Ecological-Political Landscape of “Tintern Abbey”

Ecological-Political Landscape of “Tintern Abbey”

            Prima facie, Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” exposes the Romantic sublimity through the description of nature’s serenity, idealistic view and its vastness. But the oblique presence of ecological and political landscape: the seamy side of the then English society, ecological destruction caused by industrialism and the plight of the working class, subverts that sublimity. In elaborating this claim, I will be analyzing the existing discourse on the ‘presence and absence’ of historical and ecological concern in the poem, especially among the romantic new historicists in the likes of Jerome McGann, Marjorie Levinson and William Richey, and the romantic eco-critics like James C. McKusick and Kevin Hutchings

“Tintern Abbey”, for most of more than two hundred years since its first publication in the first edition of Lyrical Ballads (1798), remained a largely uncontested masterpiece until late in the 20^th century. It was primarily because almost no one bothered to read it in historical frame of reference apart from the textual scholars trying to establish the circumstances of its composition and publication. But most of the last two decades discussion of Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” has been dominated by controversies centered on the historicist readings of the poem. How far Wordsworth acknowledged the scenes of poverty and industrial activities in the Wye valley as he made his tour with Dorothy in July 1798, and whether such scenes lie behind the poem that he wrote on July 13^th, the last day of his tour, has been the point of discussion among the scholars.

It was Jerome MacGanne’s landmark study The Romantic Ideology in 1983 that challenged the tradition reading of the whole romantic poetry including that of Wordsworth. In that polemical book he writes: “The poetry of Romanticism is everywhere marked by extreme forms of displacement and poetic conceptualization whereby the actual human issues with which the poetry is concerned are resituated in a variety of idealized localities” (qtd. in Johnston, 172). For example, William Wordsworth’s imagination in “Tintern Abbey” represses the failure of the French Revolution and erases the poverty of the Wye valley. But the butt of this polemical edge was “less romantic literature itself than the academic ideology of its present interpreters which glossed over and explained away such extreme of evasions” (Johnston, 172). In The Romantic Ideology MacGanne also shows how major Romantic texts “occlude and disguise their own involvement in certain nexus of historical relations” And this obscurantist tendency is evident in “Tintern Abbey” than in other poems of romanticism because he writes:

“At the poem’s end, we are left only with the initial scene’s simplest forms: ‘these steep woods and lofty cliffs, /And this green pastoral landscape’ 9158-59). Everything else has been erased—the abbey, the beggars and displaced vagrants, all that civilized culture creates and destroys, gets and spends. We are not permitted to remember 1793 and the turmoil of the French Revolution, neither its 1793 hopes nor—what is more to the point for Wordsworth—the subsequent ruin of those hopes.” (88)

According to Kitson, the poet’s theory of natural piety as developed in the poem “serves the interest of the ruling class and helps to maintain the status quo as it remains “complicit with the conservative minded project to turn people away from attempting to change society by political means. (qtd. in Pandey) So, the sublime claim of romantic imagination is a tact to exclude the then socio-political structure of the society.

            Marjorie Levinson also charges Wordsworth of developing a “fiercely private vision” by ignoring the plight of the rural poor living near Abbey. She argues, the poem’s “primary poetic action is the suppression of the social” (“Insight and Oversight.” qtd. in Richey 197). For her, Tintern Abbey represents the escape from cultural values, a portion of rural England “under the sign of the picturesque” (16-17). What is central to the argument is the absence of politics in Wordsworth’s poems, especially “Tintern Abbey”, and Wordsworth is “seeking to purify his mind of political thoughts through the picturesque description, and thus severing his interest from history.

            Another notable romantic new historicist William Richey has another interpretive line distinct from that of McGann and Levinson. Unlike the latter scholars, this scholar tries to defend Wordsworth of the charges that Wordsworth always erases history from his poems. Richey argues that in the poem “Tintern Abbey”, the poet has not erased the history but the history or the politics is present there in the poem though obliquely. For him, Wordsworth had every political movement in his mind when he wrote the poem. When Wordsworth was writing the poem “Tintern Abbey” Wordsworth was under close government surveillance. Richey writes: “I maintain that Wordsworth-- writing during a time of strict government censorship—constructs what appears to be private meditation, but which is in fact a very public poem replete with political implications” (198).

