Printable View
I love this poem and think it is one of the great poems in the English language. When I read it on screen today I was very taken with the effect of "tracking" that he achieves...starting with the long shot of the cliffs and waterfalls and big sky and moving slowly to the sycamore and the row of cottages, then the hedgerows and then closing in on the plumes of smoke that suggest human activity and finally to the figure of the hermit and his fire. it's Poetry in Motion to coin a phrase.:smile5:
Yet the focus is upon introversion and a visual connection with the hermits rather than the abbey. He places us there at a concrete time and place - as Neely points out - and proceeds to not mention the abbey.Quote:
Originally Posted by Quark
I didn't mention conflict, but I thought that it perhaps reflected a personal inclination.
Hmm, my question is, do we read "Lines" as anticipating his "Ode" or as a different stage - the difference of time in Wordsworth's earlier poem - is that a similar notion of the figured fall from Eden that is in his later work, or is it still an early idea, that he hasn't developed by this point?
I don't know. His Ode seems a whole darker ball game to me, a loss or realisation of youth or an understanding of the brevity of life - it seems quite a different stage altogether but I'm not really sure.
I like the contrast of the changeable - seasons, vagrants, hermits with the seemingly unchanging - the view of the cliffs and the landscape. Does he pick out vagrants and hermits as people with whom he has a kinship of view rather than the farmers and abbey goers?
Hi All--Back from my time communing with nature in Yosemite and ready to talk Wordsworth again. Lots of good thoughts to respond to, but first I thought I would share some photos of Tintern Abbey and its environs that I took in the twilight time of my one day in Wales last September. The ruins and the surroundings are still much as they were in Wordsworth's time and, apart from the presence of a paved road, motor vehicles and a few other such modern conveniences, my impression was that the area is still very much a "wild secluded scene" dotted by "pastoral farms,/Green to the very door." Wish I had some more of the natural surroundings, which are quite beautiful, but here are a few of the Abbey and the area right next to it, which I snapped before darkness fell. I knew it was a ruin before I went there, but I was unprepared for the unique beauty with which the ruined abbey merges with the landscape and for the wild natural beauty of that landscape. The merging of passing human endeavor with the natural world is quite striking, even if you haven't read the poem. How many, if any, other places in the world can you look through the stone frame of a gothic window to see glimpses of green hill and sky?
http://i43.photobucket.com/albums/e3...rdoD/647-2.jpg
http://i43.photobucket.com/albums/e3...rdoD/639-2.jpg
http://i43.photobucket.com/albums/e3...601-1-Copy.jpg
http://i43.photobucket.com/albums/e3...D/635-Copy.jpg
http://i43.photobucket.com/albums/e3...593-2-Copy.jpg
http://i43.photobucket.com/albums/e3...627-1-Copy.jpg
http://i43.photobucket.com/albums/e3...nardoD/618.jpg
http://i43.photobucket.com/albums/e3...nardoD/617.jpg
Petrarch, I've read that poem so many times but I've never bothered (or thought of) looking up pictures. Thanks! Now I should go back and read it and see if the pictures add anything to the poem.
Quite a few in UK, actually, PL - we have rather a lot of ruined abbeys, thanks to Henry VIII, many of them in secluded countryside. :smile5:Quote:
Originally Posted by Petrarch's Love
Wow, thanks Petrarch's Love! Tintern Abbey truly does "merge with nature", as you say. What a fitting subject for a poem that praises nature.
I'd like to raise one question before I sign off - this internet cafe is closing, but take a look at the following passage:
Through all the years of this our life, to lead
From joy to joy: for she can so inform
The mind that is within us, so impress
With quietness and beauty, and so feed
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all 130
The dreary intercourse of daily life,
Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb
Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold
Is full of blessings
The speaker is clearly an introvert, but does Wordsworth truly value the importance of human connection, between persons and persons, or does he lose sight of this in his exclusive relationship with nature?
I love that section, I've got that bit and a little more memorised. I can see where you are coming from with the introvert angle, but I see this passage not necessarily mocking all human contact, just negative contact. So, the theory is I suppose, that in the grandness of nature, of such happy thoughts and memories "the sneers of selfish men" and the small-minded "evil tongues" are forgotten or ignored, completely paled into significance by remembering these good times in the presence and grandness of nature. However, I suppose you could make a case for the fact that was somewhat introverted, the line "the dreary intercourse of daily life" at least suggests that he is bored with general contact, though close to the heart of poem is the deep affection that he holds with his sister, so it seems to me more likely that Wordsworth's scorn is directed at what is negative and bitter in human relations and life in general rather than all human contact.
