This is the 2nd installment of a four-part series in which I revisit my photographic habit as a teenager 40 years ago:
After a week in London, we rented a caravan and meandered through the English countryside for two weeks. I have no idea why we chose to travel by caravan. I suppose we thought it would be economical—save on meals and accommodation. Past experience (e.g. a cross-Canada camping trip in 1972) should have taught us that such expectations were unrealistic; my mom would resent cooking for us while on vacation so we’d eat at restaurants, and miserable weather would force us into hotels. It was a false economy, but we did it anyways.
In retrospect, renting a caravan in the UK seems particularly ill-advised. For one thing, the rental office was located in the heart of London which meant that Dad’s first experience of driving on the “wrong” side of the road involved steering an oversized vehicle with sloppy suspension down streets best suited for Mini Coopers. For another thing, camping in the UK was unpredictable. In an inversion of the usual stereotypes, camping in Ontario is a more civilized way to travel than in the UK. In Ontario, with its network of provincial parks, there is a well-maintained infrastructure for family camping. In the UK, camping (at least as Ontarians understand the word) is no more part of their culture than, say, hockey. We spent most nights parked in farmer’s fields with no guarantee of basic services like water and electricity.
I seem to recall that we made a big circle of it, up to York, then west through the Lake District, into North Wales, then south to Bath, east to Salisbury, and back to London and its caravan-hostile streets. In Wales, we had to stop at Tintern Abbey on the Wye River. I get the impression that everyone who passes that way feels obliged to stop at Tintern Abbey; the roadside signs compel it.
On stepping from the caravan, the first question that entered my head was: What happened to the roof? As a Canadian boy, I had no experience of medieval anything. My experience of sacred architecture was pretty much confined to churches built in the postwar suburban boom. Toronto had a few older churches built according to the dictates of a slap-dash neo-gothicism, but they were never allowed to fall into disrepair. In Toronto, sacred ruins would have been knocked down to make way for a shopping mall. Today, the façade would be preserved and incorporated into a condominium project.
“What’s so special about Tintern Abbey?” I wondered.
My dad answered that a famous poet had written a poem about it.
“What poet?” Teenagers can be almost as annoyingly persistent as three-year-olds when they start asking questions.
“Wordsworth. He’s one of the biggies.”
So, to be clear, a medieval monastery has been allowed to lie in ruins for centuries, and is visited by scads of people notwithstanding its ruination, all because some guy named Wordsworth—one of the biggies—wrote a poem about it? That’s ridiculous! So concluded I while under the spell of a pragmatic Presbyterianism which I inherited from my mother. I later discovered that the situation is even more ridiculous (as viewed through the lens of a pragmatic Presbyterianism) when I actually read the poem as a requirement for an undergraduate course in English Romanticism. The poem isn’t even about the abbey. You don’t have to read the the poem to figure that out. Just look at the title: Lines. The title is supplemented with the following words: “Composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the banks of the Wye during a tour, July 13, 1798.”
Let’s leave aside for the time being the debate over whether it’s possible for a poem to be about something e.g. love, death, a medieval abbey. I harbour a post-structuralist streak (related perhaps to my pragmatic Presbyterianism?) that inclines me to suppose that the primary function of a poem is to be a poem. Any attempt to identify what a poem is about is really an attempt to identify the pretext on which the poem goes about the business of being a poem. I have made an analogous suggestion in relation to photographs, either earlier in this blog, or perhaps only in my mind. I can’t remember which.
Assuming, for the time being, that I am a straight-forward reader of poetry who doesn’t care about theoretical concerns, I would say that Mr. Wordsworth’s poem is about natural splendour and the way it affects the moral imagination. That’s one ways of putting it. I suppose there are many other ways of putting it, too.
The poet stands in a place he visited once before, and he is delighted to find that, far from being absent in the intervening years, he has been present to this place, and it to him, through memory. Something about the landscape has sunk deep into his soul and he carries it with him wherever he goes. Although five years have past, he returns to the site and realizes how it has fed him. He is further pleased to realize that his second visit will sustain him into an indeterminate future.
“The picture of my mind revives again:
While here I stand, not only with the sense
Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts
That in this moment there is life and food
For future years.”
I might well write a poem which opens: “Forty years have past.” That was when I first learned of Wordsworth’s poem. Five years after that, as an undergraduate, I explored it as fully as I knew how. Now, I revisit it and find to my delight that, in fact, its words have sunk deep into my soul and I have carried it with me wherever I go. I spend time with it now and realize that its words will continue to sustain me into an indeterminate future. A syllogism emerges. Wordsworth doesn’t make it explicit, but it’s ripe for the picking: as natural beauty feeds the poet, so the poet’s artifice feeds the reader.
While the poet expresses regret for lost youth, we are not to concern ourselves, for age has enlarged his capacity to engage the world with greater depth of spirit, with the result that he is
“well pleased to recognise
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.”
Perhaps Tintern Abbey has a place in the poem after all. Perhaps its mention in the introductory lines is not accidental, but, rather, necessary to a full reading. The poet we encounter in these lines conveys the impression of a deeply spiritual man, a great soul. But his is not the spirituality of an institutional church; it is the soulfulness that finds its seat in scenes of natural wonder. It strikes me that the only fitting temple for such a soul would be one without a roof, exposed to stars and birds and rain.