What Nature Betrays: Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” (Part 2)

0:12 Wes: In part one of our discussion of Tintern Abbey, we talked about whether Word Wordsworth was right to suggest that our experience of nature was good not just for restoring our weary spirits, but for helping us to mature and even for making us better people. In part two, we explore his justifications for this thesis, in particular, the claim that nature connects us not just to our senses and baser instincts, but to our capacity to think, experience beauty, and ultimately act ethically and autonomously. Does nature really never betray the heart that loves her? Or has the poet ignored her more sinister dimensions? That's the subject for today's discussion. This is Wes Alwan.

0:55 Erin: And this is Erin O'Luanaigh.

0:56 Wes: And you're listening to Subtext. So, Erin, on our first episode for Tintern Abbey, we got through, what is it, three stanzas, so we have two or three more to go. It's a poem that's worth two episodes, I think. We talked about the way in which his experience of a landscape, a natural scene, was a impetus for him to a contemplative frame of mind, at least in light of the fact that he was coming to it a second time. And so the scene is imbued with memory and experience. In the second stanza, he described what he gets out of, or what nature gives us. So not just sensations sweet, but something reflective, tranquil, restoration, and maybe some sort of effect on character, right, via unremembered pleasure. And then above all, this capacity for a contemplative frame of mind, the serene and blessed mood which becomes much more explicit in the. In the second stanza. And then in the third stanza, we talked a little bit about the. I think you called it city life and the way in which one can bring the memory of nature to that, to the drudgery of the everyday world and the mundane. And so that's where we left it. And now we're ready to get into the fourth stanza. So why don't we start with you reading that?

2:33 Erin: Okay, so the listener is going to have to bear with me because this is quite a long stanza. So here we go. And now, with gleams of half extinguished thought, with many recognitions dim and faint, and somewhat of a sad perplexity, the picture of the mind revives again. While here I stand, not only with a sense of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts, that in this moment there is life and food for future years. And so I dare to hope, though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first I came among these hills, when like a roe, I Bounded o' er the mountains by the sides of the deep rivers and the lonely streams. Wherever nature led, More like a man flying from something that he dreads than one who sought the thing he loved for nature. Then the coarser pleasures of my boyish days and their glad animal movements all gone by to me, was all in all I cannot paint what then I was. The sounding cataract haunted me like a passion. The tall rock, the mountain, the deep and gloomy wood, Their colours and their forms were then to me an appetite, a feeling and a love that had no need of a remoter charm by thought supplied, nor any interest unborrowed from the eye. That time is past, and all its aching joys are now no more. And all its dizzy raptures not for this faint eye nor mourn, nor murmur. Other gifts have followed for such loss I would believe abundant recompense. For I have learned to look on nature not as in the hour of thoughtless youth, but hearing oftentimes the still sad music of humanity. Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power to chasten and subdue. And I have felt 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. Therefore am I still a lover of the meadows and the woods and mountains, and of all that we behold from this green earth, of all the mighty world of eye and ear, both what they half create and what perceive. Well pleased to recognize in nature and the language of the sense, the anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, the guide, the guardian of my heart and soul, of all my moral being.

5:03 Wes: Great. Thank you for taking that long hike through poetic nature.

5:08 Erin: You know, I was young and then I grew up. A lot of things happened over the course of it.

5:11 Wes: That's right. I think we both got a little older and wiser.

5:15 Erin: I had a religious experience.

5:17 Wes: Animal movements.

5:18 Erin: Animal movement. That's one of the best parts of this.

5:21 Wes: Sounds like 19th century speak for sex to me.

5:26 Erin: No, Glad. Animal movements? Oh, it seems so. Geez. I guess you're right. You know, I so often read this as. You know, I had no idea, as I said last time, that he was only 23 in the before. Or rather, he was as old as 23 in the before picture. And his after picture is 28. And so I thought of this as like a little boy, you know, running around like a deer. Yeah, to him it is. And he is running around like a deer. But it's cuter when you think that he's 9, 10. God, animal movements don't have so much weight at that age anyway.

6:03 Wes: Yeah, I mean, we get the picture that what nature meant to him when he was younger, which was much more bacchanalian and had a lot more to do with impulses, including the implication does seem to be sex. And it's hard not to read at least a faint allusion to the fact that he got someone pregnant in France and then couldn't go back. Because I think he. It was right after he got back from France that he made his first visit to this landscape when he was in kind of a walkabout exile, unable to go back to his girlfriend. But there's an interesting. Here. I think we get three repetitions here that are kind of callbacks. There's probably more, but these are the ones that I've noticed. Callbacks to the first stanza. One of them is murmuring, right? So that was the river or the rolling springs that were murmuring in the first stanza. And now he's saying that he does not mourn nor murmur. So he doesn't murmur or complain in this sense because of the loss of this former, more youthful relationship to nature. And we get talk of the sky again. Right. There's that triad in the first stanza of river, cliff, sky. And the whole sky thing here gets expanded. And then this word rolling comes up in the first stanza. It's something that's applied to the river, and now it's been transferred into the sky. Right. So I think he says the blue sky. And in the mind of man, emotion and a spirit that impels all thinking things, all objects of thought and rolls through all things. So the sense in which everything is imbued with or suffused with spirit.

