Tintern Abbey | William Wordsworth - Line by Line Explanation

0:00 will thou then forget that on the banks of this delightful stream we stood together [Music] hello and welcome back to nipple pop this is munami mukherjee and here in this channel we are making videos for students of english literature of colleges and universities we have been getting many requests from our subscribers and viewers that we should make some videos on the poems from the romantic period so here we are with a very important poem today the landmark

0:48 poem of the romantic period which is very famously known as the tinton abbey by william woodsworth don't skip anything in this video because we are going to look at the text the context the theme the symbols and the ways in which wordsworth communicates what he really feels about nature about life about religion and about humanity in this wonderful way i welcome all of you and i expect you to subscribe to us so that you get notified every time a new video comes up [Music] when i was growing up you know in my school days we had poems by what

1:33 especially poems like the daffodils the solitary reaper uh you know we started to have this impression that wordsworth is a very old person who loves to look at natural objects describes them so we had this vague impression and then when i went on to study literature then i started to understand the whole folly of my initial understanding of wordsworth many of you who have not been initiated into the poetry of wordsworth yet who are you know you can say freshmen from the college or maybe you are first-year students in that case you

2:18 simply have this idea that wordsworth shelley they belong to a class of people who were escapists who love to travel among natural ambiance and somehow you have this feeling that these poems are simple poems if you have been through the video that i have made on the background of the romantic period then you have realized the gravity the seriousness that romantic poetry represents i'm not going into uh detailed biographical introduction to wordsworth or you know his uh times because we have already covered that to a large extent he was born in 1770

3:04 and it was before the french revolution and we know that french revolution acted as a trigger you know trigger which made people feel that uh monarchy was not the absolute be all and all of establishments that democracy was a possibility that people should and could fight for their rights they started to believe in concepts of equality liberty so it kind of freed the european mind of age old traditions and that happened in the year 1789 now this french revolution this kind of had an impact on the thought of british people especially two persons wordsworth and

3:51 coleridge who ended up publishing a book a very important book which is called the lyrical balance why was this book important what was the central theme that wordsworth and coleridge wanted to portray wanted to represent if you read this poem tint an abbey you understand the crux of their ideology the crux of their you can see the summary of what verse was really wanted to communicate to us or rather to his readers through lyrical balance in general so we will read this poem not just to understand this poem but it's like an introduction to

4:36 the whole idea that wordsworth represents we will have some discussion on some of the philosophical concepts which we need to understand but i will try to make it easy for you by reading the poem as we will go on with it and wherever needed we will pause we will take a break we can just come back a little bit and think about how that line how that word is relevant not just to understand what's but to understand romanticism and romanticism as uh you can say as an extension of some other previously existing thought or philosophical idea all right so

5:24 enough introduction there let's talk about the title first although we are referring to this poem as tinton abbey the whole title is different you know it's a longer version and it was very common in those days to have long titles for your poems and it's almost like you summarize your whole poem there you talk about what the poem is about and what you're going to say in that so you have some kind of guesses when you look at the whole title and it's called lines written a few miles above tintern abbey there's a comma after that and then he says on revisiting the banks of the y during a tour july 13 1798.

6:11 that's a huge you know almost prosaic title prozac means it's not a very uh click-bait kind of a title you know what a clickbait is like when you surf through the youtube or facebook then uh there are these very attractive titles to videos and they are so attractive you want to click on them to see what's about but here you have a very flat title you know it's not very inspiring it's like somebody is starting to write an essay and that's very normal because that's very expected because this is not going to be just a poem it's more like a poetic essay okay so there's an argument here there's a logical sequence of you know you can say arguments which he makes

6:58 points that he makes and then the counterpoints that he puts on and then he establishes a theory in front of us so he chooses to be prosaic another thing that is very important about this poem is he is giving us a location here so he's talking about tinton away as a geographical fixed location we usually have this feeling that romanticism is about non-fixity in a romantic poet they talk about vague things about remote locations which doesn't exist in this world but he is talking about a place which actually exists and not just actually exists he also gives the time when he goes there and the occasion like

7:45 during a tour and then he uses the word revisiting the banks of the why why is the river which flows in front of the abbey so he is giving us a fixed location a fixed time a fixed location and exactly a fixed date that is 13th of july 1798 and probably this whole uh thing about you know fixing a place a time a location an occasion this whole thing robs the title of any mystery and we usually associate romanticism with mystery and magic right it's like the arabian night kind of mystery where is mystery here well uh

8:32 for one thing the word tinton abbey it is a very prosaic word isn't it it's abby is like a church building usually not a normal like cathedral or something it's like a place where the monks they used to gather just like the abbott you can see he used to be in charge of the people uh who were taking up religious orders and tinton abbey during this year in 1798 by this time tinton abbey had turned into a ruin so technically it was not a place where christians went to worship it was a place if you have a look at the picture you

9:20 would understand it was a place which was very much assimilated with the natural surroundings so it was more like an extension of nature so tintanabe it loses its connection with human civilization and becomes more connected with ambient nature and if you uh focus on the picture you would notice how the whole building which is again uh it's in ruins entirely covered with moss and greenery and surrounded by uh mountains and there's a water body in front of it the riverway so although the title looks brazilian

10:06 without mystery the place doesn't it carries all the mysticism all the mysteriousness of any medieval castle or any medieval structure which used to be the setting for gothic novels later on and this place was not uh something that was what was visiting for the first time he uses the word revisiting which means he's talking about coming back so he had been away and now he's coming back and he gives us what he feels the moment he's back here all right so we will just take up the text as it comes five years have passed five summers with the length of five

