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And for obvious reasons it’s generally abbreviated to just ‘Tintern Abbey’.īut the part about having been composed ‘a few miles above Tintern Abbey’ has led to a lot of speculation from people trying to identify the exact route that Wordsworth took through the countryside above the ruins of the abbey.

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The poem’s full title is ‘Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798’.

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Which means this is the fourth and final instalment of our mini series on blank verse, which started with dramatic speeches from Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare, and continued last month with a passage from John Milton’s epic, Paradise Lost.Īnd for this instalment, I’ve deliberately read you a longer passage than for any of the others, because I think to appreciate the movement of Wordsworth’s verse you really need to go on an extended walk with him.

And you’ve probably noticed, it’s not a ballad at all, but a reflective, meditative poem written in blank verse. So this was the tradition Wordsworth and Coleridge were attempting to tap into, with a somewhat more refined, literary take on ballads and songs and stories, including Coleridge’s masterpiece, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.Īnd today’s poem, as I say, was added at the last minute and became one of the cornerstones of the collection, and really helped to establish Wordsworth’s reputation as a poet. They were the people’s poetry, if you like. Their composers or singers were often illiterate and anonymous, and the ballads were basically public property. As we saw then, ballads formed a great oral tradition, of popular songs and stories that were handed down through the generations for hundreds of years in many cases, before they were written down. Wordsworth and Coleridge set out their stall with the title, Lyrical Ballads, which alludes to the ballad tradition which you may recall we looked at back in Episode 22, with the anonymous ballad ‘The Unquiet Grave’. He famously said that a poet should be ‘a man speaking to men’ in other words they should get down from their pedestal, and instead of writing in high-flown poetic diction, they should aim to express ‘our elementary feelings’ by talking about down-to-earth subjects with characters and images drawn from everyday experience.Īnd the book was a bit of a slow burn, it was mostly ignored or ridiculed when it was first published, but over time it has been hugely influential on the way we have written poetry and thought about it for the last two centuries. Or what Wordsworth called ‘gaudiness and inane phraseology’, in his preface to Lyrical Ballads. So in the 18th, English poetry had become more and more ornate, archaic, artificial and conventional, full of witty turns of phrase and clever classical allusions. The book was a self conscious effort to break with the past, to simplify the language of poetry and to get back to what they considered its roots. He claimed to have written it entirely in his head, while he was walking back from Tintern Abbey to Bristol, my current home town, and wrote it down when he arrived in Bristol.Īnd he added it as the final poem in the manuscript of Lyrical Ballads, the book he co-authored with his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and which is generally credited as being the beginning of modern poetry. This poem was published in 1798, fairly early on in Wordsworth’s career. The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, Of eye and ear, both what they half-create,Īnd what perceive well pleased to recognize Therefore am I stillįrom this green earth of all the mighty world Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,Īnd the blue sky, and in the mind of man,Īll thinking things, all objects of all thought,Īnd rolls through all things. Not harsh nor grating, though of ample power Of thoughtless youth, but hearing oftentimes Have followed, for such loss, I would believe, Unborrowed from the eye.-That time is past,įaint I, nor mourn nor murmur: other gifts Their colours and their forms, were then to me The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,

Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,

On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour, July 13, 1798 From Lines Written a few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,

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