Blog Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, April 16, 2025

On Wordsworth's Hermit

I am, literally, writing these words a few miles above Tintern Abbey. The occasion is a short Easter break, in a wooden bungalow-hut holiday-let, located in a farmer’s field on the hilly Wye’s left-bank a way above Brockweir: amazing views, and cosy enough inside, but because it’s made of wood the property trembles fearfully when the winds strike it, and when the rains come it resounds, like we’re inside Keith Moon’s drumkit. But we’re having a lovely time. Rachel’s birthday on Saturday coincided with Passover. We had a Seder. Dan, like many a 17-year-old surgically attached to his phone, has deigned to emerge from his digital cocoon and has come out with us for walks, with the dog, exploring the Abbey itself, motoring down to Chepstow Castle, exploring the woodlands and the river. Tomorrow we’re going to see Raglan Castle and, perhaps, we will go down a mine.

Wales: land of my fathers! (‘my fathers can have it!’ as Dylan Thomas famously said)—a good proportion of my mother’s uncles, granduncles, great-grandfathers, great granduncles and so on went down the pit, so we can construe a tourist-tour of some carefully preserved mineshaft a return to my roots. My father’s family tree is Lancashire and North Wales (Roberts is a North Walesian name) and many of my ancestors were river-men, a healthier line of work. Some of my mother’s ancestors, various Evans and Bevans, were hill-farmers, but many more worked down the pit. Some years back, whilst being investigated—like many a man of my age—for prostate issues and possible neoplasm, the doctors asked me if there was any history of prostate cancer in the family. I asked my (medically qualified) mother if any of her more populous side of the family had suffered such. She said she wasn’t aware of any of her various male relatives specifically dying of prostate cancer—but then again, she said, most of these men had been miners, and accordingly very few of them lived long enough to be taken by that disease, which generally becomes a risk when a man moves into his 50s and 60s. Sobering thought. My maternal grandfather, Roy, whom I never met (he died before I was born) was on the standard route, leaving school at 14 to work the mines, but he designed an ‘out’: he took a correspondence course, got qualifications, studied divinity and eventually became a Church of England vicar. Beats mining the black stuff. My mother’s side of the family are from in and around Gilfach Goch, in the Rhondda, a fair bit west of where we’re staying. But here we are.¹

The Wye valley is gorgeous, and, being here, naturally I have been revisiting Wordsworth’s mighty poem, ‘Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey’ (1798).

One obvious thing about Wordsworth’s poem is that, despite having this famous tourist-spot location in its title, it doesn’t mention the abbey itself at any point. Some critics have taken this absence as profoundly significant (the old Freudian heads-I-win-tales-you-lose twist, whereby mentioning X is important for analysis, but not mentioning X is evidence of repression and therefore even more important: a ruse I’ve always rather admired), or else as evidence that the poem is not interested in the Abbey and its human occupants at all, but is only concerned with the natural beauty of the Wye valley, and with Wordsworth’s love for his sister.

The background to the poem is that Wordsworth, on the verge of the release of the Lyrical Ballads (1798)—with almost all the poems in place for that epochal collection in place—went on a walking-tour up the valley of the Wye. Wordsworth had done this tour before, solus, in August 1793. Now he revisited the territory, crossing the Severn from Bristol by boat with his sister, and the two of them walking up the winding Wye Valley, and then walking back down again.

Wordsworth claimed to have composed the poem entirely in his head, beginning it upon leaving Tintern and not jotting down so much as a line until he came back to Bristol, by which time it had just reached mental completion. Although the Lyrical Ballads, upon which he and Coleridge had been working, was already in the process of publication, he was so pleased with what he had just written that he had it inserted at the eleventh hour as the concluding poem. Scholars generally agree that it is apt, for the poem represents the climax of Wordsworth's first great period of creative output and prefigures much of the distinctively Wordsworthian verse that was to follow in his great decade of composition, 1798-1808.