10:52 long winters and again i hear these waters rolling from their mountain springs with a sweet inland murmur you notice that when we read this poem we are not stopping where the line ends so we kind of flow down to the next line because unless you do that you won't have the whole sentence to think about or the proper pause where you need to stop so if you just read it like this that you know five years have passed five summers with the length of five long winters and again i hear these waters rolling from the mountain springs it doesn't make sense so he is writing a kind of poem

11:37 which was very new why new see you already know i guess about alexander pope he wrote in the 18th century okay and then if you have gone through gray's elegy uh you know that heroic couplet or rhymed verse that was very popular during the 18th century the the period just before wordsworth wrote okay and then if you go back a little more to the point where you reach the blank verse of milton yes there is no rhyme in paradise lost but the kind of language that milton was using that was very heavy you know it was serious and heavy and you needed loads of guide books to

12:23 go through the word notes to go through the whole text okay so that was paradise laws and here you look at something which reads like normal conversation it's like somebody is actually talking to you and this is what was what was talking about he was talking about in in the preface he clearly wrote he's talking about poetry being something which is used to communicate poetry is not something which should be difficult to understand it should be something which can be freely communicated to the reader or to the person who is listening to it so when we go through these lines we realize wordsworth's idea of poetic diction

13:09 wordsworth's idea of putting language that it should be a democratic one and that was influenced by the french revolution equality for liberty all those things okay so let's come back to the poem what is he saying he's saying that five years have passed which means the last time he has visited tintana bay or this place it was five years back okay five summers with the length of five long winters okay we know that five years means five summers plus five winters why is he uh giving you them separately because when he uses the word winters he's deliberately adding the adjective long because in england uh winters are

13:56 especially harsh and in summer time you have fun you it's it's a nice weather so you don't feel like it's a long summer like we feel in india it's a long summer and the winter you know kind of just flips away especially when you're in a place like bengal or um you know maybe south india so winter is welcome here but there will turn is something which they dread okay it's a time which they want to go away and that's why it feels so long okay this also happens in russia perhaps anyway so he has come back to this place and he can hear once again the sound of the river river why and how does he describe that

14:42 these waters rolling from their mountain springs with a sweet inland murmur murmur is a sound in a soft almost whisper-like sound that you make and it's a human voice he's associating with the waters so somehow he feels that there is um an element of life in the natural objects like the river and the mountain springs and their sound doesn't appear to be you know non-human there's something human about the ways in which the water is making the sound here once again do i behold these steep and

15:28 lofty cliffs cliffs means the mountain tops which on a wild secluded scene impress thoughts of more deep seclusion so the kind of uh impact that these isolated mountain tops have on him is that he feels lonely isolated and at the same time rich it's not like he's feeling sad in his loneliness or in isolation but somehow empowered enriched okay so it's seclusion it's like he has been protected from crowd in a secure spot it's this happy place okay

16:13 and connect the landscape with the quiet of the sky the day is come when i again repose here reposes rest so today after five long years he is able to rest once again here under this dark sycamore so kamur is a maple tree it's a biblical fig tree so it's a shady tree he can rest there and view these plots of cottage ground these orchard tufts which at this season now he's describing uh the things which he sees around him and he talks about cottage ground orchard tufts which at this season with their unripe fruits among the woods and cupses

16:58 lose themselves corpses are tickets of small trees like bush-like structures somehow this whole scene is seen from above just go back to the title once again lines written a few miles above the internability so it's not like standing in front of the building he is maybe on a valley just on top so that he can have if not a bird's eye view but at least a panoramic view you know from a distance so he is looking at tinton abbey and the scenery around it from a distance and the moment he looks at the whole structure of the internabi with those

17:44 you know cottages around with that mountain background and the river in front of it he is not just distancing himself from that structure he is also going back in time so here he does not only give us what he sees but what he has seen five years back to and somehow he tries to give us this idea that there's a continuity it has stayed like this it hasn't changed okay and what other things is describing here among the woods and copses lose themselves when he says lose themselves it means that the boundary line between different trees

18:32 they are kind of blurred it's like is looking at a painting where the artist he has deliberately blurred the line of the horizon and mixed up the colors so that you have this impression of a hole instead of parts so he's looking at this natural scene where he cannot distinguish between different parts and everything gives him a wholesome effect it's like the whole thing together with the building which man has made is giving him the feeling that this in front of you is a block of nature right and what else he sees nor with their green and simple hue disturb the

19:20 wild green landscape so the trees their color it kind of blends in with the surroundings so they're not disturbing anything you know visual disturbance is there once again i see these hedgerows hardly hedge rules edge rows are you know when people build these natural boundaries between farms between cottages made of small little shrubs those are called hedges uh it's not like barbed wire it's a boundary green boundary and he can see that the hedge rows they have grown little lines of sportive wood run wild so it is not maintained it is not

20:09 curated by any careful gardener they are running wild so nature here looks uncorrupted uncorrupted by human interference okay these pastoral farms green to the very door it looks so natural that there is no demarcation no area of separation between the cottages where human beings live and the land surrounding them so the green has kind of run up to their door it seems and there's a connection established between nature and what is man-made that is the cottage of the man okay so this is a beautiful connection he gives us through this expression green

