Re-visiting Tintern Abbey, Re-writing and Re-wilding the Self

(Tintern Abbey, 2017)

When these wild ecstasies shall be matured 

Into a sober pleasure; when thy mind 

Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms, 

Thy memory be as a dwelling-place 

 For all sweet sounds and harmonies...

(from 'Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey...' 
lines 138- 142 (1798) by William Wordsworth)

When Wordsworth describes the “beauteous forms” from along the banks of the River Wye revisiting him “'mid the din / Of towns and cities...” and causing “sensations sweet, / Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart...” we find exactly where his Romanticism is to us outdated. Climate change has demolished any notion of there being a boundary between Nature and Society. In Wordsworth's poem, Nature manifests itself in the “wild secluded scene,” impressing “[t]houghts of a more deep seclusion...” whereas now we are only truly discovering the extent to which we are enmeshed with nature. Nature increasingly encroaches upon society in the form of extreme weather events, rising temperatures, devastated ecosystems and disrupted food-chains. It would be more accurate to say that Nature has always encroached. However, it would be even more accurate to say that we have always been the encroachers.

The vocabulary used by Wordsworth to describe Nature, “waters, rolling from their mountain-springs”, the “deep and gloomy wood”, “all that we behold / From this green earth […] The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul Of all my moral being...” conjuring the idea of a solitary individual guided and raised by Mother Nature offers little to people for whom access to such secluded scenes is severely restricted. The sentiment is still true, though, access to nature is a necessary part of physical and mental well-being and it in turn encourages us to revere the natural world. But I would argue that the aesthetics presented in 'Tintern Abbey' are wrong and, when such images become part of our common-language in discussions about climate change, can be dangerous. For instance, does the picturesque beauty evoked by Wordsworth correlate with biodiversity? Is the solitary enjoyer of Nature from the working class? Can there be a collective enjoyment, or even better, co-existence with Nature? Is it merely the senses which inform us of Nature's “forms”, or does it require more abstraction?

Thinkers like Timothy Morton, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing or Jane Bennett give us a much more accurate vocabulary when discussing the environment. For example, Morton uses terms like “hyperobject” (n-dimensional non-local entities) to denote objects which are so vastly distributed in time and space that they escape any chance of human perception entirely - like all the styrofoam, ever. He even goes so far as to say we should discard the term “Nature” altogether, and that places are “retroactive fantasy constructs” [paraphrased]. Perhaps there are already the seeds for this in Wordsworth's romanticism, particularly around concepts such as the “sublime,” an impression made by objects or scenes so vast that they defy attempts at rationalisation or order (Morton did, in fact, begin as a scholar of Percy Bysshe Shelley so there's perhaps some continuity here). But for the enormous bulk of readers for whom the Lake District, or the Wye Valley are places separate from their lived experience, the images and scenes evoked in Wordsworth's poetry don't really equip us with ways of thinking through the problem of climate change. It's a problem with very identifiable roots but, for Wordsworth, it isn't Capitalism which is necessarily the problem, but the “din” of urban modernity altogether. The scene of “wreaths of smoke / Sent up, in silence, from among the trees”, as peaceful and beautiful as it is, borders of misanthropy. Nature is presented as society's opposite, the two cannot co-exist.

However, aside from these problematic aesthetics, I believe that some of the ideas presented in Wordsworth's poem are surprisingly prescient and can be a source of enchantment. The quotation I used to open this post encapsulates the idea I would like to explore here. It is this idea - put very simply; that we are the product of our experiences, that our sensations influence our way of being in the world - which we should read 'Tintern Abbey', and much else of Wordsworth's poetry, for.

The opening of the poem makes this point abundantly clear

Five years have past; five summers, with the length

Of five long winters! And again I hear 

These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs 

With a soft Inland murmur...