Categorising the poem is difficult, as it contains some elements of the ode and of the dramatic monologue. In the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth noted: “I have not ventured to call this Poem an Ode but it was written with a hope that in the transitions, and the impassioned music of the versification, would be found the principle requisites of that species of composition.” The apostrophe at its beginning is reminiscent of the 18th century landscape-poem, but it is now agreed that the best designation of the work would be the conversation poem, which is an organic development of the loco-descriptive. The silent listener in this case is Wordsworth's sister Dorothy, who is addressed in the poem's final section. Transcending the nature poetry written before that date, it employs a much more intellectual and philosophical engagement with the subject that verges on pantheism. [John R. Nabholtz, ‘The Integrity of Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey”’, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 73:2 (1974), 227]

Nothing in Wordsworth’s canon, not The Prelude, not any of the other Lyrical Ballad poems, has provoked as much critical discussion or debate as ‘Tintern Abbey’. Geoffrey Hartman reads its 160 lines as a quasi-ode, a complex series of turns and counterturns, articulating the poem's ‘vacillating calculus of gain and loss, of hope and doubt.’ I think this overthinks things. The poem is, pretty straightforwardly, in three parts. In the first section (lines 1-57) Wordsworth, or the speaker of the poem, articulates his love for the natural world, prompted by his return to the Wye after five years.

Five years have passed; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a sweet inland murmur.—Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
Which on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect

The landscape with the quiet of the sky.
The day is come when I again repose
Here, under this dark sycamore, and view
These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts,
Which, at this season, with their unripe fruits,
Among the woods and copses lose themselves,
Nor, with their green and simple hue, disturb
The wild green landscape. Once again I see
These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines
Of sportive wood run wild; these pastoral farms
Green to the very door; and wreathes of smoke
Sent up, in silence, from among the trees
With some uncertain notice, as might seem,
Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods,
Or of some hermit's cave, where by his fire
The hermit sits alone. [Tintern Abbey, 1-23]

I quote this whole of this opening verse paragraph (lines 1-23) in part because it ends on the mention of the Hermit, to whom I shall return. As a description of the landscape around the lower Wye I can confirm: it is precise. The second section of the poem, lines 57-111, the speaker of the poem parlays these observations of the natural environment into a gorgeous claim for the interdependence of the human mind and the beauty of nature, this latter styled as the material expression of an immanent, transcendent and fundamentally divine wondrousness. The poem’s most famous passage comes towards the end of this section:

     For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth, but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Not harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
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,
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye and ear, both what they half-create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognize
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. [Tintern Abbey, 89-112]

The final portion of the poem [112-160] is an apostrophe to Dorothy, Wordsworth’s sister. I don’t mean denigrate this final section, though some critics see it as anticlimactic, after the amazing peroration to the divine-in-nature section that precedes it—the poem’s conclusion is integral to the whole, and my time this week in the Wye valley, a few miles above Tintern, sharing the experience with two of the people I love most in the world, brings home to me its essentialness and power. Being in nature with someone you love is the point of the poem.

But, re-reading this poem for the umpteenth time (I teach it every year, on our Romanticisms course) I found myself thinking of a connection that hadn’t occurred to me before.

The presence-through-absence of the Abbey itself, in the poem, has occasioned a large amount of critical debate: arguments range from the thesis that, by suppressing the most famous feature of the area, Wordsworth is erasing ‘traditional Christianity’ in favour of his Romantic natural pantheism; or that he is engaging with the ruins of Catholicism in order to give voice to a Protestant forward-looking and sisterly reformation of religion; or that he is focusing on one of the most famously ‘picturesque’ tourist spots of the later 18th-century in order to refocus attention not on human architecture but natural beauty. One context for the poem is William Gilpin’s Observations on the River Wye, and several parts of South Wales, etc. relative chiefly to picturesque beauty (1782), his travelogue of his tour of the Wye valley. This book was a notable success, and created a tourism boom in the area: in the Victorian period a railway was run up the valley, specifically to bring tourists—they came in their thousands—to the sights Gilpin described in his account. The railway no longer exists, although remnants of its infrastructure are visible along the Wye, including the old Tintern station, repurposed now as a tea-room. Wordsworth certainly knew Gilpin’s book, and read his account of the Abbey itself.

