ABSTRACT
The Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey are justly famous for offering some of Wordsworth's most powerfully positive rhetoric about the natural world's power to soothe and nourish the human mind. The opening verse-paragraph might be mistaken for a relaxedly affectionate description of the immediate scenery. The mature poet forces himself out of the cautious rearrangements of Tintern Abbey's first paragraph and confronts far less tractable aspects of humanity 'the din / Of towns and cities', for instance. Yet the poem's stance towards people and need to care for one another remains unsettled. No sooner has Tintern Abbey praised 'acts/Of kindness and of love' as the 'best portion good man's life' than it hastens on to offer a much fuller celebration of what sounds like a withdrawal from the anxieties of the social world: that blessed moodIn which the burthen of the mystery, In which the heavy and the weary weight Of all this unintelligible world is lightened.
