Taoist Reading of Tintern Abbey by William Wordsworth :: Poetry Religion Taoism

Wordsworths hs towards a Taoist reading of Tintern Abbey quint days expect passed five summers, with the length Of five long winters And once again I hear These waters, rolling from their mountain springs With a sweet inland murmur. (1-4) Tintern Abbeys opening lines prepare the reader for a reunion, notable in shadiness not moreover for the sense of anticipation with which the poet apprehends this moment, but equally so for the poignancy which immediately inflects the poems proceedings. My reading of Tintern Abbey takes as its most prominent link up the sense in which Wordsworths Revisiting the Banks of the Wye represents a haven-seeking of sorts. Since his visit to the Wye in 1793, much has happened to Wordsworth he has found, and relinquished, his first romantic love in Annette Vallon. As a green would-be radical, sympathetic to the ideals of the French Revolution, he finds himself at odds with Londons entrench conservatism. In 1795, after well over a de cade of only intermittent contact with his sister, Wordsworth and his beloved Dorothy are reunited at Raced aver, at somewhat the same time that they make the acquaintance of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Within two years of this happy occasion, the two Wordsworths will move to Alfoxden to be near Coleridge. The turn out years of intense friendship and creative discourse will yield, by 1798, the collaborative Lyrical Ballads, to which Tintern Abbey belongs. As we consider the tumult and activity that have characterized this period of his life, we might well speculate upon the nature of the thoughts going through Wordsworths forefront as he surveys the Abbey from his vantage on the riverbank my own temptation is to equate the quietly reflective tone of the poem with the Taoist notion of hs. In Taoism hs is defined -- in describing a state of mind -- as meaning absolute peacefulness and purity of mind and emancipation from worry and selfish desires and not to be disturbed by first appearance impressions or to allow what is already in the mind to disturb what is flood tide into the mind. Hs-shih means unreality and reality, but hs also means profound and dusky continuum in which there is no obstruction. (Wing-tsit Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy. Princeton University Press, 1963.