Lines Composed a Few Miles from Downtown Augusta

Tintern Abbey.  The poem is not about this place.
It's just that its location is near the banks of the Wye that
gives the poem its name.

My review of William Wordsworth's “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798” contained these comments ...

We are sometimes asked to describe in what sense William Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey offer readers a "religion of nature.”  It is, one imagines, a typical question often asked about pieces written during the Romantic era.  In the writings of that era, religious allusions were frequent.  Profane literature was salted with the phraseology of the Bible.  Therefore, conclusions about the spirituality and religious character of writers, or at least the Christian content of their writings were—and still are—drawn.  For example, readers coming across The Lamb, by William Blake, frequently conclude that the work has some sort of religious meaning.  It doesn’t, but conclusions that it does are still drawn.

True, Blake’s allusion is to the Lamb of God revealed in scripture, but there is no more religious intent in his use of the phrase than in the use of phrases like “King of kings,” “virgin born,” “little Lord Jesus,” and “Mary and Joseph,” at Christmastime in America, circa 2011, by persons positively identifiable as … let’s just leave it as non-religious.

Tintern Abby, which incorporates no Biblical phraseology at all, offers readers in no sense whatsoever a so called religion of nature.  The only hint of a suggestion of religion, and a very weak one at that, is found at line 152, where the author describes himself as a “worshipper of Nature.” (Wordsworth, 261)  Wordsworth use of this phrase occurs very near the end of the poem.  At that point, the reader is well aware that the writer is an admirer, or a lover of the outdoors and especially of this particular place along the banks of the Wye River in England.  For the author to call himself a worshipper of nature is simply to use the strongest word possible to express his attachment to this part of the countryside which called forth so many pleasant memories of his youth.  It is a stretch indeed to infer some religious connotation to the remark, especially that some kind of alternative religion, a religion of nature, is suggested.

We are also from time to time asked to describe some of the specific ways in which nature works as a substitute for traditional religion.  But my answer to this is that nature cannot substitute for traditional religion.  True religion involves the love and adoration of the creator.  The word commonly used to express this reverence is worship.  So that when we say of a man that he worships God, we mean that the man loves, and adores, and reverences God from his heart.  If we say of a man that he worships nature, we cannot mean the same thing, for nature is the creation of God, not God himself.  Nor can we rightly mean that such a worshipper of nature has found an alternative to religion.  If words mean anything, then the worship of nature—in the place of God—is sacrilege.  It manifests, not an enlightened understanding, but a mind void of understanding.  Indeed, the idea of nature being a kind of substitute for real religion has always been one of the hallmarks of the natural man’s state of condemnation, for “professing themselves wise,” the apostle wrote, “they became fools,

“And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things.  Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonor their own bodies between themselves: Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator …” (King James Bible, Rom. 1.22-25)

I think it is fair to say that if William Wordsworth intended that any of his writings, particularly those steeped in allusions to nature or the natural world around us, express some sort of alternative to traditional religion—i.e., the Catholic Church’s teachings—that would have been a fact transmitted to us by those who studied his life and writings.  In the present anthology serving as the text for Literature 211, in the biographical sketch of Wordsworth supplied by the editors, there is no such fact mentioned.

Works Cited.

The Holy Bible: King James Version.  London: Cambridge University Press.  Undated.

Wordsworth, William.  “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey.”  Eds. Stephen Greenblatt and M. H. Abrams.  The Norton Anthology to English Literature.  8^th Ed., Vol. 2.  New York: W. W. Norton, 2006.