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Tintern Abbey

It may seem odd to characterize Tintern Abbey as a key symbol in the poem, especially considering that the only concrete reference to this building appears in the title. Indeed, the speaker doesn’t mention the Abbey anywhere in the poem itself. Yet the Abbey plays a significant symbolic role, even as it remains an absent presence in the speaker’s address. In a general sense, the Abbey is important to the poem for the way it suffuses the scene with a religious sentiment. The speaker’s reflections carry a strain of religiosity that shows up in his almost pious reverence for the natural landscape and the spiritualized “presence” that dwells therein (lines 93–102):

                     And I have felt
     A presence that disturbs me with the joy
     Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
     Of something far more deeply interfused,
     Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
     And the round ocean and the living air,
     And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
     A motion and a spirit, that impels
     All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
     And rolls through all things.

The spiritualism implied in this passage has a strong symbolic connection to the Abbey that sits just a few miles away. Historically, Tintern Abbey was associated with the Cistercian monastic order from the time of its construction in 1131 to the mid-sixteenth century, when it fell into disuse. By the time Wordsworth wrote about it in the nineteenth century, the building was in ruins. In this way, Tintern Abbey also symbolizes the very ravaging effects of time the speaker hopes to counter through the power of recollection.

The River Wye

The River Wye is clearly an important personal touchstone for the speaker, who celebrates his return to its banks after five years away. However, the river also plays an important symbolic role related to the passage of time. The poem’s overall structure may be compared to the flowing of a river. This characterization reflects a passage from Wordsworth’s preface to Lyrical Ballads, where 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.” As a lyric poem, “Tintern Abbey” follows the “fluxes and refluxes” of the speaker’s thoughts and feelings as they unfold in real time. Just as a river only flows in one direction, so too does time, and it is this irreversibility that makes the faculty of memory so crucial for the speaker. Memory isn’t simply about casting one’s mind back in time; it’s about carrying emotions forged in the past forward into the present. Additionally, astute readers may also hear in the name of the river a pun on the question, “Why?” The speaker never directly asks about the meaning of life or why we are here. Even so, his meditations on memory and time do have an existential quality that’s symbolically reflected in the River Wye.

The Hermit

The speaker references a Hermit at the end of the first verse paragraph (lines 16–22):

                       these pastoral farms,
     Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke
     Sent up, in silence, from among the trees!
     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.

The Hermit mentioned in this passage is a figment of the speaker’s imagination. When he gazes out over the landscape, he sees “wreaths of smoke” trailing up “from among the trees.” He takes these wreaths as signs of human habitation. But because he can’t actually see the source of the smoke, he indulges in a moment of fantasy, imagining they might come from “vagrant dwellers” or else a “Hermit” who sits alone in his cave. The capitalization of the word “Hermit,” along with the fact that the speaker says the word twice, indicates this figure’s significance. Despite being mentioned only briefly, this imaginary Hermit is significant for the way he functions as a symbolic stand-in for the speaker himself. As we will learn in the rest of the poem, the speaker has enjoyed a close and nourishing relationship to the natural world throughout his life. One of the central tensions in the poem stems from the challenge of channeling the joys of being in nature when the speaker doesn’t have access to wild places. As someone immersed in the natural world, the Hermit represents a symbolic projection of the speaker’s personal ideal.

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