Tintern Abbey Par-tay

Me, Tintern Abbey, back when cameras used film.

Like the Romantic sublime, this post comes to you a bit delayed. Wordsworth put it either best, or just most famously:

Loth to believe what we so grieved to hear,

For still we had hopes that pointed to the clouds,

We questioned him again, and yet again;

But every word that from the peasant’s lips

Came in reply, translated by our feelings,

Ended in this, — ‘that we had crossed the Alps’.

Imagination — here the Power so called

Through sad incompetence of human speech,

That awful Power rose from the mind’s abyss

Like an unfathered vapour that enwraps,

At once, some lonely traveller. I was lost;

Halted without an effort to break through;

But to my conscious soul I now can say —

“I recognise they glory.”

I wrote about travelling to find what he was trying to find once here. But that’s not what this post’s point.

A few people came over the other night for no particular reason, but when the date was set for July 13, I couldn’t help thinking about Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” or, more correctly: “Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey, upon revisiting the banks of the Wye during a tour, July 13, 1798.”

When I visited Tintern Abbey it was closed. I didn’t know you could close a ruin, but you can. So I went along the Wye and looked at it. That was more in the spirit of Wordsworth’s poem, so I didn’t really mind.

I tried to feel

A presence that disturbs me with the joy

Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean, and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man,

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things.

It didn’t happen there. That took a few more years and a trip to the Alps, where Wordsworth missed the sublime in 1792. He’s the better poet of the two of us, but I’m the better sublime-finder.

Last night had nothing to do with Wordsworth, in the end. Good friends, good food, some Jackson 5, and Earth, Wind and Fire at the end.

So what I’m saying is that turned into more of a Coleridge evening than a Wordsworth one. But I think I’ll celebrate Tintern Abbey Day every year from here on.

With Freya on the same trip. I think this one’s at Dublin Castle.