Lines Composed Many Miles from Tintern Abbey

So already, greetings from the banks of the Wye--or really, greetings from the Bangor Public Library. I'm on the first day of my self-imposed, hopefully productively-self-guided writing retreat.

I've come to Maine not because I've been struggling with writer's block--but because I've been yearning for the space and time to put some thoughts and feelings onto paper. I'm staying with a really good friend from my college days, Margo Lukens, whom I felt very comfortable asking to put me up. My hope is to spend each of my three days doing lots of writing and some reading, and each of my three evenings having dinner with good old friends, Margo and her husband Ken among them.

Last night, as I talked about my retreat plans with Margo, she suggested I think about blogging more frequently but also more briefly than has been my custom. Give yourself permission, she suggested, to publish in-the-moment, less developed, more exploratory posts about your individual thoughts, feeling, and ideas. Margo knows that my current days are generally chopped up, predictably and unpredictably; she also knows that I've had no shortage of writing ideas, even though I've had a shortage of writing time. Her suggestion was a direct response to the writing circumstances I described to her.

Tintern Abbey and Courtyard*

Frankly, her idea didn't sound like "one of the answers" until this morning, when I reread Wordsworth's "Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13,1798." Why--or Wye--did it suddenly resonate, you ask? For three reasons. Because I hadn't expected to be as deeply moved as I was by this poem that I hadn't read in the last forty years. Because I hadn't expected to come upon certain lines and phrases that for a long time have been helping me speak to myself about the world: "The still sad music of humanity" is one of those phrases. Finally, because I was sitting in the library with my laptop computer inches from my copy of the poem.

But why read "Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey" again at this moment? At the beginning of December, when the Scituate Town Library poetry discussion group read some Wordsworth, I felt a certain unexpected but reassuring sense of homecoming. The leader of that group, Joyce Wilson, and I decided to read some more Wordsworth. Joyce was interested in Harold Bloom's characterization of Wordsworth as a poet writing in the tradition of biblical prophecy; and since I'd taken a graduate school course on visionary poets, I had just the right book on my shelf--Milton and the Line of Vision, edited by my professor, Joseph Anthony Wittreich--to help us explore this idea together. As Wittreich puts it, visionary poets understand that their readers need to learn "to see not with but through the eye."**

Poetry--especially other people's poetry--has been much on my mind of late, particularly because the two choirs I sing in--the Unicorn Singers and the Broad Cove Chorale--are learning Craig Hella Johnson's Considering Matthew Shepard. The oratorio draws much of its text from Leslea Newman's poetry cycle entitled October Mourning. It's my contention that Johnson, Newman, and their collaborators were also writing in the prophetic tradition. 

A fellow Unicorn Singer and I are preparing a talk to be given before our late March performances, so we've been listening to interviews with Craig Hella Johnson. Johnson's motivations for writing his passion oratorio are multiple, but one of them is to create a better world in which we act better, understand one another better, and love more. Prophets are always about creating or restoring the moral order and getting people to act right. But one of the ways to the heart--perhaps always, but especially in this era of proliferating hate crimes--may be through the ear and eye.

So if you've read Wordsworth in the past, and you know this poem has something to do with returning to a beautiful natural place of one's youth and grappling with one's changed relationship with Nature over time, you're probably thinking, what can this possibly have to do with an oratorio about Matthew Shepard?

Simply put, Wordsworth's poem is also much about seeing differently, about developing a new perspective, and even holding multiple perspectives in one's head--in this case, the person I was and still am on some level, and the person I am right now who well understands that younger person and doesn't quite know where all this change will lead.

Wordsworth's youthful self wanted nothing more than to perceive, delight in, and romp among Nature's various elements that, for him, "had no need of a remoter charm,/ . . ., not any interest/ Unborrowed from the eye." Wordsworth's older self, in contrast, sees something more in Nature, senses in it "A presence that disturbs me with the joy/ Of elevated thoughts." He welcomes those thoughts, though they "chasten and subdue" the "dizzy raptures" and "aching joys" of his childhood.

Nature is no longer purely surface and sensory for Wordsworth; neither is he himself. On returning to Tintern Abbey five years later, he recognizes and values his own depth and potential for spirit, even if he isn't totally easy with every aspect of the change he's undergone:

Nor less, I trust,

To . . . ["these beauteous forms"] I may have owed another gift,

Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,

In which the burthen of the mystery,

In which the heavy and the weary weight

Of all this unintelligible world,

Is lightened:—that serene and blessed mood,

In which the affections gently lead us on,—

Until, the breath of this corporeal frame

And even the motion of our human blood

Almost suspended, we are laid asleep

In body, and become a living soul:

While with an eye made quiet by the power

Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,

We see into the life of things.***

While Wordsworth has many pleasant memories of a favorite childhood spot, he's now interested in writing about the existence of and his relationship to "the burthen of mystery," and then about the much desired experience of transcending one's own physical body to exist as "a living soul." When we're in that calm but profoundly happy soul state, we don't just see what's around us; "We see into the life of things." And that Wordsworth wants to do.

Wordsworth is grappling. And so must we. And I say "we" not just because I'm talking to "All of Us," as one section of Considering Matthew Shepard is entitled. Actually, I'm thinking about Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy, to whom he speaks. Seeing and hearing anew, always a challenge, often goes better when there's a trusted companion to share the experience with along the road. I'm looking forward to heading back to Orono in a few minutes, and telling Margo all about my latest blog, written in a few hours at the Bangor Public Library. 

* Blaze, Saffron. “Tintern Abbey and Courtyard.” Wikimedia Commons, 31 May 2011, commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tintern_Abbey_and_Courtyard.jpg.

** Wittreich, Joseph Anthony, editor. Milton and the Line of Vision. The University of Wisconsin Press, 1975.

*** Wordsworth, William. “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey,...” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45527/lines-composed-a-few-miles-above-tintern-abbey-on-revisiting-the-banks-of-the-wye-during-a-tour-july-13-1798.