Well, that's true I suppose. People have been commenting on them at least since Shakespeare's reference to "bare ruined choirs." I guess I was thinking in terms of places I've been outside the UK where gothic structures have more often managed to keep their roofs! :)Quote:
Originally Posted by kasie
Quote:
Originally Posted by ktm5124
I'll start by quoting the passage in question again with a few lines before and after that were left off in ktm's post:Quote:
Originally Posted by Neely
I agree with Neely that I don't feel that these are lines that reject human companionship, though I suppose it is possible to read them that way. I think the lines are talking about finding solace in something larger and more constant than ourselves when we are fed up with the failings of humanity, which is a very different thing than giving up on humanity or wanting to escape from people and not deal with them. If anything, it is someone who has not shied away from other people, who has been open to others, dealt with them and seen their faults and who has consequently been burned sometimes who is most apt to be thinking about the "evil tongues" "selfish men" "harsh judgments" etc. and to be looking for some way of coping with the less loveable side of people. Identifying that there are such defects in us and in our daily lives and suggesting that we can find solace for this in turning to something constant and eternal in nature need not necessarily be an "introverted" move. Certainly, I think these lines hearken back to what are arguably the most famous lines in the poem:Quote:
Originally Posted by Wordsworth
There's a lot of meaning packed into these lines, but one is clearly that he sees that there is no way anymore that he can divorce the experience of nature from his experience of humanity. His fellow human beings and his experienced understanding of them are a part of him now, for better or for worse. Humanity has music to it; it can be beautiful, but it also can be sad. Sad because we are inconstant on many levels. We can be inconstant in that, unlike nature, people may betray a trust, may behave badly toward each other, or simply callously toward each other. And we can be inconstant in that we change, age and ultimately die, while the natural world continues. He does not say that he resents this awareness of the sad and inconstant nature of people. He calls this an awareness "Abundant recompense" for what he has lost and describes it as "Not harsh nor grating," despite the fact that it has the power "to chasten and subdue."Quote:
...Not for this
Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur: other gifts
Have followed, for such loss, I would believe,
Abundant recompence. For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth, but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Not harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue...
He is describing the paradoxical feelings that many of us often have toward our fellow human beings, and I think that one thing that is important about both these passages is that they retain a supremely balanced ambiguity, refraining from either jubilation in the beauties of others or despair at the flawed nature of others. Take, for example, the central line in the passage I've just quoted: "The still, sad music of humanity." The lines before have set the reader up to anticipate a description of "gifts" that provide "ample recompense," and yet these gifts are sad. Then there is the question of the word "still." The comma would suggest it is one of two adjectives describing the "music of humanity": "still" and "sad." Yet, how can music be still (silent)? Read without the comma (does such a version exist I wonder?) the line would suggest that the music is still sad, that the sound of humanity continues to be a sad one. Read with the comma, however, it suggests that humanity's music is a still one. This could connote a number of things. It could suggest a quiet, peaceful sadness. It could suggest something unmoving, perhaps even fatal or stagnating in this music. It could denote a sad music that is generally unheard, that we do not often enough pay heed to because it is not something that we can receive knowledge of through one of our five senses in interacting with fellow human beings, but through attending to what is unseen, unheard with regard to each other (I like this last possibility best myself). The line quavers between music and stillness, reflecting a mind hovering in a space between sadness and joy. The lines that follow continue hovering in this manner. He very carefully alludes to this music as being "of ample power/To chasten and subdue" rather than stating that it does chasten and subdue. Thus, the statement is really functioning more like a question in the way it opens up for the reader the possibility that one could be subdued by this awareness of the way people are but without saying whether it does subdue or not. From this point on the question remains in the poem. Is he chastened and subdued? Is the sadness and the stillness breaking him or is that thing that makes this music, this knowledge an abundant recompense for the loss of childhood innocence and ignorance worthwhile?
This brings us back to the passage KTM brought up. Clearly he is enumerating some of the unpleasant and banal qualities of people and society in those lines. But why is he doing so? Is it to suggest that he has indeed been "chastened and subdued" by these things and can only find refuge by fleeing from them into communion with nature? Or is it to suggest that it is by strengthening ourselves with thoughts of the constancy of nature as it leads "from joy to joy" then we will be able to engage fully with humanity without fear of being so chastened and subdued by the sorrow?