8:01 Erin: Well, with God, I think. Right. Just looking at the moments that you're pointing out, I'm thinking too, how much trouble Wordsworth would be in if he was in a poetry workshop. For a lot of reasons, thank God

8:12 Wes: there were no poetry workshops back then.

8:16 Erin: But we have, you know, we have the deep rivers. Let's see, what else. The tall rock, the deep and gloomy wood, the blue sky, even not the most interesting adjectives in the world. But then we have. Then we have the sounding cataract, which I think is really lovely. And a couple of other and I guess, glad animal movements. Maybe someone would circle that. And Put a question mark next to it. But I think that's kind of nice.

8:38 Wes: Yeah, they would. That's too.

8:41 Erin: What do you mean by that?

8:43 Wes: Everything interesting would get a question mark.

8:45 Erin: That's right.

8:46 Wes: Wordsworth, you come into my office. I'd like to talk to you about your adjectives.

8:53 Erin: This could use some trimming, I'm not gonna lie. Anyway, just the very first line. I'm already kind of wondering what he's up to, though. I mean, I think, like, this. You know, this has such a talky quality. And I mean that in a positive way. I mean, you know, it's easy to read. It goes rather quickly as we go through the lines. We're kind of bounding through them like a row ourselves because we're not really tripped up by anything. But then when you go back, a lot of interesting things are happening. So. Like, for instance, just in the first line, with gleams of half extinguished thought. You kind of know what that is. I think what so often happens for me in this poem is that you read through it really quickly. And then you're kind of like, oh, well, what actually is half extinguished thought?

9:32 Wes: Yeah, it's kind of like our question about unremembered pleasure. Right.

9:37 Erin: Yeah. That little qualifier, half extinguished, is just really funny.

9:42 Wes: So we have this, especially in light of the fact. Sorry. That, you know, he's just talked about how he's not blind. He's not like a blind man. Right. Yeah.

9:49 Erin: Right.

9:49 Wes: He's been able to sustain this earlier experience in memory even when in the city or elsewhere.

9:56 Erin: Right. And now it's like the movie is over. You know, the credits are rolling and his recognitions now are dim and faint. Which we would use to describe, you know, sight that's failing. And somewhat of a sad perplexity. The picture of the mind revives again. And so I guess what I'm asking is, in these four lines, is he losing it? And then. Oh, he gets it back again or what's going on there?

10:21 Wes: Yeah. It's interesting that, you know, maybe the memory starts to look dim in light of re experiencing something. Yeah. The picture of the mind revives again. So maybe there's the experience of realizing that what he thought had stayed with him hadn't quite stayed with him. I'm not sure how do we interpret sad perplexity here. Because then we get a transition to hope. These are the sorts of interesting conflicts that I really like and I think, like, sustain the poem regardless of whether it's sloppy or not. It's got that engine that keeps us Bounding like Rose, I guess. But, yeah, sure. I don't know. What do you make of sad perplexity here?

11:06 Erin: I don't know. Maybe that the images are kind of warring with each other. He's not sure what to make of them because he's just had this moment of emotion with that exclamation point that preceded this. So maybe he's almost a little bit. We've just left him at a fever pitch with, O Sylvan. Why, thou wanderer through the woods? How often has my spirit turned to thee? So, you know, maybe he's a little shy now. He's coming down from. From that moment, perhaps now. And, oh, I lost it. You know, he was at the height of some sort of passion, maybe. And maybe even through speaking it or writing it or whatever, he kind of loses it in the moment, even as he addresses it. Maybe that's what makes it escape him because he's finally addressing it directly.

11:50 Wes: I guess memory creates these different contradictory layers as he's described it. There's the first experience, which was all about youth and impulse and desire. And then there was the. You know, he brought in all these other effects. The ability to comfort us, you know, when we're in the office, let's put it that way. Character building. But above all, meditation. And, you know, the contemplative nature of all this stuff. And now, as he returns to it, it's one thing to have that contemplative aspect in memory, but now there's potentially a conflict. Right? So does. Does revisiting the scene, does that evoke youthful impulse? Now, if it's in memory, it can have that element of nostalgia. Right. And be worked over. But if you're coming back to it a second time, then what is it? Exactly? It's not what it was in memory. Precisely. So when the picture of the mind revives, he once again, he's told us this before, but he wants to do it again, which is that the experience now is not about present pleasure just as it wasn't in memory, but it's about hope now. So this is like a new thing to put on the list. Not just immediate pleasure, not contemplativeness, not character building. But now we get hope and also takes us out of the present. There's a lot of not being in the present in this, but go ahead.

13:20 Erin: Yeah. And he kind of wonders too, or hopes, rather, that even though he's not that unthinking being that, you know, sort of went traipsing through the woods five years ago that now he'll still be able to take. What does he say, you know, food for future years. And so there's this idea that even though he's now maybe more conscious of the fact that he is, you know, storing up for the, you know, the winter in town or whatever, about to, you know, go into his long sort of spiritual hibernation in the city, he's now conscious that that's what he's doing. So there's a little bit of, I guess, you know, meta commentary, you know. Okay, so he has all these wonderful memories of this place from when he experienced it in a more. In a less thinking way, almost implying that though that was a sort of a false orientation towards nature, that there was something less calculating about that. Right. Because he wasn't intending to remember this scene so well and to have it have such an effect on his life in the future. And now he's going back as a retreat, I guess, and almost as a deliberate, or rather as a deliberate storing up of memory in a way which I find to be. It never really kind of works that well. I mean, in personal experience, maybe this is the case for Wordsworth, but he's kind of hoping to recapture the lightning in the bottle moment. And my experience is that when you try to recreate a memory or go back to a place and expect to have the same experience, you very seldom achieve that. So I don't know, I read a little bit of desperation inside the hope. Maybe I'm wrong there.