20:54 to the very door and reeds of smoke sent up in silence from among the trees so the landscape which he describes to us it's not without human beings there are dwellings there are small cottages where men and women they are living their lives and what kind of people sent up in silence from among the trees and the low copses coming from the trees with some uncertain notice as might seem of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods so normally woods or forests are not places where you build houses but nomadic people

21:40 people who are maybe hermits okay who have left this material world and gone off as a hermit or as a sage or simple nomadic people they live in small little temporary cottages in these woods and maybe they light a fire to cook food or to to just keep themselves warm and from that fire the smoke escapes and that kind of merges with the clouds above so although those houses they represent human civilization but still these people being outside the community of civilization you know civilized people

22:27 city life urban life these people who live in these small cottages in these inhospitable woods they are as much part of nature as these trees as these hedges okay or off some hermit's cave where by his fire the hermit sits alone and maybe there is a hermit a person a meditative person who has gone off in pursuit of truth of religion of finding out the sense of life you know what hermits are and when he talks about a hermit he is talking about

23:14 the concept of the noble savage in a way that when you are away from civilization when you go inward you know seek truth inside you not in technology not in machines when you look at nature as a guiding force you become a hermit then you become like a philosophical leader you give off a kind of knowledge that the greatest teachers fail to do and you do that in isolation a hermit sits alone he is away from everyone and in his loneliness he reaches a kind of realization which wordsworth wants for himself so he paints a picture in front of us in this first stanza

24:01 and this whole picture is very descriptive he gives us a lot of descriptors here and the best thing about the scriptures that wordsworth uses is that he employs kind of all five senses all five senses are employed here uh okay he tells us what he sees steep lofty cliffs and then all this greenery we have seen whatever he has seen it's like we are seeing through his eyes then he tells us what he hears see i hear these waters etc etc he gives us the idea of the kind of smell he has the smell of the unripe fruits and then the feeling the sensation of touch where he is talking about the way in which

24:49 landscape is touching the objects in it so he gives us whatever physical beauty he can get from that scene to give us an idea what he is looking at how he is feeling about this place now we come to the next part or the next answer of the poem these beauteous forms through a long absence have not been to me as is a landscape to a blind man's eye he has given us some images from a scenery right and he is referring to them as beauteous forms i mean these mountains this water body these cottages this woods

25:35 everything is part of nature and all these objects are beauteous forms to him so what does he mean when he uses the expression forms technically we need to go back to plato to understand what he means by forms here one of the many theories that they have put forward especially in his republic there was this concept of the forms he said that you know this world or our understanding of this world is divided into two aspects images and forms images means

26:20 everything that you see touch feel experience with your five senses everything that is tangible you know you can you can simply prove their existence a table a chair a woman but what about the things which you are sure exists but you cannot pinpoint saying that this is this and this is that you have all been in your primary classes and you know about different kinds of nouns right there is proper noun common noun collective noun

27:05 abstract noun okay now when you think about it when you think about the idea of abstract noun what are the examples you were taught honesty truth bravery lie things which you cannot experience with your five senses but things which you can realize that they are there therefore there is something in this existence which is outside the grasp of our five senses but still exists these belong to the group of forms you can say

27:51 and forms mean things which do not change do not change their quality abstract nouns turned into things which you can experience with your senses for example there is this word called beauty you cannot objectify it you cannot say that this is beauty you can say this is a beautiful thing this is a beautiful woman this is a beautiful garden so whenever we use abstract noun as something which we can understand

28:36 perceive experience we use it as an adjective therefore when a noun is qualified with an adjective it becomes an image something which you can experience in your life and the moment you associate adjective with a noun you also are associating a time reference how suppose you say she is a beautiful woman this means that she is a beautiful woman now in 20 years you might not call her beautiful if your idea of beauty depends on her youth

29:22 if you say he is a truthful man you're saying that he is truthful now you are not certain you are not guaranteeing that he will be speaking the truth like tomorrow or the day after tomorrow therefore the concept of things anything which we experience with our five senses or the concept of images they are transient transient means they are not permanent you see something beautiful the beauty will fade you see something bright it might get dimmed you see something dark it might get bright so you are never certain that whatever you experience right now

30:08 will be the same thing which you will experience later but when you talk about abstract nouns since they are not linked to any decaying object changing object they are existing as they are throughout they don't change why where does beauty reside where is the idea of truth where is the idea of freedom it is very much inside your minds and when i say mind i don't see your brains it's your mind it's your consciousness now come to this poem and look at what wordsworth is saying he has described to us in the first

30:56 stanza a set of images remember images but then he is saying that these are beauteous forms this means that he is not considering these images as images these are extension of nature with the capital n and that nature is eternal it does not change that one particular tree you know might grow old it might die but this whole idea of trees those all idea of water this whole idea of a ruined space this idea is never going to change and this idea

31:42 is referred to as the beauteous forms so when you encounter questions like what does warsworth mean by beauteous forms you just don't say that he is talking about the river the valley the mountains the ruin of tintern abbey things which has affected him no he's not just talking about those things he is talking about those things but those things are an extension of his whole idea of nature and how has this chunk of nature affected him how has this beauteous form affected him this is what he's going to tell us now these beauteous forms through a long absence he hasn't been for five years around this place have not been to me as is a landscape to a blind man's eye

32:28 now when a blind man looks at a landscape he doesn't see anything it doesn't affect him so he says that these beauteous forms these elements of nature they have had an effect on me like something which it has on a blind man but oft in lonely rooms so this is the effect he had and amid the dean of towns and cities when he went away he had been to the city it was claustrophobic for him he felt suffocated there was this this littleness the smallness of the rooms in which he had to live compared to his vast landscape which he was accustomed to and he felt that his freedom was compromised

