3. Original title: “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour.”
Published in Lyrical Ballads
Tintern Abbey was once a great medieval church, but during time of King Henry VIII, Tintern's monks were ordered to leave. Then the abbey windows and roof were smashed, and the abbey was left to decay amidst the beautiful landscape of the Wye Valley.
Over 200 years later, Wordsworth visited these ruins on a walking tour of the Wye valley at age 23.
He returned to the spot, as the poem tells us, almost exactly five years later.
He composed this poem orally upon leaving Tintern, continuing his walking tour to Bristol. It took four or five days to create it and he memorized it in its entirety. Not any part of it was written down; not a line of it was altered.
Since it was composed on the whim, we seem to hear the easy, immediate utterance of what is going on in the heart and mind of the speaker. “Tintern Abbey” captures the idea that poetry is “The spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.”