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William WordsworthA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
“Tintern Abbey” is full of visual imagery: the sights of the Wye valley landscape, the speaker’s memory of that beautiful scenery, the appearance of his sister Dorothy, his traveling companion, and the resurrected image of his younger self that he “cannot paint,” all belong to the visual realm. The speaker’s eye is both a literal and figurative organ of vision: a bodily sensory system and a symbol of his manifold capacity for emotional, intellectual, and spiritual awareness. While auditory imagery is also important in the poem (e.g., the mountain streams’ “soft inland murmur” [4]), the eye and vision are the controlling metaphors of “Tintern Abbey.” It is through the eye, primarily, that the speaker takes in the landscape, relives his memory of it, experiences the semi-mystical vision that penetrates “into the life of things” (50), and witnesses evidence of the “motion” and “spirit” that “rolls through all things” (102-104).
In the first paragraph of the poem, the speaker’s eye embraces the pastoral scenery, taking an active role in its composition, framing and altering its details. The eye doesn’t see passively; what, and how, it perceives “impress[es] / Thoughts of more deep seclusion” and “connect[s] / The landscape with the quiet of the sky” (7-8).
By William Wordsworth
A Complaint
William Wordsworth
A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal
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Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802
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Daffodils
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I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
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London, 1802
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Lyrical Ballads
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My Heart Leaps Up
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Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood
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Preface to Lyrical Ballads
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She Dwelt Among The Untrodden Ways
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She Was a Phantom of Delight
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The Prelude
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The Solitary Reaper
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The World Is Too Much with Us
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To the Skylark
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We Are Seven
William Wordsworth