![]() This is suggested by collocation: the word "again" is always followed by a reference to sense perception. In a class on "Tintern Abbey" given in the School for Criticism and Theory in 1985, Professor Ralph Freedman pointed to the ambiguity of the repeated word "again" in the first verse paragraph: its direct meaning in the context-"now, five years from the first visit"-is supplemented by the connotations of reminding oneself to actually look and listen. 10) on the bank of the Wye, the speaker's attention is constantly wandering away from the data of direct perception-his "interest" is claimed by memories, thoughts, and surmises. Indeed, on the scene of his micro−biography, during the interval spent under "this dark sycamore" (l. 60) at the failure to reproduce the intensity of the emotional heightening experienced during the speaker's 1793 visit, when his love of nature did not depend "on any interest ⁄ Unborrowed from the eye" (ll. The starting point of this dynamic poetic experience is the "sad perplexity" (l. The change of the speaker's attitude is an enacted theme, or, in a sense, thematized "plot" of the poem: a larger biographical change, a shift of commitment, is simulated by a micro−biographical event, the speaker's temporally unfolding, trial−and−error response to his revisitation of a memorable spot. into an enactment of a complementary transition-from an intense consciousness of the self to sympathy for another. Hayden's cento "The Road to Tintern Abbey," The Wordsworth Circle 12 (1981): 211−16. For a guide to Wordsworth's reworking of this and other topoi see John O. Abrams, Doing Things with Texts (New York: Norton, 1989) 382. One of the unique features of "Tintern Abbey," not yet sufficiently recognized in critical discussions, is that it integrates the revisitation topos The topos of revisiting was amply present in eighteenth−century topographical poetry see M. Hilles and Harold Bloom (New York: OUP, 1965). ![]() Abrams, "Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric," From Sensibility to Romanticism: Essays Presented to Frederick A. Hartman, "Romanticism and 'Anti−Self−Consciousness,'" The Centennial Review 6 (1962): 562. This initial response stimulates his reflections upon a change in himself, and the speaker comes to terms with this change through a process common to the Romantic nature lyrics that "explore the transition from self−consciousness to imagination" and "achieve that transition while exploring it." Geoffrey H. In "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798," the speaker, biographically identified with Wordsworth himself, contemplates a landscape well−remembered since a visit to the same spot five years previously, does not quite recognize the view, and is perplexed by his subdued reaction to it.
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