14:58 Wes: No, I think that's right. I think you're getting at this sad perplexity. Right? Who goes. If he's feeling old at 20, is it 28 now he's going back to. In my view, that's still a baby, as I've said many times before. But if he's going back, they're feeling old now. And thinking back on youthful experiences, especially love, which is kind of implied in the background here, romantic experiences, then is that pleasurable or is it sad? Is it something I've lost or something I can take pleasure in simply as a memory or simply as an impetus to certain compensations, like the contemplative compensation. So this is about loss of a certain kind of immediate relationship to things. Right. So he can, despite the nature worshiping quality of this poem, it's also kind of a requiem for a more innocent relationship to nature. Right. It's like looking back and then, you know, like looking at kids and seeing how they're. They relate to the world and they wonder around, they're bounding around Like Rose, so excited by everything, and you can't reclaim that. You get a little bit of that when you're around them, which is one of the things that's so delightful about children. You know, you can relive that relationship to some extent, and it's worth bringing up. Right. He's actually talking to his sister, which for me was a big surprise. Right. And it took me a while to figure out. I thought it was a metaphor at first. He was calling the sister, the. The river, his sister. And then I, in my notes, I put in the margin, literally, his sister. Literally talking to his sister. So anyway, you know, once you know that, you. You realize that this is also, in a sense, an admonishment to her. You can even see it as him. It's a very indirect way of warning someone against behaving according to the impulses of youth and getting themselves into the same sorts of trouble that he got into. I was reminded of. This may not be quite appropriate, but Laertes talking to Ophelia, right, and talking about guard your virginity. This is a much more sophisticated way of saying that if it is right, this is a big stretch that I'm making here, but it's kind of a reverse. Gather ye rosebuds, while you may, sort of position to take, but a very indirect one. So it's not about how precious, as Laertes puts it, you know, how precious virginity is. Exactly. It's about keeping in mind how the future will transform one's relationship to such things. And if you know that going in, then, I don't know, maybe you have an advantage.

17:41 Erin: I don't think so, though. I mean, you know, maybe this is why Dorothy always said that she never had great facility for poetry, and she just ended up writing journals and diaries and becoming famous in her own right for those. I mean, not to get too ahead of ourselves here, but I do think that by warning her ahead of time, doesn't this effectively preclude her from being able to write her own Tintern Abbey? Right. You have to have the unthinking thing to go back to a place and then be like, ah, the first time I was here, I was so unthinking. It's not as good a poem to say, oh, the first time I was here, my brother warned me not to enjoy myself too much, you know, or to, you know, instructed me on how to comport myself toward the scene. I mean, I guess maybe you could get an E.M. forster novel out of that, but you really can't get a romantic poem out of it. So I think I end up feeling as though she's a little bit cheated because you have to have the. At least in the economics of this poem, you have to have the original wellspring of this unthinking emotion to then later come back to and get a return on that investment with a more sober kind of mindset. But to initially approach it with that kind of sobriety, at least in Wordsworth's formulation, doesn't give you that opportunity for later reflection and later personal readjustment.

18:57 Wes: It's like he's taking her aside and saying plastics to her.

19:01 Erin: Right.

19:03 Wes: Yeah. So you're reminding me of the Graduate, you know, where you get the adult wanting to impose their wisdom on a youngster when, of course, that's impossible. They have to live through it. They have to go through it themselves. And they're not gonna get it from your advice.

19:18 Erin: Well, especially because isn't he only a year or two older than Dorothy?

19:22 Wes: I know. That's the other thing.

19:24 Erin: It's like the obnoxious older sibling who thinks they know because they were, you know, they were born 15 minutes before you were. I don't know. And the idea, too, that, like, he has to tell her to control herself. I don't know. There's something a little annoying older brother about it.

19:37 Wes: Yeah.

19:38 Erin: But it's okay. We still love you, Will.

19:42 Wes: I thought of Annie hall and the way in which. There was a thesis there about the way in which human relationships, including, you know, especially romantic relationships, can be sustained by nostalgia. In a sense, they can be. So that, in a sense, the. Our relationship to memory is much less fraught in some ways. It doesn't carry the irritations of the present. And you can read, by the way, the whole city thing where he can carry the memory of nature with him in the city. You could just read that as being with people as well.

20:15 Erin: Sure.

20:15 Wes: People time versus alone time. And the way one can carry alone time with you or carry memory with you into those situations to help get through the irritations of them. And the same thing in love, you know, get through the conflicts of love by carrying memory with you, including memories of the good times in those relationships. That's the way any. Any whole ends. You know, one can always ask the question whether there isn't something neurotic about that, whether this need to kind of. I'm not saying that there is. I don't. I lean against this claim, but it's one that. That I think one might raise, which is that if. If you're leaning on Nostalgia. Is there something wrong with that or is that the right way to approach all of this?

