’s ability to guarantee a continual flow of blessings.
The ontological stability of the imposing natural forms of “steep woods and lofty
cliffs” is further undermined by the syntactic bumpiness of the opening of this sentence.
Strictly syntactically speaking, what has been absently wandering for many years in this
sentence is not “me” but these steep woods and lofty cliffs: “after many wanderings,
many years / Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs.” This conceit of wandering
cliffs and woods, which echoes the description of the Wye itself as a “wanderer through
the woods” (57), is justified by the itinerary of these images in the poem, where steep
and lofty cliffs have mutated, under the force of memory, first into deep rivers and
lonely streams and then into a deep and gloomy wood before finally recovering their
original steep loftiness. Empson considered the syntactic slippages in “Tintern
Abbey” to be markers of weak forms of ambiguity, of conceptual fuzziness, or even
of bad faith as Wordsworth tried to intimate more pantheism than he thought his
readers would accept (154), but “Tintern Abbey” contains such elaborate demonstrations of complex syntactic precision that its ambiguities, such as the subject of
the verb “connect” in the first verse paragraph, its anomalies (thoughts imposed
“on,” rather than “in” a secluded scene), and even its errors, which introduce wandering
woods and cliffs, come across as vehicles of irreducible uncertainties.
In the final movement of “Tintern Abbey,” the ability of Dorothy’s memory to supplement the potential mutability of nature is solicited in a series of “exhortations” (147)
that hover between indicative, subjunctive, and imperative moods, leaving their perlocutionary force in question. Is “Nor wilt thou then forget” (156) a confident statement
(“You will not forget”), a command (“I forbid you to forget”), or a plea (“Please do not
forget”)? This exhortation is the third iteration in a series that begins with the concise,
seemingly unproblematic claim “wilt thou remember me” (146). The second exhortation transforms “remember” into a litotes, in which the initial negation (“Nor”) is separated from its main verb (“forget”) by three subordinate clauses, one of which contains
that aporetic “where”: “Nor, perchance, / If I should be where I no more can hear / Thy
voice, nor catch from thy wild eyes these gleams / Of past existence, wilt thou then
forget” (147–50). The recondensation of this address in its final iteration into “Nor
wilt thou then forget” is combined with deictic reference to “these steep woods and
lofty cliffs” and “this green pastoral landscape” to give it a sense of material weight,
but to believe that these exhortations have the power, through ritualistic repetition
and deictic emphasis, to compel memory to live in an endless summer that flows
from joy to joy is tantamount to believing that language has the power to command
“these steep and lofty cliffs” not to wander off into lonely streams and gloomy woods.
The major narrative of “Tintern Abbey” invites us to read the poem as a nature
poem. The narrative folds its moral argument into its epistemological claims as it promises that contact with the physical forms of nature enables the passive achievement of
“moral being.” Ecocriticism has, for the most part, been willing to take this argument at
face value, without feeling a need to engage the legacy of Paul de Man’s contention that
romantic poetry absolutely does not illustrate a fusion of nature and human consciousness. In an early polemical form of this argument, de Man contends that “Critics who
write of a happy relationship between matter and consciousness fail to realize that the
very fact that the relationship has to be established through the medium of language
indicates that it does not exist in actuality” (“Intentional” 8). As de Man argues, two
entities that are joined only by an arbitrary medium – language – can hardly be said
to have an organic relationship. In an essay that attempts to confront the de Manian
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legacy in romantic studies and to ground “thing theory” in romanticism, W. J. T. Mitchell suggests that de Man places too much of an emphasis on this arbitrary medium
called “language.” Mitchell identifies the emergence of romanticism as a cultural movement with the discovery by European culture of two modes of representation that take
physical form, the totem and the fossil, and he gives “poetic language” the privilege of
joining these material forms of representation in the “world beyond language”
(“Romanticism” 182). Mitchell argues that this analogy between “poetic language”
and the material forms of the totem and the fossil, which display “representation in a
physical medium like stone or flesh,” justifies Wordsworth’s claim that poetry can
become a place where “We see into the life of things” (Mitchell, “Romanticism”
182, 172). De Man would no doubt object that this supposed access to the “world
beyond language” does, in fact, pass through language, but Wordsworth’s use of the
physical, acoustic properties of words in “Tintern Abbey” complicates the deconstructive assumption that the relationship between language and materiality is strictly arbitrary. If it is necessary for a reader to enter into a state of heightened awareness of the
slightest acoustic cues in order to hear, first, the echo of the “quiet of the sky” in “an eye
made quiet,” and then to hear the disruption of that quiet through the iteration of the
phonemic properties of these words in the “sounding cataract,” then it could be
fairly argued that “Tintern Abbey” itself provides the material environment for the
reader’s experience of what Mitchell calls the “structure of feeling” (“Romanticism”
184) that the poem describes.