33:15 now he's talking about those moments when this whole surroundings that he felt around him that was choking him and how does he write about that amid the din of towns and cities the noise i have owed to them ode to them means these beautiful you know like snaps of nature it's like he is taking photographs in his memory okay and those photographs imaginary photographs or imagined photographs they were giving him a kind of relief what kind of relief i have owed to them in hours of weariness when i was tired

34:02 sensations sweet so the first thing that these beauteous forms gave him was a physical pleasure he actually felt good his body felt good okay so he is first talking about the physical effect that his memories helped him get okay sensation sweet felt in the blood now blood is directly connected to our bodies right it's part of our physical existence and he's saying that he felt a kind of a rush of happiness inside him and he is very right because you know when do we feel happy biologists they explain very well that

34:47 endorphins a specific hormone which is also called happiness hormone they're responsible uh when we are feeling happy it's like our brain is secreting endorphins and we are relaxing uh when we feel a lot of fear and anxiety it's adrenaline walking so our bodies define our emotions to a lot extent but he's saying that somehow these memories chunks of landscape stored in his brain they release that kind of hormonal reaction that runs through his blood so he felt happy when sitting in that claustrophobic place sitting in that small little quarter he

35:34 thought about this open space this happy place and he felt physically good so that was the first reaction he had and felt along the heart now just when his body warmed up to this idea of happiness it led automatically to an emotional state so physical is very much connected to emotional right if you are physically happy of course that leads to you know a better mood a better spirit you have more energy to look forward to a day okay so your condition of the body determines the condition of your mind and that is what is happening here

36:21 and passing even into my pure mind so he is making a difference between blood heart and purer mind blood is your physical body heart is your feelings feelings which any human being can have and then he's talking about the purer mind something which cold ridge might have defined as the secondary imagination you know something which makes you look at things in an elevated way or with a more open mind it makes you more spiritual so he is talking about like a chain reaction physical happiness emotional fulfillment and then spiritual awakening blood heart

37:07 purer mind he gives you three categories in which he felt the awakening how was he awakened by these beauteous forms the memories of these beautiful images with tranquil restoration restore means when you are brought back to your regional state when he went away from this place he experienced a life which was very different from this rural life okay so every day he felt that he was being broken down he was confined his soul was crushed in a city

37:52 and when he thought about these moments he had spent that made him feel restored to his original state of happiness so it's like a process through which he's cured of a disease and what is the disease disease here is the life of a civilized society feelings too of unremembered pleasure such perhaps as have no slight or trivial influence on that best portion of a good man's life and how has this experience of visiting tintern abbey like when he used to do it five years back how has that affected him it has helped him become a better human

38:38 being and how does he define a good man's life his little nameless unremembered acts of kindness and of love so you don't call yourself as having lived a great life if you have achieved a lot of worldly fame if you have achieved a lot of you know awards and stuff you have lived a good life if you have performed small little acts of happiness kindness love small little things where people don't even you know tell you a thank you in return so if you have done things like that where neither have you remembered that act not

39:24 as the person you have you know done that to has remembered its small little acts of kindness maybe helping a person cross the road an elderly man pick up something from the ground small little things which you might as well have not done if you are a person whose life is filled with things like that then at the end of it you will have a satisfied ending and what kind of a person does this what kind of a person has a great life where that person has done these you know unlimited number of kind acts small little things

40:09 a person who is influenced by nature because nature is all about this nature doesn't believe in awarding something to someone like human beings too because when you try to award somebody for some great act for some great invention for some great achievement you are also promoting the idea of competition when you award someone you do not give awards to a lot more people than you are voting right so it's a process of negation nature doesn't negate anybody everyone who performs these small acts are rewarded and that reward is not in terms of any you know

40:56 tangible physical reward that reward is felt within yourself you feel good about it and you feel at the end of your life that you have lived a good life and i think when we are dying that's the only thing that would matter wouldn't it that i had done what i could have done for everyone i had met or have met so that effect that nature has on human beings that is the subject matter of tintern happy here okay so he is talking about first the physical reaction that nature has on him and how that physical reaction transforms into a spiritual experience then he talks about how

41:44 being close with nature has made him understand that the whole point of being a good man is being good in small little moments unremembered moments nonetheless i trust to them i may have owed another gift and not just the physical not just this teaching that he gets from nature teaching about how to become a good man the third thing that he gets from nature is of aspect more sublime sublime means something which feels like out of the world anything can make you feel what sublime is it depends it varies from person to person some person

42:30 standing in front of an of a beach you know might feel the effect of sublime on him somebody uh taking up uh some kind of intoxication might feel sublime then so we don't know what has the effect of sublime on who but here we know that nature definitely has the effect of the sublime on wordsworth and what is sublime as i said when something takes you a little bit up it's like those meditating yoga gurus who elevate themselves from the from the ground that kind of a feeling where you maybe are physically attached to the ground but your soul is elevated and you can look into things

43:15 with better consciousness than people around you that is sublime and sublime has an element of mystery because there is no road map to sublime the road map which he gives us a road map that go to tintana bay come back go after five years you will feel sublime no it's not that he is saying that that has given him his personal sublime and when we talk about sublime and wordsworth we just don't say sublime we say egotistical sublime as a sublime which is a personal experience for him eco it's like your personal self getting elevated and he is at the center of his thoughts it's like

