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

Wordsworths hs towards a Taoist reading of Tintern Abbey Five years pee passed five summers, with the length Of five long winters And again I strain These waters, rolling from their mountain springs With a sweet inland murmur. (1-4) Tintern Abbeys opening lines shit the reader for a reunion, notable in tone not still for the sense of anticipation with which the poet apprehends this moment, but equally so for the poignancy which this instant inflects the poems proceedings. My reading of Tintern Abbey takes as its most prominent concern 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 young would-be radical, humane to the ideals of the French Revolution, he finds himself at odds with Londons entrenched conservatism. In 1795, afterwards well over a decade of only i ntermittent cutaneous senses with his sister, Wordsworth and his beloved Dorothy are reunited at Racedown, at about the same metre that they make the acquaintance of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Within cardinal years of this happy occasion, the two Wordsworths will move to Alfoxden to be near Coleridge. The ensuing years of tearing friendship and creative discourse will yield, by 1798, the collaborative melodious Ballads, to which Tintern Abbey belongs. As we consider the tumult and activity that have characterized this period of his life, we exponent well speculate upon the nature of the thoughts going through Wordsworths mind as he surveys the Abbey from his vantage on the riverbank my own temptation is to twin 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 moment absolute peacefulness and purity of mind and freedom from worry and egotistic desires and not to be disturbed by incomi ng impressions or to stop what is already in the mind to disturb what is coming into the mind. Hs-shih means irreality and reality, but hs also means profound and deep continuum in which in that location is no obstruction. (Wing-tsit Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy. Princeton University Press, 1963.