20:57 Erin: Yeah, no, he doesn't protest too much. He. Well, never mind.

21:04 Wes: Well, I think you're right because you might be right about protesting too much because again, this is about, you know, this is sad perplexity about what is lost in youth to some extent. And he's putting a very positive spin on that.

21:18 Erin: No, I'm happy now, really.

21:19 Wes: Becoming an adult is really not that bad. Right. It's better to be reading and writing poetry than to be falling madly in love with someone. Right, Right.

21:33 Erin: Yeah. And I'm still enjoying this. Right. I still am loving being here and I'm still attuned to my senses. Right. The mighty world of eye and ear. And yet he's very well tuned, I think, to also what's happening on the cognitive level here. You know, both what they half create and what perceive. So there's something about taking this in. So he's. He's centering it more on himself and his perception. I think even as he is trying to convince. And I think he's conscious of this, of course, even as he's trying to convince us of this immediate reality that he's still taking in through eye and ear. He then kind of goes into this, you know, both what they have create and what perceive, you know, both what I'm kind of bringing to this cognitively through my enjoyment and maybe even over and above what's actually really here versus what they're just taking in on a basic sensual level. And so that qualifier is really funny because it implies that he's not just still lover of the meadows and the woods. There's something obviously more. More going on there.

22:40 Wes: Yeah, there's no immediate contact with the natural domain. There's a philosophical background to this which is actually important, really important to Romanticism in begins in early modern philosophy. It gets amped up by Kant and then of course the German idealists, including Hegel. This philosophical tradition of German idealism, it's very connected to Romanticism. And one of the basic ideas is that there is something that stands in between us and our experience of the world. Just be straight up empiricists. We don't just sort of get everything as it is shuttled in through the senses. Rather there's a lot of this, what we would call formal, whether it's spatial or temporal or causal or having anything to do with the structure of the world that in a way, at least with Kant, right, gets imposed on the mind. So we end up Creating. We are half creators of the phenomena. We get data, we get a given, and then we impose our human cognitive categories on that. And that's a kind of precursor to an idea that's very popular today, which is social construction, which I think in many ways is a misuse of this. But that's another discussion. So I think that's a very interesting, as you point out, for him to say we are half creating the world. It's a very interesting way to talk about his relationship to nature and explains some of the sad perplexity, I think. And in his case. Right. What is he bringing to the table that transforms the experience of nature? It's the former memory of it, but also whatever experiences he's had in between then and now and a more contemplative frame of mind. And he's. And he tells us he's not going to complain about that, which is, you know, when you say protest too much, that's more evidence.

24:31 Erin: Right, sure.

24:32 Wes: Favor that. When someone says, I'm not mourning, I'm not complaining about this, then they are. They are actually complaining.

24:39 Erin: Well, I think, you know, you're helping me cast the lines about the godly presence in a different light because I see that same evidence of that German romanticism that you're speaking of. Maybe just to recap a little bit, he talks about his glad animal movements and all these things that were then just an appetite to him. And he. He says that now the loss of these aching joys and dizzy raptures is made up for by a more mature, sublime response and the sense of God or a divine spirit being interfused in what he's seeing now. And I'm thinking of what you're saying, because it seems to me that he would have to go back a second time to perceive the godly presence. Because I'm thinking of the ways in which we kind of. We narrativize our experience only in retrospect. And I think, like that narrativization is indicative of perceiving a divine plan in what has already happened to us. So it's very difficult in the moment to see God, I think, working through things that are happening. But it's easy in hindsight to say, oh, now I get it, because that happened. So that this could happen. So that this could happen. Right. So the ability to look back on things and to reflect in memory, it adds this other extrasensory perception on top of just mediating things through the mind. I think you're also mediating things through the divine will. Right. Or the Divine plan. And I think that's kind of what he's getting at here. Now. He sees that it's infused with this divine spirit. Of course, it was before, but he couldn't perceive that. So I see this too, as him sort of taking further evolutions toward maybe thinking back fondly, even on the intervening years between when he left this spot the first time and now, you know, as difficult as they were, and as much as they induced this sort of like rapid maturation in him, implying that they were very hard years to get through that, he now sees the narrative there, the divine plan that was there.

