Abrams and Tintern Abbey Essay -- Essays Papers

Abrams and Tintern Abbey In his essay, Structure and Style in the greater Romantic Lyric, critic M.H.Abrams describes a paradigm for the longer Romantic terminology of which Wordsworths Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey is an example. First, some of the poems are each identified as odes in the title, or, as Abrams states approach the ode in having lyric magnitude and a serious subject, feelingfully meditated. (201) The vote counter of Tintern Abbey expresses deep sensations as he views a landscape familiar from his youth, the emotions and memories evoked lead to wider moral and philosophical cogitations. The prototypical lyric, Abrams continues, present a determinate speaker in a particularized, and usually a localized, outdoor setting. (201) Indeed, Wordsworths title specifically identifies the site of which the narrator speaks, it is a few miles above Tintern Abbey, on the banks of the Wye. The narrators of these poems, continues Abrams, speak in a fluent vernacular which rises easily to a more formal speech, a sustained colloquy, sometimes with himself or with the outer scene, but more much with a silent human auditor, present or absent. (201) Tintern Abbey begins with an informal statement, a sudden spontaneous overflow of plyful feelings Five years nourish passed five summers, with the length / Of five long winters And again I reckon / These waters (1-3) then gradually builds to more studied speech conquer for philosophical ruminations For I have learned / To look on nature, not as in the hour / Of thoughtless youth, but hearing often / The still, sad music of humanity / Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power / to chasten and subdue (89-94). The narrator is speaking to a... ...e scenes of Nature shared in concert will be stored in their memories to draw out at a later date to be used as a variety of non-pharmaceutical anti-depressant Oh, then, / If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief, / Should be thy portion, with what healin g thoughts / Of tender wallow wilt thou remember me, / And these my exhortations (143-147)Required TextsW. Wordsworth and S.T. Coleridge. Lyrical Ballads. (1798, 1800, 1802) Ed. R.L. Brett & A.R. Jones. Routledge, 1992.William Wordsworth, The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850. Eds. J. Wordsworth, M.H. Abrams & S. Gill. Norton, 1979.William Wordsworth The major Works. Ed. S. Gill. Oxford, 1984/2000 Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders. Ed. D. Kramer. Oxford, 2001.Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It. Chicago, 1989. Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age or, A Young Ladys Illustrated Primer. Bantam Reprint, 2000