 Richey’s argument is that Wordsworth could not be obvious in his poems. French Revolution was on its heyday, England wanted to contain that influence at any cost. So, it could not tolerate anyone writing in support of French Revolution and against the hardships that the poor English people had to undergo.  So, to counter this challenge, Wordsworth chose loco-descriptive genre of poetry. Loco-descriptive poem basically described the locations, especially the beautiful locations, natural scenes and so on. Sub-genre of this poem ‘revisionist poem’ and this genre by nature has politics. In the poem “Tintern Abbey”, Wordsworth focused upon how his perception of the landscape has changed in the intervening five years (“Five Years have passed, Five summers with the length/Of five long winters…” (1-2)) and much of this change results from the thoroughly different political circumstances of these two visits (Here two dates are July 1793 and 1798). Political upheaval and the political change affected his impression. In July 1793, Wordsworth supported French Revolution. But by 1798, this faith had vanished as French Revolution took violent turn like attack on the democratic cantons of Switzerland which for Wordsworth signaled the revolution’s betrayal of its original aims, as Wordsworth himself wrote in “A letter to the Bishop of Llandaff.” This oscillation in Wordsworth’s stance is present in the poem though subtly.

            For Richey, “Tintern Abbey” deals with the politics of memory. In politics of memory, things of favor are exaggerated where as the things that are not in favor are not expressed much. Because, Richey argues, memory by nature is political, this poem is political. This claim comes in contrast to the one McGann and Levinson made that there is the erasure of historical and political realities in “Tintern Abbey.”

            Romantic eco-critics like James C. McKusick, Jonathan Bete and Kevin Hutchings tried to analyze the ecological landscape in the poem that attacked the idealistic sublime view of nature. Eco-criticism, also known as ecological literary criticism, according to McKusick “first came to prominence during the 1990s, a period of increasing environmental concern throughout the industrialized world” (199) and Romantic poetry became one of the most important terrains for the development of eco-criticism because, as Hutchings in “Ecocriticism in British Romantic Studies” writes: “Romantic literature often appears to value to the non-human world most highly, celebrating nature as beneficent antidote to the crass world of getting and spending and lamenting its perceived destruction at he hand of technological industrial, capitalist consumerism” (172-73).  Eco-criticism takes literature, especially poetry as a means of fundamental change in the consciousness of the human being because “the business of literature is to work upon consciousness.”(172)

            Like Romantic new historicism, eco-criticism has questioned the Wordsworth’s reputation as a nature poet. The question is not how much the poet talks about nature, but the central concern is whether the poet has been honest in his description of landscape and also if he is being one sided in his view. It is now argued that Wordsworth with the depiction of sublime aspect of nature is sidelining the contemporary reality.

            In “Tintern Abbey”, Wordsworth describes how he returned to the banks of the Wye River in 1798, after a five year’s absence. By 1970s, the place had become the site of small-scale industries such as tanning, charcoal burning, and iron-smelting, and the water of the Wye river were heavily polluted by the toxic by products of these industries.

Industrial Revolution of 18^th century radically changed the society. But it had many drawbacks. It created a labor class people. These people were in extremely petty condition. They could not do themselves their skilful task, because they could not compete with the industry. So, they had to die of starvation. Similarly, child labor increased dramatically and so did the crimes. The most of all these problems that the eco-critics are more concerned with is the destruction in the nature. Industries were established in large numbers. This is not the problem, but they were established destroying the nature. Natural environment was heavily impacted. The smoke and the waste materials produced from the industry directly caused problem in the ecology. Similarly, industries were built near rivers and jungles so that they did not need to move to other place in search of raw materials for the productions. So, there were many beggars in England during that period who used to move from one place to another in search of food.