Mitchell offers a sophisticated version of the ecocritical rehabilitation of the ethics
of “Tintern Abbey,” a recovery which relies upon a faithful reproduction of the moral
logic of the poem’s major narrative. This narrative promises that access to the “world
beyond language,” which consists of natural objects such as steep and lofty cliffs, produces a philanthropic disposition in the experient subject; under the influence of “feelings . . . of unremembered pleasure” (“Romanticism” 31–32), she will automatically
perform “unremembered acts / Of kindness and of love” (“Romanticism” 35–36).
This promise is grounded in the prospective form of this narrative, which moves inexorably towards the edifying “something far more deeply interfused” that stands at its
telos. The poem’s minor narrative, which never escapes its origin in the “something
that he dreads,” differs from the major narrative in two significant ways: its temporal
form is retrospective (but not nostalgic), and the material “world beyond language”
that it confronts is a world of events, rather than objects. Rather than anticipating a
future of benign repetition under the influence of nurturing objects, this narrative
takes on the ethical burden of repairing a past fault.
When de Man brings his insistence on the disjunction between language and materiality to bear on questions of moral responsibility in the world of events, rather than the
epistemological relation to natural objects, he offers as an exemplary case a critique of
Rousseau’s excuses for, among other things, abandoning his illegitimate children. De
Man argues that apologies, as a rule, are pointless, since “confession is not a reparation
in the realm of practical justice but exists only as a verbal utterance” (“Excuses” 280),
and a belated verbal act is of no use to those who were affected by an actual event. De
Man excoriates Rousseau for indulging in the “guilty pleasure” (299) of self-dramatizing confession when Rousseau repeatedly returns to the same culpable events in the
Confessions and the Fourth Reverie and produces only “a stage on which to parade
his disgrace” (286).
Wordsworth can hardly be accused of the crime of self-dramatization with which de
Man charges Rousseau. Mitchell offers a pithy account of the difference between
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J. O’Rourke
Rousseau’s and Wordsworth’s economies of excuses: “Rousseau confesses everything
and feels guilty for nothing; Wordsworth confesses nothing and yet seems to feel excessive, unmotivated guilt for some unnamed crime” (“Influence” 647). If the closest that
“Tintern Abbey” will come to naming “some unnamed crime” is “something that he
dreads,” then it would seem that Wordsworth successfully resists what de Man calls
the “machinal” (298) quality of the excuse, which is performed because that is
simply something that language does. In his treatment of Rousseau’s excuses, de
Man is emphatic about the purely linguistic nature of the apology; he insists that
“the relationship between confession and excuse is rhetorical prior to being intentional”
(282), and he expands the reach of this rhetoricity into a general law:
Far from seeing language as an instrument in the service of a psychic energy, the possibility now arises that the entire construction of drives, substitutions, repressions, and representations is the aberrant, metaphorical correlative of the absolute randomness of
language. (299)
This insistence on the “absolute randomness of language” leads de Man into the assertion
that not only excuses, but guilt itself, “any guilt . . . can always be dismissed as the gratuitous product of a textual grammar or a radical fiction” (299). Whatever de Man
intended this sentence to mean, in the midst of the Le Soir scandal this claim became
central to the controversy over de Man’s wartime writings. De Man’s defenders found
in the dismissal of excuses an explanation for his silence about his wartime activities
in the postwar years, but his critics saw an abnegation of all moral responsibility,
since de Man seemed to them to be saying that guilt was only a product of language, a
random force that could always be used to accuse or excuse anyone of anything.3
The final sentence of “Tintern Abbey” seems to anticipate de Man’s difficulty in
determining the relation between the “rhetorical” and the “intentional” (i.e., between