44:02 almost the way in which people during the venezuela humanism fails thought you in a homocentric world man at the center but for a romantic like wordsworth that would sound very proud if he said that i am at the center of my world no he's saying i am not at the center of my world i transformed by nature is at the center of the world which i think is the sublime world okay so i'm not going to get into details because let's come back to it and understand what he says here he says that he has received three gifts first gift

44:49 the physical effect of happiness okay or that the physical happiness which he gets from thinking about the memories that is the first gift he's talking about second gift is how nature has affected his actions his good actions small little things his kindness so that is the second effect third effect is the sublime and what is the sublime actually that blessed mood so sublime equals to a mood okay elevated state in which the burden of the mystery in which the heavy and the weary weight of all these unintelligible

45:34 world is lightened you know you reach a moment where you feel that all your questions are answered that is sublime and that is reachable in different ways in fact uh later on maybe when we will take up poems like oh to a nightingale we would know exactly what wordsworth was talking about here kids wanted to uh gulp down some wine and simply reach the zone where the nightingale was singing he thought that it was possible to reach that level if he intoxicated himself coleridge he was an opium consumer and

46:20 he felt that that helped him reach that moment of sublime but moment of sublime if that was reachable simply by uh consuming wine and intoxicants we would have had millions of cold ridges and millions of kids by now right that becomes a trigger maybe but when somebody is capable of experiencing a sublime moment it means that that person has that inhibited person like it's it's deeply ingrained in his psyche or her psyche and any kind of trigger makes that reaching point possible for them easier for them okay

47:08 so he says that thinking about that happy moment that i had spent here thinking about that moment changed my mood into a sublime mood and uh what happened then then this mystery that what what is the final question that we have about life that what's the whole point of life why are we living what is love how do people look at me these are the basic questions we have these are the things which make life mysterious and in that moment of sublime you look into the life of things you start to get answers that sireen and blessed mood is using the word blessed because it's a divine

47:54 experience it's an experience which the religious leaders they have also claimed to have experienced through meditation that they have reached god so that is a divine moment a blessed mood in which the affections gently lead us on and it's a gentle process if it is an intoxicant the process is harsh it affects your body but if it's nature that is carrying you to that sublime mood then it will take you in a gentle way it's a more easy process easy for yourself until the breath of this corporal frame and even the motion of our human blood almost suspended we are laid asleep in

48:41 body is talking about the state of meditation as stated by religious gurus throughout the world irrespective of religion i'm not talking about any one particular religion meditation is therefore not just a religious experience or rather it is the religious experience that he talks about because for wordsworth there is nothing higher than nature and because nature allows him to reach that sublimity that state of serenity therefore nature is like god for worship because what is god if not somebody who

49:27 takes you to that level where you know everything about everything and nature does that for him we are laid asleep in body and become a living soul while with an eye made quiet by the power of harmony and the deep power of joy we see into the life of things if this be but a vain belief maybe maybe he thinks people will be laughing at him that no this cannot be true it's if you take a pinch of opium maybe you will get carried off to a zone where you will feel like sublime but thinking about nature how can that be and he says it happens for me yet oh how often darkness and amid the many

50:12 shapes of joyless daylight joyless daylight usually we say that daylight is joyful but when that daylight peeps through that shady window in a london room it appears joyless so in those moments when the fretful star unprofitable and the favor of the world have hung upon the beatings of my heart how often spirit have i turned to the eu sylvan y why the river is called sylvan the word sylvan it means wooded and it's right from the word sylvanas the roman god of woods and the fields like pan god okay that is silver

50:58 so the river y is kind of personified in a way as if the river can hear him speak out to it and the river is wandering through the woods and is almost seen as a derified form as a figure of a goddess here okay so he's talking about sylvan y the wanderer through the woods how often has my spirit turned to thee to thee means to the images i had collected in my mind looking at you when i was here five years back so he's talking to the river and now with gleams of half extinguished thought with many recognitions demand faint when

51:44 you go to a place you revisit a place you tend to have recollections from past but those recollections are never very clear you know they kind of interpose with each other some of the memories fade into other memories and you have these flashes of deja vu as if you have been to this thing you have done that okay so that happens and memory plays tricks on you so naturally he had forgotten many things but even then some moments are stored in his mind moments which are overlapping interfusing with each other and having an effect of a collage as it were when he comes back to it

52:31 and somewhat of a sad perplexity the picture of the mind revives again why sad because whenever we think about the past we get sad why do we get sad first because life doesn't give us a chance to actually go back in time because if we could do that we could become younger now you all are very young people you might not have that urge to go back yet you are just enjoying your newfound youth and you feel that this is the moment i've been looking forward to but at the end of it uh when you are troubled by your owner's syllabus then you do want to go back to

53:17 the time when you didn't have to worry so much about exams and english syllabus at least right and trust me when you reach my age you could kill to go back to the time when uh say you were first struggling with internabile so he's talking about a sad confusion sad perplexity that thinking about the past gives us always because the past shows us in a light where we only try to remember the good things unless and until there's a huge trauma in your life usually your past always looks rosier than it was when you were living that life and naturally

54:03 it becomes sad because you feel nostalgic and nostalgia means yearning for the past oh if i could go back to that moment that feeling is associated with melancholy not depression melancholy means a kind of sadness which is very poetic very creative even so it's not like memory of why is just restoring him to a happy state or a sublime state it is also giving him a kind of poetic melancholy and what happens then while here i stand not only with the sense of present pleasure it's a pleasure for him to remember

