Tintern Abbey to Westminster Bridge: Exploring Spatiality, Temporality and Liminality in Select Poems of William Wordsworth

Abstract

“The highest priest of nature”, William Wordsworth, who helped in forging a new poetic sensibility in English literature, is more or less synonymous with the Romantic Movement he belongs to. The beauty of his lines and his radical departure from the earlier sensibilities, giving primacy to the rustic over the classic, the nature over culture, and the ordinary over elite leave space for further analysis of the multiplicitous binaries that the poet tries to address and resolve. Tintern Abbey, which is located on a rustic landscape overlooking the Wye river is spatially antithetical to the Westminster Bridge that overlooks the Thames river in bustling London. Unlike the general notion that romantic poetry invariably captures the rustic landscape, a close reading of Wordsworth’s poems would reveal a more slippery spatial reality that transcends the boundaries of the countryside. Oftentimes, the poet is trapped between fantasy and reality or in an imaginary liminal space from where there is no escape. Navigating between the past and the present, the poet is equally trapped in the temporal liminality of birth and prenatal existence. The landscapes of liminality in Wordsworth’s poems can be better understood through the various dualisms it tries to resolve. There is a genuine attempt to resolve the binaries of modernity and antiquity, happiness and grief, life and death, youth and old age as well as Christianity and Paganism. This paper attempts to locate (or rather understand) the boundaries of space, time, and emotions in the poetry of Wordsworth. The poems selected for analysis include: “Tintern Abbey”, “Resolution and Independence”, “Upon Westminster Bridge”, the Lucy poems (“Three years she grew”, “She dwelt among untrodden ways”) and “London, 1802”.