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 double for the longer Romantic lyric of which Wordsworths Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey is an example. First, some of the poems are either identified as odes in the title, or, as Abrams states sexual climax the ode in having lyric magnitude and a serious subject, feelingfully meditated. (201) The storyteller of Tintern Abbey expresses deep sensations as he views a landscape familiar from his youth, the emotions and memories evoked lead to wider chaste 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 w hich rises easily to a more formal speech, a sustain colloquy, sometimes with himself or with the outer scene, but more frequently with a silent human auditor, present or absent. (201) Tintern Abbey begins with an informal statement, a sudden self-generated overflow of powerful feelings Five years have passed five summers, with the length / Of five long winters And again I hear / These waters (1-3) then gradually builds to more studied speech appropriate for philosophical ruminations For I have learned / To look on nature, not as in the hour / Of preoccupied youth, but hearing oftentimes / 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 constitution shared together will be stored in their memories to draw out at a later date to be used as a sort of non-pharmaceutical anti-depressant Oh, then, / If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief, / Should be thy portion, with w hat healing thoughts / Of tender joy 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 study 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