54:49 when he was here before but not just that he is not just happy because he's thinking about the time when he was here before but he is happy because of something else and what is that but with pleasing thoughts that in this moment there is life and food for future years five years back when i was standing here that memory helped me survive these five years today i'm standing here again so it's like i am taking some reinforcements inside my mind i am adding to that store house of memory so that again i can live off of it for five years ten years fifteen years so nature is like uh you know that

55:35 well where you come you drink and you then you live off of that if you have red harry potter it's like that elixir of life which you get from that sorcerer's stone that philosopher's stone and you drink that and you survive and you become immortal until you drink you have to drink again so it gives you kind of a booster vaccine kind of a thing okay where you get immune to the horrors of civilized life the din and hustle of city life and that memory needs to be recharged for wordsworth it's like a process of recharging himself and this is one of those moments

56:22 he knows that this moment is going to be useful in the future years okay and so i dare to hope dog changed no doubt from what i was when first i came among these hills when i was here earlier now when was he writing this he was writing that he was born in 1770 and he was writing this in 1798 so figure it out he's not that old he's like what 28 years old and he's talking about a time when he was 23 years old so from 23 to 28 it's like a huge leap he has as if completely changed then he was a very young and mature man when he

57:08 was 23. and if you are making your calculations what was the year when was what was 23 years old it was 1793. so a man was turning 18 and there was this french revolution and he was in this pristine landscape he was getting aware of the words of russo talking about the savage power of nature the concept of the noble savage that man at 23 he was experiencing nature with all his body with his whole physical existence

57:53 because at 23 what you all are what like uh your age is probably you know if i'm giving a right guess it's uh something around 20 to 22 at the most 23. so how would you experience nature if you go on a hiking trip or if you go to a sea beach you will enjoy nature you will take a dive straight into the the sea water run across the fields with your friends because that is the way in which a 23 year old person experiences nature and he is talking about that that back then i had a different way in which i experienced this scenery well like a row row is a deer a small deer young deer so he compares himself

58:40 to a young deer and a young deer doesn't know where it is going it simply leaps and jumps about that is the way he experienced this place before when first i came among these hills when like a row i bounded over 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 back then how was nature for him the coarser pleasures of my boyish days and their glad animal movements all gone by so it was more like instinctive reaction he enjoyed nature of course he did but that enjoyment was on that physical level and

59:26 we know that the three levels he's already talked about physical emotional and spiritual he experienced nature physically instinctively like an animal to me was all in all i cannot paint what then i was i was different i cannot tell you what i was the sounding cataract haunted me like a passion passion is a word you associate with your body with your hormones and at 23 of course hormones define your actions that is the most youthful phase of a man's life the tall rock the mountain and the deep and gloomy wood their colors and their forms where then to me an appetite

1:00:12 something you want to feel experience with your body a feeling and a love that had no need of a remoter charm there was nothing spiritual about it it was all body it was all maybe a little bit of emotion but mostly body no need of a remoter charm by thought supplied i did not think about what i was looking at there was no thought involved not any interest unborrowed from the eye whatever i could see with my eyes i was happy with that i did not think about anything unborrowed from the eye which is not connected to what i was seeing i wasn't interested in that that was five years back that time is passed and all its aching joys are now no more

1:00:59 i don't experience nature like that anymore aching joy it's like an oxymoron like aching means painful but not painful aching is that it's a dull pain which is almost pleasurable if you think in that way you know when you do a big workout okay and your body aches it gives you a sense of fulfillment like you have done something good for yourself that is aching so aching pleasure because he was experiencing nature with his body so it was like an aching pleasure for him that is not what he is doing right now now he is experiencing nature in a different way

1:01:45 that time is passed and all its aching joys are now no more and all its dizzy raptures diseases something where that it's a kind of intoxicated state okay it's like ah you're so happy you don't have any care about anything that's dizzy it's like you're getting high so he was getting high on nature when he was young not for this faint eye not more nor murmured i'm not sad that i'm not able to feel those aching pleasures anymore i'm not sad that i don't run around anymore why because i am experiencing nature in a different way now and he says

1:02:32 other gifts have followed for such loss what loss the loss of being able to enjoy nature physically we used to do that when he was 23 years old for such loss i would believe abundant recumbents enough compensation is there i have been given enough recompense okay what compensation for i have learned to look on nature not as in the hour of thoughtless youth not in the way i used to be when i was 23 but hearing oftentimes the still sad music of humanity he has come to realize that sadness is not something you must run away from you can experience it because you see nostalgia

1:03:19 sadness melancholy all these things are so necessary to understand life and to understand humanity you cannot escape everything and people call romantics escapists yes but here we don't see escape he is talking about experiencing sadness he doesn't want to run away from it not harsh not grating he doesn't say that the sadness that he experiences is harsh it's not cruel it's not hurting him i remember a statement made by shorthand and i'm just translating his words here now forgive me if that translation is awful but he

1:04:04 said that pain when removed from fear can be enjoyed as much as pleasure it means that pain is when you associate pain with terror when you're experiencing pain because somebody you love has died or maybe you are hurt wounded no he's not talking about that pain he is talking about the sadness the melancholy which doesn't have any element of terror in it that pain is as enjoyable as happiness and more sublime and that is exactly what wordsworth is talking about here too

