Tintern Abbey: Structure

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“Tintern Abbey” consists of 162 lines that Wordsworth organized into a series of five sections of varying length. When talking about poetry, we usually refer to subsections of a poem as stanzas. But stanzas are typically understood as formal units organized by an internal rhyme scheme. In this case, however, rhyme plays no role. As such, critics often describe the sections of “Tintern Abbey” as verse paragraphs, a term that reflects how these sections function as rhetorical units that explore distinct themes and ideas. The first verse paragraph (22 lines) contains the speaker’s thoughts and feelings about returning to the same landscape after a five-year absence. The second (28 lines) features his reflections on what this landscape has meant to him in the intervening time. In the short third paragraph (9 lines), the speaker makes an assertion about the important role the natural world has played in his life. He then follows this assertion with the fourth paragraph (54 lines), which includes a lengthy discussion of his changing relationship to nature as he’s aged. The final paragraph (49 lines) contains his closing address to his sister, where he speculates on how their memories of the present experience will serve them in the future.

Though organized into five verse paragraphs, it’s also possible to liken the structure of “Tintern Abbey” to the flowing of a river. This characterization reflects a famous passage from Wordsworth’s preface to Lyrical Ballads. There, he claims that the purpose of “all good poetry . . . is to follow the fluxes and refluxes of the mind when agitated by the great and simple affections of our nature.” These words aptly describe “Tintern Abbey,” which, as a lyric poem, follows the “fluxes and refluxes” of the speaker’s thoughts and feelings as they unfold in real time. Although broken into distinct verse paragraphs, it’s important to note that the transitions between paragraphs aren’t hard breaks. Instead, each paragraph ends in the middle of a line, and the next paragraph picks up where the last left off, completing the line with a complementary thought (lines 19–24):

With some uncertain notice, as might seem
Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods,
Or of some Hermit's cave, where by his fire
The Hermit sits alone.

These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:

The paragraph breaks don’t mark a discontinuity of thought. Instead, like a bend in the river, they are continuous even as they signal a change of direction. The outpouring of the speaker’s mind symbolically mirrors the poem’s setting at the banks of the River Wye.

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