26:35 Wes: That's really interesting. You're making me think of something else in Kant, and this is his. It's often called the third Critique, the Critique of Judgment, which includes aesthetics, a theory of aesthetic judgment, judgments that something is beautiful. And one of Kant's ideas is that in our relationship to the natural world, part of our experience is of purposiveness without purpose, right? So from the standpoint of a naturalistic framework, we're not intelligent design people. We know that this is all brought about by natural causal mechanisms. But when we notice that things are beautiful, it's like noticing a surplus. It didn't have to be made this way, right? So this is the distinction, Wordsworth's distinction between. Is between a more contemplative appreciation of beauty and then more a more youthful experience of just. Of pleasure, of being, having one's impulses stimulated by nature. But when we experience beauty, it's as if the world has been designed for us. In other words, if we want to give an evolutionary explanation of behavior, and we think that pleasure is critical to that, fine. But is beauty really necessary? So beauty seems to be a kind of surplus over and above what can be explained naturally. Even if it isn't right. Even if there is actually a natural explanation for it. It gives us intimation for Kant, of the divine, of a higher power that has created nature for us, so to speak. Otherwise, you know, we wouldn't be able to experience it as beautiful. And that you were saying something different, which involved narrative, but it might be related, right? So the way in which we tell a. What is it? We tell a story, right? We give a. We. We put, you know, the manifold of the. The chaotic experiences that have happened in the past, we organize that into a story, and so we're able to give it meaning and also give it a kind of narrative trajectory, maybe a purpose. So it starts to look as if it's more organized, right? There's history to it, it looks as if it's more organized than it seemed at first. And if it is more organized, then in a similar way it's. It would be an indication of the presence of the divine. So you can say, oh, you're reading into it, or this is just the, you know, our application of our kind of meaning making faculties that have been written into the brain by evolution. Or you can take another tack, and this is what Hegel will do is say, everything you call cognitive, I call God. Everything you call reading in, I just call God. Because that is self consciousness. And God and nature all have, they're at bottom the same thing. They have the same structure. I can show you that. And so anyway, I really liked this idea that you brought up because it connects so directly into German idealism and ultimately Romanticism.

29:41 Erin: Yeah, I was thinking too, like the narrative element of it. Those of no belief who are listening to me go on about this. I mean, I think this is just something that we do to get through things, you know, is to narrativize these things. Whether or not we want to attribute it to a divine plan or to look, it was all okay because here, here we are now. And there was a kind of an irrationality maybe to where we ended up. Whether or not we want to call that God is really interesting or maybe just our own, you know, desire for meaning making, as you're saying.

30:08 Wes: Yeah, so this talk of the divine is a good segue into the very. Into the way the stanza ends, which is with, you know, I was talking about beauty and there's. The concept of sublimity is related and those two things are, you know, mentioned. Kant's third critique, the sublime is a big part of that and it's a big point of discussion among other philosophers at the time. So. And of course he brings it up directly. He's not, he's not shy about just using the word sublime in his poem. He's telling you about his experience and he's going to do that directly if necessary. But what he keeps telling us is that our experience of nature, and I think our experience of art as well, is not just about passion and emotion. Right. This works against the stereotype of the Romantic. It's this important fusion of contemplativeness and thinking with passion. And the two Wordsworth explicitly say, in other places these things are not opposed to. They go together. And here in the same way that the cliff joins the sky and the river, these things are joined. So what he gets out of nature again, in the end, it's the spirit that rolls through all these things. So he's still a lover of meadows. But that doesn't just mean sense. It also means sensibility. Right. So it's the anchor also of his purest thoughts.

31:31 Erin: Yeah. And he also says, you know, he explicitly uses the word language. And. And in so doing kind of exposes maybe what the romantic sensibility that you just described doesn't want to recognize, which is that if you're going to get your thoughts down on paper, you have to be a little more scientific about, you know, about being able to reproduce these things or to order them properly in a poem. Right. So the reflection and the mediation of the experience has to happen in order for the incident to be recorded.

31:59 Wes: Yeah. And, you know, and a thinking and a more analytic frame of mind. And it's also his moral being. So he's reminding us he's that unremembered character building pleasure here. The kind of formative influence of the nurture in nature. The formative influences that comes out here in a more. In our more reflective ethical moments as well, our decisions. What do I do? What's right, what's good. We might think that nature is the antithesis to that because it's always tempting us with, you know, what is with again, with pleasure. Doing what comes naturally. Right. But no, it's not just about. Nature doesn't just instill in us doing what comes naturally. It is actually the source of one's moral being. It is the source of some sort of relationship to nature as a source of one's capacity to be. To be good, to be ethical.

32:52 Erin: Good. Shall I read the last? Stand up?

32:54 Wes: Yeah.

32:54 Erin: Okay. This is another long one I'm going to try not to laugh at. My dearest friend. My dear, dear friend. All right, here we go. Nor perchance, if I were not thus taught, should I the more suffer my genial spirits to decay. For thou art with me here upon the banks of this fair river. Thou. My dearest friend. My dear, dear friend. And in thy voice I catch the language of my former heart. And read my former pleasures in the shooting lights of thy wild eyes. Oh, yet a little while may I behold in thee what I once was. My dear, dear sister. And this prayer I make, Knowing that nature never did betray the heart that loved her. Tis her privilege through all the years of this our life, to lead from joy to joy. For she can so inform the mind that is within us. So impress with quietness and beauty. And so feed with lofty thoughts. That neither evil tongues, rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men. Nor greetings where no kindness is Nor all the dreary intercourse of daily life shall e' er prevail against us or disturb our cheerful faith that all which we behold is full of blessings. Therefore let the moon shine on thee in thy solitary walk and let the misty mountain winds be free to blow against thee. And in after years, when these wild ecstasies shall be matured into a sober pleasure when thy mind shall be a mansion for all lovely forms thy memory be as a dwelling place for all sweet sounds and harmonies. O, then, if solitude or fear or pain or grief should be thy portion with what healing thoughts of tender joy Wilt thou remember me and these my exhortations? Nor perchance, if I should be where I no more can hear thy voice Nor catch from thy wild eyes these gleams dreams of past existence. Wilt thou then forget that on the banks of this delightful stream we stood together? And that I, so long a worshipper of nature hither came unwearied in that service? Rather say, with warmer love. Oh, with far deeper zeal of holier love. Nor wilt thou then forget that after many wanderings, many years of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs and this green pastoral landscape were to me more dear both for themselves and for thy sake.