No part of the ruins of Tintern is seen from the river except the abbey-church. It has been an elegant Gothic pile; but it does not make that appearance as a distant object which we expected. Though the parts are beautiful, the whole is ill-shaped. No ruins of the tower are left, which might give form and contrast to the buttresses and walls. Instead of this a number of gabel-ends hurt the eye with their regularity, and disgust it by the vulgarity of their shape. A mallet judiciously used (but who durst use it?) might be of service in fracturing some of them; particularly those of the cross isles, which are both disagreeable in themselves, and confound, the perspective.

Picturesque, but not picture enough for Gilpin! A little applied bashing-about could add rough-edges to the structure that would improve it, he says.

But if Tintern-abbey be less striking as a distant object, it exhibits, on a nearer view, (when the whole together cannot be seen,) a very a very enchanting piece of ruin. The eye settles upon some of its nobler parts. Nature has now made it her own. Time has worn off all traces of the chisel: it has blunted the sharp edges of the rule and compass, and broken the regularity of opposing parts. The figured ornaments of the east-window are gone; those of the west-window are left. Most of the other windows, with their principal ornaments, remain. To these were supperadded the ornaments of time. Ivy, in masses uncommonly large, had taken possession of many parts of the wall; and given a happy contrast to the grey-coloured stone of which the building is composed: nor was this undecorated. Mosses of various hues, with lychens, maidenhair, penny-leaf, and other humble plants, had over-spread the surface, or hung from every joint and crevice. Some of them were in flower, others only in leaf; but all together gave those full-blown tints which add the richest finishing to a ruin.

… When we stood at one end of this awful piece of ruin, and surveyed the whole in one view, the elements of air and earth, its only covering and pavement; and the grand and venerable remains which terminated both; perfect enough to form the perspective, yet broken enough to destroy the regularity; the eye was above measure delighted with the beauty, the greatness, and the novelty of the scene. More picturesque it certainly would have been, if the area, unadorned, had been left with all its rough fragments of ruin scattered round; and bold was the hand that removed them: yet as the outside of the ruin, which is the chief object of picturesque curiosity , is still left in all its wild and native rudeness, we excuse, perhaps we approve, the neatness that is introduced within: it may add to the beauty of the scene; to its novelty it undoubtedly does .

But Wordsworth’s poem presents a kind of photographic-negative of Gilpin’s touristy account: a focus on the natural environment around the Abbey and no mention of the Abbey itself, where Gilpin is interested in the Abbey alone and has little to say about the valley itself, beyond deploring the poverty of the local inhabitants:

Among other things in this scene of desolation, the poverty and wretchedness of the inhabitants were remarkable. They occupy little huts, raised among the ruins of the monastery, and seem to have no employment but begging; as if a place once devoted to indolence could never again become the seat of industry. As we left the abbey, we found the whole hamlet at the gate, either openly soliciting alms, or covertly, under the pretence of carrying us to some part of the ruins, which each could shew; and which was far superior to anything which could be shewn by any one else. The most lucrative occasion could not have excited more jealousy and contention. One poor woman we followed, who had engaged to shew us the monks' library. She could scarcely crawl; shuffling along her palsied limbs and meagre contracted body by the help of two sticks. She led us through an old gate into a place overspread with nettles and briars; and pointing to the remnant of a shattered cloister, told us that was the place.

Wordsworth, in many of the Lyrical Ballads poems, inhabits these kinds of lives, this manner of abject rural poverty. But in ‘Tintern Abbey’ he does not. In fact, other than William and Dorothy, there is only one other person in the poem.

This brings me to my point. Wordsworth, although he has the whole history of monks sequestering themselves to divine life in the Abbey at his disposal, doesn’t mention that. But he does make reference to a ‘hermit’ living in the environs, whose simple fire sends up a strand of smoke. Who is he?

I wondered if Wordsworth was aware of another quasi-historical legend (linked to the Arthurian cycle) associated with the area, unmentioned by Gilpin, and not discussed by the long tradition of critical writing of the poem. Here is a letter published in The Gentleman’s Magazine (which we know Wordsworth read) from a few years before his first visit to the area.

