Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey

Scholars generally agree that it is apt, for the poem represents the climax of Wordsworth's first great period of creative output and prefigures much of the distinctively Wordsworthian verse that was to follow.

In the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth noted: "I have not ventured to call this Poem an Ode but it was written with a hope that in the transitions, and the impassioned music of the versification, would be found the principle requisites of that species of composition."

Having internalised the landscape, Wordsworth claimed now "to see into the life of things" (line 50) and, so enabled, to hear "oftentimes/ The still sad music of humanity" (92–3), but recent critics have used close readings of the poem to question such assertions.

[4] Part of her contention was that he had suppressed mention of the heavy industrial activity in the area, although it has since been argued that the "wreaths of smoke", playfully interpreted by Wordsworth as possible evidence "of some Hermit’s cave" upslope, in fact acknowledges the presence of the local ironworks, or of charcoal burning, or of a paper works.

Noting not just the absence of direct engagement on his part with "the still sad music of humanity" in its present industrial manifestation, but also of its past evidence in the ruins of the abbey itself, she concludes that this "confirms Marjorie Levinson‘s well-known argument that the local politics of the Monmouthshire landscape require erasure if Wordsworth's poem is to advance its aesthetic agenda.

"[6] The poems concerned include the following: As the boat carrying Sneyd Davies neared Tintern Abbey, he noted the presence of "naked quarries" before passing to the ruins, bathed in evening light and blending into the natural surroundings to give a sense of "pleasurable sadness".

Its retrospective mood draws on a particularly 18th century emotional sensibility also found in Edward Jerningham's description of the ruins, with their natural adornments of moss and 'flow'rets', and reflected in J. M. W. Turner's watercolour of them.