William Wordsworth's "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey"

The works of William Wordsworth are as ground-breaking and daring as they are numerous. Through his own unique perception of Nature, creation, and the relationship of the self to these ideas, Wordsworth carries the implications of Romantic Nature poetry above and beyond those of all other poets of his ilk; he goes so far as to defy, though subtly, the dogmas of the Christian faith and assert that Nature and one's own mind play as much of a role in creating all that one sees as ever could some lofty, all-powerful deity. For Wordsworth, the human eye, ear, and mind are omnipotent, and the great green world of Nature that surrounds us, "what they half create, and what perceive" (ll. 106).

Nowhere is this ideology more readily observable than in one of Wordsworth's most popular and highly-esteemed poems, "Tintern Abbey." The course of this poem mirrors the course of Wordsworth's life; through reflection he beckons the reader to accompany him through the past, to the days of his youth, "when like a roe" he bounded over the mountains and pastoral landscape, in no need of personal introspection concerning what surrounded him. In Wordsworth's own words, the Nature that he so loved "had no need of a remoter charm, by thought supplied, nor any interest unborrowed from the eye" (ll. 82-83).