(lines 1-4, emphasis mine)

We are presented not with an idealised Nature, rather it is a scene that is deeply personal to William Wordsworth. It is a place he has returned to, has revisited over the years, as he has grown and matured into the poet he is at the time of the piece's composition. His descriptions concentrate not just on the scene he finds before him, but his subjective experience of, personal feelings about, and biographical connections to it. He distinguishes between the “wild ecstasies” of his youth and the “sober pleasure” of his maturity and, between these times, we can imagine the remembered “sensations” of his youth dwelling with him throughout the years. There has been a process of growth, a growth of the poetic mind, set in place by these “sensations”. He is unable to “paint” what he was when he first visited the Wye, “For nature then […] To me was all in all.” 

The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,

Their colours and their forms, were then to me 

An appetite; a feeling and a love, 

That had no need of a remoter charm, 

By thought supplied, nor any interest 

Unborrowed from the eye.

(lines 78-83)

These ecstatic, joyous experiences required no further reflection or knowledge to appreciate. They remain located in a particular time and place, a refuge of youthful innocence dwelling in the poet's mind. Yet, returning to these scenes, he finds not the same “thoughtless” sensations, but has “learned [to] look on nature […] hearing oftentimes the still sad music of humanity” 

...And I have felt 

A presence that disturbs me with 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: 

A motion and a spirit, that impels 

All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 

And rolls through all things.

(lines 94-102)

He now finds, with “elevated” thoughts, a “presence” which transcends his atomised and personal experience. It is something deeply “interfused” and “dwelling” within the landscape all around him, a “spirit” which “rolls through all things”. His return to Tintern Abbey has become a gateway to transcendence, a transmutation of the personal to the universal. This way of thinking, proceeding from the concrete and familiar, to the abstract and otherworldly, is an idea I find to be continually profound, and a perpetual source of inspiration in my own creative practices. Our surroundings become meaningful in themselves because they are the only way to access the higher truths of the universe and existence. Perhaps for many literary critics, especially those of a Marxist persuasion, it could be “reactionary”. It represents a privileging of one's individual, private experiences and, therefore, it could bolster an atomised, “bourgeois” identity; the prime agent of Capitalism. Furthermore, Wordsworth's celebration of childhood innocence could become a source of sentimentalised, conservative nostalgia. Add in his aesthetics of seclusion and folk culture, and one begins to question where exactly a Wordsworthian romanticism could lead us today.

I returned to this poem because of my research into Herbert Read and John Cowper Powys. I have been studying their life writings (Read's The Innocent Eye (1933) and Powys's Autobiography (1934)) and both present something of a Wordsworthian outlook on their childhood and the process of poetic maturity. These texts aren't traditional, chronological biographies. Powys's is notoriously riddled with omissions (it fails to mention his mother even once) and Read is similarly quiet about large parts of his life. They do, however, write about places, things, feelings, and ideas which mattered to them. Things which “impressed” themselves onto their consciousness and dwelt there, staying with them and shaping their creative output. The Innocent Eye's form follows on from Read's earlier symbolist poems, and each chapter denotes a certain place in very clear, concise language. It is a very spare, unsentimental mode of description. Autobiography's form is more difficult to pin down. Whereas Read draws on the minimalism of symbols, presenting something ornate but almost lacking in warmth, Powys is digressive, prolix and often informal. There is nothing close to a symbol, only organic impressions, the evocation of sensations which cannot be indexed by mere words.

But, where both texts overlap is their commitment to marking the things and sensations which stuck with them in their earlier lives. They have a similar pantheist/animist outlook to Wordsworth where these particulars, the local and personal, become the key to accessing higher truths. This is what struck me most about The Innocent Eye, the symbolic content of Read's other work finds its origin in the “virgin impressions” presented here. There is a love, or passion, reserved for these things and places. Here is a revealing excerpt from Read's biography of Wordsworth

Passion, of course, does blaze from many a poem of Wordsworth's; but not the direct passion of profane love, not even the direct passion of sacred love, but passion transmuted into impersonal things – rocks, and stones, and trees. 