35:15 Wes: So that line was originally, my dearest friend. My dear, dear friend. My dear, dear, dear, dear friend. And then she read a draft and she cut out that third one. But so it's interesting now. So he keeps piling up the meanings of this. You know, this revisiting this scene. And we got hope, in particular added last time. And then, as, of course, a reiteration of the contemplative importance of nature. And now we get this idea of his vision of her future, his hopes for her. So this is also something that's transforming. That's half creating the landscape, Right. This is transformation forming. His experience of it is his anticipation of what it will mean to her.

36:08 Erin: Yeah. It's kind of bizarre that this only happens in the last stanza. It always surprises me. It's like he's been going on for 20 minutes. And then finally the camera kind of zooms out a little bit from his face. We realize that he's sitting next to someone who's just sort of been staring at him like.

36:23 Wes: It's like that Arrested Development moment or several moments panning out in Buster. Buster is sitting there.

36:29 Erin: Buster is there.

36:30 Wes: Unbeknownst. Yeah. One might see it as cheap when not used comedically. Self referentially is a kind of Cheap trick, this kind of reveal.

36:40 Erin: No, I mean, he's been talking to her all along. But we thought that he was talking to us, and maybe we still do when he says, my dearest friend, my dear, dear friend, and we think, oh, we're special. But in fact, no, Right.

36:51 Wes: And like I said, I had to figure out if the sister really existed. Even I was so confused.

36:57 Erin: It can be read both ways. I mean, he's speaking to us and to her. He's looking at her and he's seeing his younger self all 18 months that separate them or whatever

37:08 Wes: age.

37:10 Erin: And he is, I guess, you know, to give him credit, he is seeing her glad enjoyment, her glad animal movements, her being like a roe, bounding around perhaps, and therefore checking her. He's not maybe robbing her of that experience immediately. Or maybe he is, who knows?

37:26 Wes: Stop rowing around like that. The word on the screen is you've been rowing, rowing around town. Sorry.

37:40 Erin: And yeah, he sees the shooting lights of her wild eyes. And then we get the famous line, nature never did betray the hunk that loved her, which we already addressed a little bit last time, but is there more that we can say about this now that we're almost done here?

37:54 Wes: Well, I just wanted to say that it's relevant to what you just said, but. So in thy voice I catch the language of my former heart and read my former pleasures in the shooting lights of thy wild eyes. So, yeah, maybe you just said this, but he's not trying to cramp her style and suppress her passion, part of his experience, right? So he can see it to some extent through his own youthful passion, what the landscape meant to him back then. And then what it means to her in the present. And for him, it's lost. So there's a sad perplexity, there's an element of mourning to that, but also, again, a appreciation of the compensations for that, the spiritual compensations. And with her, there's the anticipation of that happening. So it's kind of sad in the sense, right, he's anticipating a young person, and let's just pretend he's really a lot older than her. Maybe he is spiritually an old soul, but it's this anticipation of a young, you know, you, you, especially when you get to my age, you look at the relationship of much younger people, say, in their, you know, late teens, early 20s to the world, and you. You remember what that's like and how thrilling it can be and how awfully painful it can. Can be. And in a way you miss it, but you're Also glad you're not going through it anymore if you aren't, you know, so one can envy the young. And that, I think is part of the source of doing the graduate type of thing and coming at them and saying, you know, let's get down to business, let's do plastics. You got to worry about your career, you got to worry about money. You kind of. It seems caring and practical, but often I think it comes out of envy and a desire to deprive younger people of their dreams, which they should. They should be doing that. They should be bounding like a row. They shouldn't go straight into finance. There's always time for that. Or plastics. There's always time. It's my advice to listeners of this podcast, so can always sell out. So you want to be careful about your advice and your admonitions. It's not just about the fact that they can't take the advice and live by that, but as. As you mentioned, they need to go through these experiences themselves. So I think it can be sad to be with her and to know that this type of excitement is something that's going to fade, but also to appreciate what maturation means, what the path of maturity can mean for someone and for that to be a pleasant idea as well. So this kind of idea of her transformation, or just more generally a transformation, the sort of course from a more immediate sensuous relationship to the world to something more spiritual and contemplative. It's sad, right? So I think the way Hegel puts it is that language kind of murders reality, right? It interposes the symbolic order, interposes a veil, a layer between us and immediate experience. You know, and this is part of what we do growing up. We lose that maternal immediacy and this kind of early symbiosis and merger, and then we are forever kind of without our other halves, so to speak, as Aristophanes puts it in Plato's Symposium, right? And so we're always lost. We're always looking for this thing to complete us or to fulfill us, this thing that we can't really ultimately have. So there's that loss, but then there's the conviction that it's also more importantly a gain. That. Right. That human self consciousness and language and science and the arts, that's all worth it. It's all worth the loss of our ownness, right? We're no longer animals just bounding around the forest or the grass, right? It sucks. It's a horrible loss. We've been expelled from id, but there's something more important that we're compensated with.