1:04:50 though of ample power to chasten and subdue and i have felt so that that kind of feeling makes a person change himself chester means when you when you rebuke somebody when you instruct somebody i don't do this do that that is disciplining somebody if you read the lucy poems you would see what i am talking about that lucy is an imaginary person who was nature's child and what's what imagines that nature disciplined lucy instructed her to be her child through the process of transformation and this transformation is like nature is a teacher for lucy nature has been a teacher for wordsworth

1:05:37 and i have felt a presence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thoughts sublime is not peaceful it's not nirvana it's disturbing because when you see uh the problems which you're having in life when you when you find the answers you see that the answers lead to more questions perhaps and it's disturbing because you have to think all over again the whole point of opening your mind is to reach a point where you see that it can be opened further again okay so there's no end to it and it's disturbing of course disturbs me with the joy of elevated thoughts a sense

1:06:24 sublime he's repeatedly using this word sublime okay of something far more deeply interfused whose dwelling what is he talking about nature i mean these few scenes or things which he has seen around this tinton abbey this ruin not just that he's talking about nature in general and he gives us some specifics 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 this is where what it's not just a point of nature he's a poet of man he is seeing man not as an aberration not as an outsider

1:07:11 he's seeing man as an integral part of nature if that man allows himself to be so he is mentioning individual images setting sun's round ocean but he is talking about the non-changeable permanent form called nature you see tintan abbe this structure was made by men once it was a very thriving structure you know it was very gorgeous and people used to be there and then it got ruined over time time has this effect on everything that man has made except the nature which grows around the

1:07:56 tintana and only that part of tintern abbey has survived which has allowed itself to be associated with nature because we all belong to that world of images sadly yes it's no way that we can reach that world of forms of ideas but in the moments when we become one with nature we can experience a little of that world which plato would have called the world of ideas the idea of freedom the idea of perfection so setting sun living air mind of man everything becomes an extension of nature for wordsworth here a motion and a spirit

1:08:44 that impels all thinking things all objects of all thought and roles through all things he's talking about divine spirit here as if there's a consciousness as if a mango tree and a mountain and a river and a human being are all connected by some natural energy spirit running through all okay so that's a very unique idea and of all that we behold from this green earth of all the mighty world of eye and ear so he's talking about the physical world here that whatever we see with our eyes whatever we hear with our ears they belong to the physical world both what they have create and what

1:09:32 perceive why half create whenever we look at something any object even in nature we only see half of what is there we don't see the spiritual aspect of it this is again platonic you know plato said that the objects around us they are all imperfect copies of ideas the images which we see around us they are imperfect copies they are half created they are not whole you get the idea of their permanent beauty permanent truth then you feel that okay i've seen it all well pleased to recognize in nature and the language of the sense the anchor of my purest thoughts he thinks that that

1:10:18 spirit which lives beyond any dimension that we can see that spirit is the guide so he is not talking about jesus christ here he is not talking about any institutionalized religion here he's talking about nature and his religion is often described as pantheism i like to describe the word pan in two ways one yes the greek god band he was the god of the forest and of nature in general so pan dionysus whichever you call and whoever is a follower of pan thinks that the world of nature is the world of god and

1:11:05 well uh their panties fine that's a very that's a very uh nice way of putting it but another way if you look at the what pan it means all panoramic view means an all-pervading view pantheism means the wholeness of everything that you experience you believe that there is divinity in everything including human beings that is another way of looking at pantheism and i believe wordsworth is more like a second type of pantiest not just a pantheist who says that the tree is god or the river is god he doesn't say that he says that the same divinity touches the y which touches the ruin of the abbey

1:11:52 which touches the mountains and which touches his soul so he is as much the part of divinity so it's a pantheism it's an all-pervading god being everywhere the guardian of my heart and soul and all my moral being not perchance if i were not thus taught should i the more suffer my genial spirits to decay if i was not taught by nature when i was young maybe i would have become a depressed man by now turned to decay for thou art with me now he is talking about the second person who is standing there with him so this man is not alone so this is not a soliloquy here he's not talking to himself

1:12:40 he is actually talking to another person it's more like a dramatic monologue but i would say a poetic monologue because we don't have any dramatic moment here it's more like an autobiographical outpouring to a listener who is very sympathetic and who is in tune with the poet now who is this listener who is standing with him here for doward with me here upon the banks of this fair river thou my dearest friend my dear dear friend is talking about his sister here he's calling her a friend because she was very close to him although she was quite younger and in thy voice i catch the language of my former heart since you are a young

1:13:27 person compared to me you are my past image so he sees his sister as if she represents everything he was once okay just like you people represent was i was once so in the same way he says this and read my former pleasures in the shooting lights of thy wild eyes so he doesn't have the wildness in him anymore he has become subdued now mature but his sister still has that youthful wildness because she is young oh yet a little while may i behold in thee what i was once my dear dear sister and this prayer i make finally he gives

1:14:13 us why is he writing this poem at all why is he talking to her here knowing that nature never did betray the heart that loved her it is her privilege through all the years of this our life to lead from joy to joy so nature as i was telling you gives us those points of charging up our spiritual batteries from time to time takes off from joy to joy that is what nature does never betrays the heart that loves her it's very interesting how he's referring to nature as a woman so he is seeing nature as god and god as woman and that is a kind of a different way of looking at dfinity and somehow it is very

1:15:00 non-christian too because according to christian theology god is a very super powerful male figure of course so he is taking away that masculinity from nature from the idea of divinity rather because he makes nature not just look creative and feminine but he's actually referring to nature as her and she for she can so inform the mind that is within us so impressed with quietness and beauty and so feed with lofty thoughts and neither evil tongues how does nature protect us nature fills us with lofty ideas lofty thoughts high thoughts so that when people hate

