Redemption in Poetry and Philosophy: Wordsworth, Kant, and the Making of the Post-Christian Imagination

2. "Tintern Abbey”: Restoring the Soul

37 s Restoring the Soul “Tintern Abbey” 2 This chapter is an attempt to read “Tintern Abbey” by getting as close as possible to the limits of its own language and the reader’s forbearance. It seems to me that its most interesting aspects by far are emotional, moral, and spiritual, and that its historical, political, and ideological tendencies have been tracked down and hunted to extinction . An older and deeper sense of the poem, a long-neglected kind of response to its ways of disturbing us, needs reviving.1 But to do this we have to follow another kind of pathway through the labyrinth of the verse, paying close attention to kinds of details recently ignored, arguing with the poem in another way, non-theoretical, non-historicist. This is a level of close argumentative attention that philosophers routinely expect of themselves with “their” texts (see the next chapter’s sections on Kant), but that much recent criticism dismisses and is in some danger of forgetting about altogether with literary texts. Readers may, therefore, find some of what follows somewhat labyrinthine, particularly in the second and third sections. I hope they will feel that their efforts are paid off, redeemed even, in the other sections. The poem is a highly original and ambitious “natural ode” (see the following section): a public celebration of the private restoration of a self. Its first paragraph affirms the value of a familiar place in reconstituting that self, but offers glimpses of what has to be suppressed in order to achieve this reconstitution: the more difficult emotions of human relationship. In the second and third paragraphs the metaphors 38 Redemption in Poetry and Philosophy s are wonderfully, uniquely triumphant as representations of restorative value, as “forms of beauty”; but they stumble as virtue-bearing “forms of good.” The poem’s thought falters palpably as it turns from “blessed mood” to “unintelligible world”—because that world of inter-human emotion is what it has little insight into. In the climactic fourth paragraph it seems that the poet has indeed been fleeing from the humanity he could not accommodate, and that God, or Being, is reduced to a necessary backdrop for what amounts to a suppression of moral life. The embarrassing final paragraph confirms the poem’s lack of interhuman insight. What we remember about the poem, however, is how close it comes to achieving its most remarkable ambition: that of transforming poetry itself into a kind of therapy, a language whose power to heal or redeem may be a substitute for nature’s own—or God’s.2 Impassioned Music, Little Lines Title and First Paragraph “I have not ventured to call this Poem an Ode,” Words­ worth wrote in a note to the 1800 edition of the Lyrical Ballads, “but it was written with a hope that in the transitions, and in the impassioned music of the versification would be found the principal requisites of that species of composition.”3 Here is a stiff, typically Words­ worthian show of modesty , or “proud humility,” in Hazlitt’s words. One might imagine the show: “A real Ode? No, no: I wouldn’t presume. Maybe just an entirely new kind of ode.”4 The language of the poem itself often strikes this note, as we shall see. And the stakes really are as high as they can be. Pindar, Horace, and Milton are all at the table, but this subversive new player disclaims all pretensions to such status, even while planning (not just “hoping,” as he says) to change the very terms of the game. “Tintern Abbey”5 is an ode in spirit but not style, whereas “Simon Lee” and others are ballads in style but not spirit.This “ode” is both Pindaric , public, ceremonious, invoking or addressing the gods, praising participation in the life of a community; and Horatian, private, meditative , tranquil, invoking friendship and withdrawal from community, addressing a familiar and congenial readership. The deep contradictions here are part of the poem’s constitution, for better or worse: part of what makes it a new kind of ode. For “impassioned music” read urgent public plea for the versification, for Words­ worth’s new kind of s “TinternAbbey” 39 poetry, not just in it. For “transitions” read private or autobiographical narrative structure: both temporal and emotional. The lineaments (“principal requisites”) of a strophe, antistrophe, second strophe, and epode can be made out beneath the four...