Deep Ecological Consciousness and Interconnectedness in William Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey

Humans and nature interconnectedness is a dynamic process. The extensive misuse of natural resources has left us in an uncontrolled situation. Ecological disasters are worsening our relationship with nature. Humans’ anthropocentric attitude to dominate nature needed to be relooked from biocentric lenses. Rediscovering our interconnectedness with nature will advance our ecological consciousness to bring equilibrium between humans and nature. This paper intends to examine “Tintern Abbey”, the famous poetry by William Wordsworth to raise awareness of the interconnectedness of humans and nature in people’s minds, through deep ecological perspectives.

The Romantic Concealment of Desire: Coleridge’s and Wordsworth’s Poetic Voices

The present study poses an interpretation of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Eolian Harp” and William Wordsworth’s “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” so as to evince the subject of desire as the ulterior motif of these texts, even though the poetic voices of these works attempt to conceal such a theme. This reading interprets both poems as compositions that share the same thematic line as William Blake’s “The Book of Thel” and John Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn”. Consequently, the close reading of the poems by Wordsworth and Coleridge will be presented.

Unremembered Pleasure

Chapter 1 begins from Wordsworth’s frustrations with his own memory while walking in the Swiss Alps, before considering the ways in which Wordsworth’s early loco-descriptive verse works through problems of perception, retention, and representation. Reading Wordsworth against a long tradition which positions him as the poet of memory, it traces a persistent interest in lost and unnoticed images and affects, which are neither consciously experienced nor traumatically repressed. It goes on to study and develop Wordsworth’s use of the term ‘unremembered pleasure’ in ‘Tintern Abbey’, presenting the possibility of unnoticed and retrospectively acknowledged satisfaction as an alternative to the broadly empirical and descriptive way readers have often expected or hoped for the poem to work. Turning to anthropological theory, the chapter develops an account of unregistered experience, and above all lost pleasure, as a form of gift

Tennyson’s ‘Tithonus’ and the Revision of Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’

This chapter examines the Wordsworthian echoes and borrowings in the 1860 dramatic monologue ‘Tithonus’, revealing ‘Tithonus’, and, in part the earlier ‘Tithon’ on which it is based, as a rewriting of the relationship between mind and nature, of the self reencountering itself in time, as it appears in Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’ (1798). In reworking Wordsworth’s interaction between mind and nature, ‘Tithonus’ is consolidating a new poetic alongside revising what has ostensibly become an outdated poetic trope. The revisions, in part, free Tennyson from the universal subjectivity of the lyric speaker, thereby strengthening the strategies of the monologue. Yet, Tennyson’s borrowings and echoes create effects that the poet cannot fully control, feeding, compromising, directing, and, ultimately, supporting the poem.