1:15:46 us people tell us rude things when bad things happen to us those memories of nature those lofty thoughts they help us survive now he's talking about the wrong things that can happen to his sister and the name of his sister is dorothy dorothy washburn she was very close not just to wordsworth but to coleridge as well and these three people you know was what coleridge dorothy they used to have this lovely chats together long walks together and that was like a very good bond of friendship we have there which over time broke down and that was a sad thing too but here let's come back to what he's talking about here what are the evil things that can happen in life evil tongues rash judgments sneers of

1:16:33 selfish men not greetings where no kindness is nor all the dreary intercourse of daily life so these are the things that's going to that are going to hurt you shall ever prevail against us or disturb our cheerful faith that all which we behold is full of blessings if we are equipped with the weapons of restoration that nature gives us then we are prepared to fight every battle of life okay that we can see everything as a blessing therefore let the moon shine on thee in thy solitary walk and let the misty mountain winds be free to blow against thee so he is kind of giving a blessing to his sister that let nature embrace you and then after years so later when you

1:17:19 will come back like i have come back today you will also come back someday and then you will be a more mature person 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 so by that time you must have grown ideas about this world of forms wiser mature thy memory be as a dwelling place for all sweet sounds and harmonies oh then if solitude or fear or pain or grief should be thy portion if you are ever ever broken down in life with what healing thoughts of tender joy

1:18:06 will thou remember me maybe in those moments when you are sad you will remember me because this memory of this this moment is going to charge you up with life again okay and these my exhortations no percents if i should be where i no more can hear thy voice he's just 28 but he's talking about some distant future when maybe he would be away he would be dead and his sister will be all alone nor catch from thy wild eyes these gleams of past existence i won't be able to be with you then maybe i would be dead will thou then forget

1:18:51 that on the banks of this delightful stream we stood together will you forget this moment this is very important because nature is important fine because nature will restore you but nature cannot restore you unless you remember so maybe it's nature which is very powerful but it is powerful only when you choose to exercise its power or you choose to exercise your memory so he thinks that whatever immortality nature can give him is not through nature but through the memory

1:19:37 of dorothy only if his sister remembers this moment will he be remembered even after his death and of course it's like you know shakespeare's words that so long as men can breathe and eyes can see that kind of line keeps on recurring that i am writing this poem so long as this poem will be read i will be remembered so i don't know what is more permanent nature or this poem i don't know who made whom immortal because in my experience people now go to see it internationally more than they did during the time of wordsworth so i don't

1:20:24 know how much tin turnabe the place has immortalized was worth but i definitely know that wordsworth has immortalized internabi so it's also the other way round so human effort human memory human documentation is important so wordsworth's nature is not powerful unless it is associated with goodness of man we'll now then forget that on the banks of this delightful stream we stood together and that i so long a worshiper of nature hither came and wear it in that service the word service is very important service does not only mean offering some

1:21:10 religious prayers or some rituals not that you're serving and how do you think what is serving nature here apart from being a poet he was a an activist one of the first environmentalists i had talked about that uh in that video on romantic age he was striving consciously deliberately and violently against this massive industrialization specially expansion of railways in these areas of the lake district and he felt that he had a responsibility to serve nature nature might be powerful but nature needs service as well

1:21:56 and he is unwearied in that service and he wants his sister to remember that rather say with warmer love oh with far deeper zeal of holier love he's constantly using these religious terms you know service and worshipper and holy so these are the words he's deliberately using because he is a pantheist at the end of it nor will thou then forget that after many renderings many years of absence these steep woods and lofty cliffs and this green pastoral landscape went to be more dear both for themselves and for thy sake what does he want his

1:22:42 sister to remember what are his last words is he saying that nature is all important to him saying does that no you say the nature is important for me i've come back like five years and i'm looking at the scenery with a lot of love and veneration but these things these glimpses are important to me not just for their sake but because i am with you so finally the last words they focus on human relationships so he might have romanticized a hermit's life here solitary hermit ideal world that all fine but that's not for him

1:23:30 for him the memory inside his sister's mind is the place where he's going to survive everything that is something he is aiming for so he is a romantic because he knows that finally everything perfect exists in the world of ideas and his relationship with his sister it will survive all odds only if she remembers him in this moment because in this moment he is acting as the best person so these are the different ways in which you look at the poem many questions come from this but mostly teachers prefer to ask questions like

1:24:17 how do you think nature has gifted what's what what gifts has he received and you have questions like uh analyze this poem as a poem of nature and what's what as a poet of nature don't give flat answers there try to talk about how he is connecting human emotions uh human element extension of nature that like human beings as an extended aspect of nature an integral part of nature how he is focusing on the concept of noble savage the concept of the rural human life as a contrast to the congested city life okay so all these things will be useful

1:25:03 um please comment whatever you have in mind about something which i might have missed any expression you want me to explain over again and also you can send me some of the suggestions about poems by wordsworth which you want me to take up and in due course of time we will be covering um a lot more poems from the romantic period poems by shelley keats coleridge of course so keep sending your suggestions and we will see which suggestions um we can take up first thank you for being with me it had been a long video i know but i wanted to cover the whole poem and

1:25:51 all these aspects uh in this single video and see you all very soon in the next video next week so till then stay subscribed stay happy this is munami mukherjee signing off [Music] you