Mr. Urban, Bishop Goodwin, in his treatise De Protulibus Anglicanis, [says] that, in the old register of Landaff, there are some curious particulars concerning Teudric, or Theodoric, King of Glamorgan. King Teudric, says the register, reigned over his people with great peace and justice; but, preferring eternal felicity before temporal power, he resigned his kingdom to his son Maurice, and retired to lead the life of an hermit in the woods of Dindryn. Whilst he lived in this retired manner, the Saxons invaded his son's territories, and great fear prevailed, that, unless Theodoric assisted his son Maurice, he would be deprived of his territories by strangers. It is said of this Theodoric, that, whilst be possessed his kingdom, he was never conquered by his enemies, but ever proved victorious; whenever he appeared in battle, his enemies were immediately put to flight. His son's subjects, therefore, prevailed with him, though he was very unwilling to leave his retreat, to oppose the Saxons, whom he defeated in a great battle at Tintern, near the river Wye. But having received a wound in his head, which he knew to be mortal, he hastened his return, that he might die amongst his own people, having first desired his son, that, if he should die on the road, he would build a church at the place where he expired, and bury his body there. He had scarce travelled five miles, when he departed this life at the foot where the river Wye falls into the Severn; wherefore a church being built in that place, as he had desired, his body was inclosed in a stone chest, which, says the Bishop, “being either broken by chance or decayed by age, when I ordered it to be repaired, I found his bones, which had been interred a thousand years, not the leaft decayed; the mark of a great wound in his skull remaining as if it had been lately made.” Maurice, thinking that he had not rightly discharged his duty, gave the adjacent lands to the church, and the place was called, by posterity, Merthir Tewdrick, which means the Martyrdom of Tewdrick, whom they esteemed a Martyr, because he died in battle against the enemies of Christianity. This place was afterwards called, in short, Merthirn, and then, as it is at this day, Mathern. The Bishops of Landaff had a palace at this place, which was destroyed in Cromwell's time.

I am yours, &c. S. Watson [Gentleman’s Magazine 44 (1774), 458-9]

Is this the hermit whose humble fire Wordsworth records in his poem? If so, the engagement with his familial love, with which Wordsworth engages here, is in one sense the point of the whole.

I am wondering if the landscape of Wordsworth’s poem records this deep history, and Wordsworth’s reference to the hermit connects with the story of the king who gave up temporal power for spiritual retreat in the woods, who returned to save his country from alien invasion at Tintern—Wordsworth writing in 1798, during the Napoleonic wars and the height of the panic about French invasion (he and Coleridge had been mistaken for French spies whilst out walking discussing Spinoza)—and then travelled the Wye from Tintern down to Chepstow, as Wordsworth and Dorothy did, to die in sanctity.

1. When my Nan (my mother’s mother) was alive, she used to say to me, in her lilting Welsh-accented English: ‘you are Welsh, Adam, but you’re no’ proper Welsh. You don’t speak Welsh! It’s the language of the angels, the most beautiful language in the world, but you must learn it from your mother’s breast. I didn’t speak a word of English until I was eight years old’ and much else along these lines. Sometimes we grandkids would ask her: ‘say something in Welsh, Nan’ and she would look momentarily confused, and then more stern-faced, waving the request away with a hand: ‘I can’t be bothered with any of that now.’ This raises the possibility that, having spoken nothing but Welsh as a small girl—which I’m happy to believe was indeed the case—learning English at school, then marrying and moving to England (my grandfather’s parish was in Altrincham) and then spending the rest of her life over the border, speaking nothing but English and hearing nothing but English, all the way into her dotage … that she had forgotten her mother-tongue entirely. A strange thought! Of course, my Nan’s policy of consuming a bottle of gin a day can’t have helped with that. Nana was also a British Israelite, a topic on which she and I had some interesting exchanges when I was a teenager, and which has become an issue more acute for me now that, Gentile though I be, I have married a Jew and raised two Jewish children. But, London-born and raised, and having spent pretty much all my life in South East England, I am, maugre my heritage, by no means proper Welsh.