In William Wordsworth’s “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey,” the speaker describes the River Wye. The poem’s full title identifies the location above Tintern Abbey in the Wye Valley, on the border region between England and Wales.
Wordsworth revisits the landscape after five years and reflects on how his response to nature has changed. As a younger person, he experienced the countryside with energetic physical excitement; later, he finds in it a quieter moral and spiritual influence. Memory allows the landscape to continue shaping him even when he is away from it.
The poem was composed in 1798 and published in the second edition of Lyrical Ballads in 1800. It is one of Wordsworth’s best-known examples of reflective nature poetry and is written in blank verse, unrhymed iambic pentameter.
Despite the title, Tintern Abbey itself is not the poem’s main subject. Wordsworth focuses on perception, memory, human feeling, and the relationship between the natural landscape and the mind.