language and the “world beyond language”) in the construction of apologies by
framing this question in grammatical terms. For the second time in the poem, its
final sentence first performs and then quickly repairs a simple grammatical error:
after many wanderings, many years
Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs,
And this green pastoral landscape, were to me
More dear, both for themselves, and for thy sake. (157– 60)
In a poem whose most complex and elusive narrative involves the possibility of quieting the effects of “something that he dreads” five years after the fact, it is striking that its
final sentence should begin with an error – a misplaced modifier that sends steep woods
and lofty cliffs wandering – and then attempt to repair that error simply by inserting the
words “to me.” The first time the poem performs this type of syntactic patch job is in the
first sentence of the second verse paragraph, where a similar absence is attributed to
nature (“Though absent long, / These forms of beauty”) before that absence is reassigned “to me” (23–24). De Man’s critique of the futile belatedness of excuses suggests
that the questions raised by the grammar of these sentences mirror the ethical questions
raised by the minor narrative of “Tintern Abbey” in both illocutionary and perlocutionary forms. Is this repeated repair of a grammatical error, like an apology, just a mechanical effect of the “randomness of language,” or is it intentional? And, if it is
intentional, is this remedial intentionality effective? Do these sentences become retrospectively, grammatically correct? More importantly, if the illocutionary logic of
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663
“Tintern Abbey” is, as Bromwich suggests, an “implicit apology,” does the poem ever
resolve the ethical debt that “haunted me like a passion”?
As Keats’s description of the “dark passages” of “Tintern Abbey” suggests, the
crucial uncertainty in the poem is not a matter of the constancy or the predictability
of the relations between the subjective power of memory and the physical presences
of things and the passage of time; what remains unresolved is the ethical status of a
subject who cannot confidently declare where he stands in the “ballance of good and
evil.” The major narrative of “Tintern Abbey” addresses its concerns about the fragility
of memory with an architectural metaphor that describes the “mind” as a “mansion
for all lovely forms”; within that protected space, “memory” functions as a
“dwelling-place / For all sweet sounds and harmonies” (140–43). But in the poem’s
minor narrative, where the interpolation of the word “woods” into the epithetic formation of “steep and lofty cliffs” embeds either a deliberate or an inadvertent reminder
of both the “houseless woods” of the lonely hermit and a surprisingly “deep and
gloomy wood” within the form of a semantically random, metrically determined variation on a linguistic formula, these “dim and faint” (60) metonymic associations tell a
different story about memory: It is apt to wander, and even its recognitions may be as
much a burden as a blessing.
Notes
1.
2.
3.
While humanist critics like M. H. Abrams and Helen Vendler responded to new historicist
readings of “Tintern Abbey” by arguing that political readings of the poem obliterated its
aesthetic value, Marjorie Levinson identified an aesthetic value in the poem’s “dark passages.” Describing Wordsworth’s depiction of the small farms in the poem’s first verse
paragraph and his realization that “such spots are doomed,” Levinson credits the “elegiac
beauty” of the poem’s nostalgia for “a vanished and idealized way of life and mode of
feeling” (37). Levinson’s reading of the poem remains rooted in its major narrative,
however, where memory longs for an idealized past. I am arguing that in the poem’s
minor narrative, the memory of “something that he dreads” makes the past into more of
a threat than an occasion for nostalgia.
Significant ecocritical readings of “Tintern Abbey” include David Miall’s “Locating
Wordsworth: ‘Tintern Abbey’ and the Community with Nature,” and Charles Rzepka’s
“Pictures of the Mind: Iron and Charcoal, ‘Ouzy’ Tides and ‘Vagrant Dwellers’ at
Tintern, 1798.”
The most thorough collection of commentary on de Man’s wartime journalism is Hamacher,
Hertz and Keenan’s Responses: On Paul de Man’s Wartime Journalism.
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