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| 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. |
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.