41:55 Erin: Or maybe it just behooves all those people who have written all this stuff down to try and convince us that what they're doing is worthwhile.

42:01 Wes: He's preaching. He's preaching.

42:03 Erin: Yeah.

42:03 Wes: It's an argument. It is an argument for poetry, ultimately. You know, it really is.

42:07 Erin: Right, right. I think he's trying to give Dorothy, you know, a sneak preview of what will happen when she's as wise and mature as he is. When her mind becomes a mansion for all lovely forms. Thy memory be as a dwelling place for all sweet sounds and harmonies. Which is interesting because I'm thinking back to last time and how I was a little puzzled by the fact that we don't really get a house in that first description of the landscape. We don't get the actual cottage. We get green to the very door, which is the closest we come. Right. And here now we've finally get the house, but it's a mansion. And maybe there's something here, too, about being a mansion for all lovely forms. There's something of a cathedral or a church in that as well. And the.

42:54 Wes: Not Tintern Abbey.

42:56 Erin: Right.

42:57 Wes: So present here, it's just off in the distance. But.

43:00 Erin: Yeah, right. And that's something that we haven't really talked about is that the fact that he effectively ignores Tintern Abbey's direct representation in this poem. But maybe this is part of that too. Right. Maybe there's something of the implication of the abbey in this that.

43:16 Wes: Well, he calls himself a worshiper of nature. Right. And he's at the periphery of the abbey. So what is the relationship between this nature worship and God worship?

43:26 Erin: Right, right. Well, I mean, it's a place that retains, you know, memory of several different ages. Right. Just as Wordsworth retains his memory of his. His youth and different experiences of the world. So, I mean, in a sense, Tincher Nabi has become a temple to nature now because it's been overtaken by nature. You know, you can go inside it, so to speak, but it really doesn't have a roof and it's all grown over. And that's part of why. I mean, it just looks so incredible, you know, the altar and everything, or I'm not sure actually, if the altar is still there, but, you know, all the things we would normally associate with trappings of a church and. And all that are now gone and replaced by ivy and grass and things like that.

44:07 Wes: So you'd wanted to return to this. And I think this is good. So we can now do what? Wordsworth, you know, we can kind of recapitulate what Wordsworth is doing and we can return to our former discussion of whether nature ever betrays the heart that loves her or that loved her. This is sort of, I'm reminded of our Keats, of course, episode on the urn, right. Beauty being truth and truth being beauty. It's at the same level of boldness of assertion. It's come right out and assert this very grand thesis and in this case, probably in both cases, but seemingly implausible. And the poem has told us about the many ways in which nature can betray us. Not least is in leading us onto temptation, right? Of. Of being the source of instinct and impulse and sinfulness and desire and. But of course, you know, we. It's our embodiment, it's our mortality. Yes, it's pleasure, but it's also a lot of pain. Does his explanation hold up? Which is just that it, despite all of these things, it's our kind of our meta. Relationship to nature, the way we can hold on to it in our minds, right? So it's not being immediately. It's not being natural beings or being immediately embedded in the natural scene and having the immediate experience of the natural scene that is nature's faithfulness to us. She's not faithful in the present moment in that sense. She's not faithful in her natural relationship to us. I would say she only becomes faithful at the point of contemplativeness or self consciousness, right. Or memory. She helps us build this, this mansion that we can, we can store up these memories of that more immediate relationship and I guess we leave the. Leave the bad stuff out and use the good, the good part of it to comfort us. So maybe, you know, maybe the idea is that on this kind of mediated plane of experience where we are doing half the creating, once we've contributed our part to the raw manifold, the raw experience of nature, then it becomes something redemptive and non betraying in another way. Maybe saying that once we've united it to the divine. I don't know. Does that make sense?

46:33 Erin: It does. It's a little bit unrealistic, obviously. And the, the kind of mind and heart that would express this idea that all which we behold is full of blessings, that this faith is to just recognize that the blessings of nature. It's a little bit of the row talking. Maybe he hasn't gone to the next.

46:54 Wes: He hasn't leveled up the deeper zeal of holier love. It's still zeal, right?

47:01 Erin: I mean he recognizes the, the bad things about, you know, the dreary intercourse of daily life. He recognizes the bad things that can happen to you and sees them and calls them by name, you know, the sneers of selfish men, etc.

47:12 Wes: And it's the memories of nature which are supposed to keep you. They're supposed to alleviate the pain of those things.

47:18 Erin: Right, right. And of course they can't, you know, in the moment, you can't. Maybe you can if it's not that bad. But, you know, these things tend to derail us. That's part of. Of the nature of being human, is that we lose sight of those moments of, you know, it can't all be, you know, divine gratitude and having something really crappy happen to us and then just, you know, oh, think of Tintern Abbey. It's all gonna be okay.

47:42 Wes: You know, just imagining, you know, her sister falling and spraining her ankle. She's like, ow. And he's just. Just think of Tintern Abbey. Shaking Tintern Abbey. Nature cannot betray you. Think of the wonderful things. Yeah, that pothole betrayed me.

