In Tintern Abbey Wordsworth wonders almost endlessly at the beauty and glory of nature. There is his view of it at the time he wrote it and the retrospective of when he was last there. This thoughtful, pondering tone to the work made it seem like run-on thoughts, yet it was still interesting because of the detail and the content. The lines that struck me the most were lines 71-73:
...more like a man
Flying from something that he dreads, than one
Who sought the thing he loved.
These lines got to the heart of this work for me because the whole collecting nature and the picturesque idea seems to stem from the desire to escape from the realities of the world. This is a continuing theme throughout human history; if we never wanted to have a taste of something truly fantastical, we would not be as we are. Wordsworth is expressing his desire to escape from the mundane and/or troublesome things that make up our realities.
I think the idea of Tintern Abbey being a series of "run on thoughts" since this poem is obviously a recollecting period of nostalgia, the sentence structure forces the reader to think in a pattern of a nostalgic stream of consciousness.
ReplyDeletegreat insights!
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