Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey

Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey by William Wordsworth is not only about Wordsworth's return to Tintern Abbey after 5 years, but also about his return to nature itself. Throughout almost all of his work, Wordsworth emphasizes the importance of nature to a person's intellectual and spiritual development. This poem not only emphasizes that importance, but also relates nature to the divine. In this poem, Wordsworth seems Pantheistic. Pantheism is the view that the Universe (and Nature on Earth) is the only thing worthy of the deepest kind of reverence. Pantheists think that the best way to understand God is to relate to nature. Wordsworth calls himself a "worshipper of nature" with a "far deeper zeal of holier love," and it is obvious that he not only loves nature, but reveres it. Nature has helped him get through tough times in his life, and when he was lonely the thought of nature has made him happy. Wordsworth goes on to say that nature has given him a "sublime" gift, which in this case I believe sublime really means divine. This sublime, or divine, gift allows Wordsworth to understand the "unintelligible world" and "see into the life of things." Through nature, he understands God and everything God created. This thought process is similar to a section of Hartley's Observations on Man, which says that the pleasures that we enjoy can be understood through nature. Wordsworth says that nature is "The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, the guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul, of all my moral being." This relates to Rousseau's A Discourse upon the Origin of Inequality. Rousseau says that in the state of nature, man is the most pure and moral. Society corrupts man and makes him wicked because he desires artificial faculties. In Tintern Abbey Wordsworth worships nature for how pure and simple it is.