Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey | Close Reading and Analysis | Greater Romantic Lyrics

welcome everyone to the next video in our series on the greater romantic lyric this is wordsworth's tintern Abbey one of the most beautiful poems in English and today we're going to be close reading this poem line by line not just dealing with what's the poem saying what does it mean because it is very complex and that's important but we'll also be looking at how this poem is a poem how it is a lyric poem so let's get into it the full title of course of William wordsworth's poem is called lines composed a few miles above tintern Abbey now I'm just going to stop there because that part's very important Wordsworth has been here before he's above the ruins of tintern Abbey it's no longer a church it used to be a cistercian Abbey the poem is very interested in locating its place within a particular setting and the fact that he's overlooking the ruins of this Abbey is important because the poem in a way has to deal with how does a new Faith emerge from the ruins of an old and for Wordsworth and for this poem it doesn't exactly mean how does Christianity emerge from older forms it doesn't really have to do with institutional faith it has to do with a faith that answers how to go on living in the world it's the faith in a continued goodness of the world or the possibility for goodness that's the faith he's interested in and in this poem he describes how his faith five years ago was different than it is now and he's going to trace the difference later in the poem moving on with the title here on revisiting the banks of the Y during a tour so he's come here before as he tells us in the first line he was here five years ago and he's returned again and the date is July 13th 1798. now this date is important to Wordsworth this was the Bastille Day in 1789 the French people overthrew the repressive monarchy and began to rule and this was known as the French Revolution and Wordsworth was an undergraduate when this was happening he was an undergraduate Cambridge and he was excited because he was a republican which meant that he didn't believe in the monarchy and so he thought that this revolution would sweep ...