48:07 Erin: Well, it's also. He's employing her to think of nature mediated through him. Right. Which is also really funny. Think of Big Brother and his wonderful exhortations to you with what healing thoughts of tender joy. When wilt thou remember me? And these my exhortations.

48:23 Wes: She needs the priest. Apparently she's not going to be a Protestant.

48:27 Erin: Oh, there you go. There you go. Yeah, no problems with his ego there. But the idea of the blessing and what he wishes for her, I think is what I'm reading here, that maybe she won't be able to have this monk like reaction to the slings and arrows of the world. World. But the idea is that this is what he wishes for her. And I do love much like a priest, I think there's a kind of the blessing that happens at the very end of the mass or whatever, which can sometimes be kind of a long multi part blessing. Let the moon shine on thee in thy solitary walk. You know, this is very much reminiscent of those. To me it's very touching. Let the misty mountain winds be free to blow against thee. You know, so he wishes her, I think, these wild ecstasies, but also this mature pleasure. So he wishes her like a full life of both, you know, the roe kind of joy and the mature joy. And he wishes that this can heal her in those bad moments, perhaps, you know, by blessing her in this way and by being a mediator of God's spirit in this moment or nature spirit or both. I think the moment will come when she will be able to take these lessons to heart, you know, without the expectation that she's going to be able to always be just sort of meditating through all the bad moments of life. So. Yeah. So I see this, you know, as a hope, as you say, as a hope, rather than maybe a realistic expectation. But in its hope, it's quite beautiful, I think, and sweet. If we forgive his. His grandeur.

50:05 Wes: Yeah. And it's. Although, oddly enough, you know, he doesn't actually. Even though I totally agree about that sort of grandioseness of these lines, for some reason, my fantasy of his character. And maybe that's his. Maybe it's just from reading about him. Right. And some of the secondary stuff, the background is. I don't have this impression of him as a grandiose person. He's almost oddly subdued for a romantic, in a way, oddly stayed in some sense. Hence this emphasis on contemplation and stuff. But I was going to say, you're making me think of how poignant this is and how maybe it doesn't exactly start with the return to the natural scene. It starts with his encounter with his sister. Walking with her, hiking with her, essentially being with her. But this encounter that we have of others, that we can be with them, but we can't be with them totally. We can't be in their heads, feeling their feelings. We can't always be there for them. So you love someone, you love your little sister, but you know that you can't do anything about all the pain that she's going to experience. You can't directly alleviate those things. And you want to do that, you know, you want to give to that other person whatever it is that's going to prevent them from being painful or especially being lonely. Right. So this talk of a solitary walk through life is a callback to the seclusion in the first stanza, right? The two types of seclusion, the seclusion of the natural scene, which is evocative of the seclusion of instinct, the way in which instinct is unseen or unconscious or unavailable to us. And then the thoughts of more deep seclusion, the kind of seclusion we get in the contemplative moment. I start to wonder with this callback to that in the last stanza with this word, solitary. If it isn't, you know, his experience of her. Seclusion in the sense of the seclusion of subjectivity. Right. The seclusion of another person's mind, which is not directly available to us, it's cut off from us so the hope is that the relationship that her relationship to nature can penetrate in an enduring way and in a way that his love by itself can't. Right. His love is not enough to be a constant comfort to her on her solitary walk. But if he can give her this gift of a contemplative encounter with the natural world, which is to say this certain kind of relationship to the instinctual, certain kind of reflective relationship to the instinctual, then it transforms the meaning of pain. And it can be like a bomb, you know, and the kind of bomb that one gets in being engaged with the arts and with philosophy. And it really is that, you know, and so wanting someone to have that, that's a real hope. That's a realistic hope. That's something that you might be able to. Might be able to give them. So that's what I was thinking of at the end here. Just this concept of being solitary or secluded and the way that shows up in instinct and contemplativeness and then finally in our relations to others, the way in which their. Their subjectivities are cut off from ours.

53:23 Erin: That's beautiful. I like the last line here in which, you know, we. We do get from him, I think, to that next level, because he's able to, even though he's. He's protesting too much about his lack of supreme enjoyment that he. He's experiencing in this contemplative moment, that because he is experiencing the nature now through his sister, I think that's the development and the evolution that happens at the end, that he's now going to remember this experience not only through his own youth, but through hers as well, and taking that lesson of witnessing all of those things that you say and seeing them through her eyes and. And kind of in that way almost doubling his enjoyment and experience, but also his kind of consciousness.

54:14 Wes: Yeah, we have to bring. You're making me think that we have to bring our relationships to others, to this experience of nature. Right. This is again, part of what we have create, but we have to bring the social. In some sense, his relationship to another, to another person is an integral. Or to society in general, including the city and all that stuff. But it's an integral part of what forms or half creates this experience. But yeah. So I think for postscript, I was thinking maybe we could talk about our relationship to nature. Is it really all that Wordsworth cracks it up to be? Is it the bomb? Is it a basis for a mansion? Is it all that? So that's what we'll do in Postscript and sounds good. All right.

55:06 Erin: Thank you, thank you.

55:10 Wes: And thank you to everyone who listened to this episode. subscribe@patreon.com subtext Also, this podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. airwavemedia.com AirwaveMedia.com.