The lines remind me very much of some of my favorites by Keats (who perhaps had this poem in mind when penning them?):
Despite the "o'er-darkened ways" of depression, bitter cynicism, unkindness, disengagement etc. that we could explore, it is important to remember that there is something beautiful, something eternal, something unchanging and ever joyful that we can tap into in life, and that this will always be sustaining. I personally find that both the lines from Keats and those from Wordsworth encourage the second of the two directions I suggested before quoting the Keats. That is, far from encouraging an introverted retreat from others, I find in these lines the source of something that can enable a person to go openly out among others, to connect with them freely and to have the ability not to fall apart when they disappoint. By having no illusions about people, by recognizing their flaws and inconsistencies and then by also recognizing something--be it nature or beauty or God as author of them both--that is eternal and reliable as a source of comfort and joy, it becomes easier to forgive and forget those little human errors when they come along. I like to think that the "healing thoughts" with which the poem is intended to provide his sister are thoughts intended to strengthen her (and we the readers, whom he is addressing also indirectly) against despair, not just as a means of escape from sadness, but as a means of confronting and overcoming all the obstacles such sadness may place in the way of connecting with others.Quote:
Originally Posted by Keats
Part of the brilliance of the poem, however, is that he does not tell us exactly how to take all of this. We know that there is a potential to be subdued and a potential to be healed, but whether the knowledge of these things is to encourage us or dissuade us from bonding with our fellow human beings is an open question. Part of what makes the poem so moving is that he is laying open this profound uncertainty and making explicit a state of mind vacillating between the certain and the uncertain that, at times, haunts us all.
Much could be said at this point regarding nature and religion, but both myself and my keyboard are tapped out at the moment.
I do think there is a difference between Keats and Wordsworth. Wordsworth is a negative character, Keats is not. His melancholy is some short of socratic dialogue between the nature of art. Since he is a later romantic, he seems to have absorbed all ideals and criticism - Schiller, Wordsworth, Coleridge, etc - and refined it. He does not explain anything, he pratices it. However his poems quickly evolved to be all about the same theme. Keats see permanence and destruction at sametime, always. Obviously, this is more developed when we see the odes, but even there how quick the beauty for ever is dependable on us, our reaction to it. He is seeking the aesthetic effect of reading, not the immutable text. No wonder Borges said that Ode to a Nightingale was the poem that taught what poetry is.
The maturity of Keats that many like to imagine would not be the poems that would make Milton and Shakespeare find a "rival", it would be the critical maturity.
I would agree with the general characterization that Keats tends to be more positive than Wordsworth, though I'm not sure that I would say that Wordsworth is always necessarily a negative character. I think that shifts and changes through the stages of his life and through the shifts in his poetry. I agree that Keats is more consistently concerned with the fine balance between permanence and destruction as you say.Quote:
Originally Posted by JCamilo
Could you clarify a little more what you mean here? I'm not sure I'm understanding what you mean by the "aesthetic effect of reading" versus "the immutable text?" Not agreeing or disagreeing, I just don't follow what you're referring to. Also, do you mean that you think Keats wouldn't have grown to rival the work of Milton or Shakespeare, or just that he may possibly have risen to such heights but just in a different way than people usually suppose?Quote:
He is seeking the aesthetic effect of reading, not the immutable text. No wonder Borges said that Ode to a Nightingale was the poem that taught what poetry is.
The maturity of Keats that many like to imagine would not be the poems that would make Milton and Shakespeare find a "rival", it would be the critical maturity.
Don't want to distract people from Wordsworth too much, but was interested in clarifying the point.
Too Borges (and some others) poetry, literature or art, is not the work. It is not the book. But the aesthetic effect of the act of reading. It is reading the artistic fact (beautry that surprises us) not the production of the text. (at least until we learn to them the production of text is a product of reading).Quote:
Originally Posted by Petrarch's Love
That is contrary to the notion that once the text is written, it is in the stone (the vision that a text is what the the author proposed) very commun on critics until the XX century. Keats is already working on this direction (the nightingale is not about his song, but about the effects on the listener and the urn has a dialogue with the viewer).
I have read some visions that keats too young death, when he was just starting stopped the english poetry to have a genius akim to Milton or Shakespeare (which is irrelevant, since Keats is a genius on his own) but my opinion Keats would be another kind of genius, one that was able to produce in such quality and quantity and apply the critical sense he had almost innate. When he was dead he already knew what poetry was, he could not explain, he could show us.