(Read in Abbs, 1998: 93)

Peter Abbs writes that Read could as easily have been writing about himself here. And such is Read's temperament; for him it is easier to write about himself through other things, ideas, and even people, than directly about himself as a person. Powys, despite the complete difference in style, ends up doing something quite similar. It is difficult to find concise quotations from him, so below is a page from Autobiography which clearly demonstrates a Wordsworthian romanticism during his trip to Bognor

I can recall a greater number of the mysterious feelings that are for me the very essence of existence in connection with this little seaside place than in connection with any other town I know except Weymouth. And they were not particularly remarkable, these lanes, these hedges, these ditches near Bognor. They were the reverse of remarkable! But they were unfamiliar to me. That accounted for part of what I felt. They were like those scenes you look at out of a train window. They were like the backgrounds in those pictures of landscapes that you glance at and pass by in a gallery. I saw them for a moment, these roadside tree-stumps, these grey fragments of old walls, these little spinneys at cross-roads, these ragged thorn-bushes with hollows underneath them scooped out by rabbits and dogs and children and suggesting long, hot, idle Sunday afternoons and the far-off twilight songs of blackbirds. I saw most of these field-paths, these wayside heaps of stones, these hawthorn stumps, these wind-blown tamarisk-bushes, these dung-heaps by old cattle-barns, these cart-ruts going down to sea, once only, for I was always exploring in new directions, but for that very reason, in my sensitized state, they became more than just hedges and ditches round the town of Bognor!

Not that they were transformed, not that they became picturesque or “artistic.” But I saw them as they had entered, and as they had left, the consciousness of men and women, going about their affairs, seeing them without seeing them, as they followed their purposes and their desires. But I saw them as they were – no! as they were when they had passed through the half-conscious consciousness of all these human minds. I saw them as you see the designs round the illuminated letters in old breviaries. From being “minute particulars” they became “universals,” each one an enchanted “gleichnis,” or symbol, of that secret burden of unspoken knowledge under which all those inanimate things that are the background of our life, droop, stiffen, or hold their breath when you catch them off-guard.

(Powys, 1982: 378-379)

Both authors, furthermore, identified as anarchist. Read's thought was indebted as much to figures like Kropotkin and Max Stirner than it was romantics like Wordsworth. Powys was also a fan of Stirner, but also a close correspondent of Emma Goldman. This anarchism presents itself first and foremost as an ethical stance, leading to political (or anti-political) action, and I would argue that it is closely tied in with their Wordsworthian romanticism. They both saw in romanticism a means of liberation for the masses. I want to draw this post to a close for now, and discuss their version(s) of romanticism in more depth in the next post. I think that the notion that this romanticism results in an atomised, reactionary form of identity is false. Reading through these texts, and being familiar with their other work, I would argue that their acts of writing about their own lives through “impersonal things” becomes a way to contest stable identity, a way to challenge ideology and create a more ethical and ecological sensibility.

Embracing subjectivity and the personal becomes, surprisingly, a way of connecting with others and otherness. In an age of echo-chambers, fake news, and atomised identities anchored in increasingly obscure ideological views, this kind of “personalism” might perhaps be quite valuable. The act of writing disrupts the continuity of our given-identity, as we are forced to reconcile with the things of the past which have shaped us, we recognise them for their personal affects and their particularity. Aesthetics become a matter of personal taste, but it also turns the collective conversation towards what kind of environment(s) should children be raised in? Access to nature allows for this quality of personal reflection to take place in alignment with ecological values, re-writing the self becomes a way to re-wild the self. 

Links

Right to Roam Campaign: https://www.righttoroam.org.uk/

The Intersectional Environmentalist: https://www.intersectionalenvironmentalist.com/ 

Texts cited:

Abbs, P., (1998) 'Herbert Read as Autobiographer' in Goodway, D. (ed.) Herbert Read Re-Assessed, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. 

Powys, J. C. (1982) [first published 1934] Autobiography, London: Picador. 

Wordsworth, W. (1994) 'Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798.' in Wordsworth, W., The Collected Poems of William Wordsworth, Ware: Wordsworth Editions.