Tintern Abbey

Here’s an excerpt from Wordsworth’s wonderful poem with the wonderfully long and typically British title, “Lines Composed a few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour.”  If you understand what he is talking about when he writes about the mood “In which the burden of the mystery/ In which the heavy and the weary weight/ Of all this unintelligible world,/ Is lightened,” then you can come camping with me anytime.  If not, I don’t know what to tell you.  Go take a walk through the woods or something and rethink your life.

In this passage he talks about how the memory of his last visit to the banks of the Wye has served him.  This probably should remind you of C.S. Lewis if you’ve read him talking about Joy or Beauty (which he always capitalizes).

            These beauteous forms

Through a long absence, have not been to me

As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye:

But oft, in lonely rooms, and ‘mid the din

Of towns and cities, I have owed to them

In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,

Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;

And passing even into my purer mind,

With tranquil restoration: - feelings too

Of unremembered pleasure: such perhaps,

As have no slight or trivial influence

On that best portion of a good man’s life,

His little, nameless, unremembered acts

Of kindness and of love.  Nor less, I trust,

To them I may have owed another gift,

Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,

In which the burden of the mystery,

In which the heavy and the weary weight

Of all this unintelligible world,

Is lightened:- that serene and blessed mood,

In which the affections gently lead us on,-

Until, the breath of this corporeal frame

And even the motion of our human blood

Almost suspended, we are laid asleep

In body, and become a living soul:

While with an eye made quiet by the power

Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,

We see into the life of things