This simple nine-line poem describes how the poet is filled with joy when he sees a rainbow, and that he has always felt this way, since ‘my life began’ he hopes he will always keep that sense of enchantment with the natural world. The poem is one of the great hymns to tranquillity, quiet contemplation, and self-examination in all of English literature. The scene inspires feelings which the poet connects with small acts of love and kindness, and which can lead to a kind of tranquillity which allows us to ‘see into the life of things’: to understand things in a way we usually cannot.

Wordsworth tells us that although it’s been five years since he last clapped eyes on this scene, the memories of the beautiful landscape have often returned to him when he has been in busy ‘towns and cities’ or sitting ‘in lonely rooms’. Well, actually, according to Wordsworth, he didn’t ‘write’ a word of the poem until he got to Bristol, where he wrote down the whole poem, having composed it in his head shortly after leaving the Wye. This poem was not actually composed at Tintern Abbey, but, as the poem’s full title (‘Lines Written (or Composed) a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798’) reveals, was written nearby, overlooking the ruins of the medieval priory in the Wye Valley in South Wales. On that best portion of a good man’s life, Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,įelt in the blood, and felt along the heart Milton thus stands as a beacon of enlightenment and integrity, a man who has the best interests of England at heart and has the skill and influence to make a real political difference.īut oft, in lonely rooms, and ‘mid the din How can England defend itself against a foreign power while there is such corruption and selfishness among its people? Wordsworth had been a staunch supporter of the French Revolution in 1789, later declaring, ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive!’īut by 1802, the Revolutionary regime had given way to Napoleon’s imperial tyranny, and the Napoleonic Wars.

By 1802, Wordsworth was a literary celebrity, thanks to the publication of Lyrical Ballads, which he co-authored with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in 1798.

Wordsworth lyrical ballads