As Levinson and McGann charged romantic poets of erasing the history, eco-criticism analyses the poem in the similar vein. William Wordsworth in his poem only focused on the sublime aspect of nature replete with serenity. However, the seamy side of the society is not shown in the poem. In the poem “Tintern Abbey”, the poet does the same thing. He does not show the society of that time, rather he sings about nature that is sublime for him. However, going deeply, we can find the ecological and political landscape present in the poem though obliquely. This oblique presence of social concern subverts the natural serenity and the sublimity by showing the actual pitiable condition of the society.

The oblique presence of the political and ecological landscape is noticeable from the very first stanza of the poem. The poem opens with the recounting of the poet of his visit to Wye River:

 “Five years have passed; five summers, with the length/

Of five long winters! and again I hear/

These waters, rolling from mountain-springs/

With a sweet inland murmur.” (1-2)

In these lines, the poet is singing about nature in quite sublime tone. The serenity of nature, the sweetness of the nature is presented. Up to ten lines, the poet presents nature as beatific. But from line eleven, we see something hidden in that sublime presentation of nature. It seems as if the poet is trying to screen something. The reference of hedge-rows begins to unfold the political reality hidden beneath the ostensible description of the serenity of nature: Once again I see/These hedge-rows—hardly hedge rows, little lines/Of sportive wood run wild. (16-19) For Levinson, these lines are the characteristic of a tendency in the poem: “an object does not materialize in the poem before it is effaced or smudged.” (6) Levinson believes that “hedge-rows” to be “an emblem of enclosure,” a sign of the rural impoverishment that Wordsworth evades throughout the poem.

Throughout the stanza, Wordsworth is using euphemisms to talk about nature and its beauty. By doing so, he is trying to evade the reality. England at that time was relatively poor and this historical fact is not mentioned by the poet in direct way. It is present obliquely. The lines : “Pastoral farms/Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke/Bent up; in silence from among the trees.” (18-20) are euphemistic description intended to divert the attention from material to spiritual. Levinson argues “the cottages plots notes in the poem are ‘green to the very door’ because the common lands had been enclosed and the only arable land remaining to the cottagers was his from garden (“Oversight” 30). Because many factories were to be established there, the lands of the common people were enclosed leaving them very small area for cultivation. And those factories produced waster materials like smoke which caused destruction of the whole ecological balance. As shown in the poem, these “wreaths of smoke” come from ‘among the trees’. What it suggests is the destruction of natural beauty by the industrial activities. But no where in the poem, the poet shows this side of reality and continuously talks of the natural serenity that he got going to Wye River. In the succeeding lines, Wordsworth talks about “vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods”. Vagrant dwellers, in fact were beggars, another painful side of reality that Wordsworth does not openly tell. The establishment of factories made large numbers of population jobless, and even those who worked as labor could not have a better life. These labor class people suffered from starvation as they were employed in very low wages. So, they ultimately became beggars and the ‘vagrant dwellers’ of the poem refer to that reality. But this reality is present in oblique manner for which Levinson charges Wordsworth of “projecting only nature’s fairest and most interesting properties” (46).  Wordsworth tries to evade this reality by talking about the natural sublimity.

In the same way, “vagrant dwellers” can be associated with Wordsworth himself and also with Dorothy. Before coming live with her brother in 1975, Dorothy had lived an extremely unsettled existence. Similarly until he received a legacy from Calvet in 1795, Wordsworth himself had lived an equally rootless existence.

The structural refrain ‘once upon’ in the poem also has to do with the politics; to show the oscillation in Wordsworth’s response to the political scenario of the Europe-namely The French Revolution. ‘Sad music of humanity’ hints at what Wordsworth thought of French Revolution.

Thus, in “Tintern Abbey” we can find the political-ecological landscape present obliquely. The oblique presence of the misery of the poor people of that time, the destruction of ecological balance that was taking horrendous shape due to the industrialism, the seamy side of the contemporary English society in the poem subverts the nature’s sublimity. 

(Unedited first draft of my research paper)

 © Rajan K. Gautam, 2008