Loss and " Tintern Abbey"
Sheree Frappied
October 15th, 2001
Wordsworth's treatment of Dorothy in paragraph six of "Tintern Abbey"
is characterized by a rather startling emphasis on togetherness. It seems
to me that Wordsworth's concerns are presented in a light radically different
from what comes prior in paragraph five. Paragraph five consists of six sentences:
in the first three the poet reflects on what kind of "viewer" he
once was and in the last three describes what he has learned since (in what
way he is now a different "viewer"). For example, sentence four
begins with, 
"[f]or I have learned," and five with,
"[a]nd I have felt," and six with
"[t]herefore am I still." In essence, the reader gets Wordsworth's
thoughts on how he has changed. In the
first three lines of paragraph six we see a supposition and an implied question:
suppose he hadn't learned these things, would his creative energies have flagged
and disappeared? When he answers this question he addresses Dorothy directly
and in the same instant in which he alludes to verse four of the twenty-third
psalm: "Yea, though I walk through the valley / of the shadow of death,
I will fear no / evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and / thy staff they
comfort me." Contrary to what may at first appear obvious, and that is
that the poet worships his sister in the way he would God, I think the rest
of the paragraph moves in another direction. He doesn't worship Dorothy as
he would God; rather, he addresses what is meaningful in his life in view,
now, of the fact that he is mortal. He realizes that he, like Dorothy, walks
in the shadow of death and that their separation is inevitable. (What is death
about if it is not about separation?) Their inevitable parting is the poet's
primary concern here, and I think it is a concern that provokes considerable
anxiety -- this anxiety about their separation is what intensifies (and also
makes somewhat ironic) the togetherness motif. Despite all that he has learned,
the poet doesn't really know how to "learn" about this. What seems
of grave importance to the poet is the spectre of Dorothy alive in a world
from which he is absent -- indeed, he anticipates it -- one in which Dorothy
may experience
"solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief," (see 3c) one in which
"should [he] be where [he] no more can hear / [her] voice," she
should not forget that they "stood together."
Wordsworth's emphatic treatment of togetherness in the last paragraph of "Tintern Abbey" is suggestive of a dynamic that has been elucidated in psychoanalytic studies. As children, William and Dorothy lost both parents: William was eight when his mother died and thirteen when his father died; two years younger than William, Dorothy suffered these losses at six and eleven. Does the psychology of loss -- in particular, David Dietrich's concept of the lost-immortal parent complex (see 1,1a,1b,1c) -- shed light on the critical problem of the poet's turn to Dorothy in "Tintern Abbey"? (See 2,2a,2b,2c) Is it possible that each one unconsciously views the other as a partial replacement parent figure? Evidence in Dorothy's journals strongly suggests that the occasion of William's marriage threatened Dorothy's sense of personal security. The marriage creates a threat and therefore an anxiety within her that is manifested by her regressive behaviors. (See 3, 3a, 3b, 3c, 3d, 3e, 3f, 4) It is possible that the marriage arouses the threat of separation in both William and Dorothy -- as evidenced by the giving and returning of the ring -- an odd, neurotic dance.
(1) David Dietrich, "The Problem of Loss and Mourning: Psychoanalytic Perspectives," Early Childhood Parent Death, Psychic Trauma and Organization, and Object Relations. Eds. David Dietrich and Peter Shabad. Madison: International Universities Press, 1989. 277-335.
Drawing from the work of psychoanalytic researchers, Dietrich writes the following:
(1a) . . . early childhood death of a parent is a type of psychic trauma with its own special, specific, and organized constellation of structural and developmental sequelae, psychic consequences, laying of unconscious fantasies, clinical or less often subclinical constellations, and compromise formations. In short, it has its own enduring, specifiable, largely unconscious configuration which I have referred to as the lost immortal parent complex. (283)
(1b) The loss and lost object do not simply recede into the past, for the past is always temporally a part of the present; that is, the present is always partially experienced as missing, lost, dead, gone away, removed in the representation of the lost, though paradoxically present parent. (282-3)
(1c) . . . the degree of the impact (quantitatively) of the loss is greater than in certain other types of psychic traumata because of the enduring deleterious and pathogenic effects early childhood parent death has on developing psychic organization and structure . . . [such effects] can be altered to some extent by the nature of the replacement parent . . . (283)
(2) James Soderholm, "Dorothy Wordsworth's Return to Tintern Abbey," New Literary History 26:2 (Spring 1995): 309-322.
(2a) Many recent critics . . . do not take the turn to Dorothy at the end of "Tintern Abbey" seriously. These critics believe that William never gets outside of the orbit of his sublime meditations and that he uses Dorothy for his own poetic ends. (311)
(2b) Many recent critics of the poem [Levinson in particular ] see only the solipsistic aspect of apostrophe. (313)
(2c) "The Wordsworthian solution [in the words of Elizabeth Fay] . . . positions the woman as helpmate only: nonseductive, disenchanting, and disempowered because non-verbal." These attacks pervert William's address to Dorothy in order to see it as an expression of his narcissism rather than an appreciation of Dorothy's ecstatic self-sufficiency, an attempt to evoke a former life both from and in that ecstasy, and finally a prayer offered to the redemptive agency of memory. Fay's reluctance to see how William is in fact seduced and enchanted by Dorothy suggest the critic's feeling of exile. (313)
(3) Romanticism: An Anthology with CD-ROM. Second Edition. Ed. Duncan Wu. Malden: Blackwell, 2000. 433-435.
Dorothy Wordsworth: From the Grasmere Journals, Thursday 29 April 1802 (five months before William and Mary are married):
(3a) . . . Afterwards William lay and I lay in the trench under the fence . . . William heard me breathing and rustling now and then, but we both lay still and unseen by one another. He thought that it would be as sweet thus to lie so in the grave, to hear the peaceful sounds of the earth and just to know that one's dear friends were near. . . (434-5)
(3b) Dorothy Wordsworth: From the Grasmere Journals, 4 October 1802 (the day of William's wedding; with interpolated comments in brackets):
On Monday 4 October 1802, my brother William was married to Mary Hutchinson. I slept a good deal of the night and rose fresh and well in the morning. (Dorothy is not ill during the night nor is she ill that morning.) At a little after 8 o'clock I saw them go down the avenue towards the church. (She describes this event as though she is watching -- furtively, perhaps--through a window.) William had parted from me upstairs. (She seems to be hiding.) I gave him the wedding ring--with how deep a blessing! I took it from my forefinger (Is Dorothy the keeper of the ring? Was it their mother's?) where I had worn it the whole of the night before; (Why does Dorothy wear what will/should become Mary's wedding ring the whole of the night before her brother's wedding? Presumably this is not something she does often.) he slipped it again onto my finger and blessed me fervently. (This could be thought of as William's marriage to Dorothy that day.)
When they were absent, my dear little Sara prepared the breakfast. I kept myself as quiet as I could, (Why must she keep quiet? Is she stifling tears? If so, why must she hide them from Sara?) but when I saw the two men running up the walk, coming to tell us it was over, (Why didn't Dorothy and Sara go to the wedding?) I could stand it no longer (Unidentified, intolerable emotions) and threw myself on the bed (Has she been watching from the window since they left?) where I lay in stillness, neither hearing or seeing (Why are her faculties impaired? Is she hiding under the covers?) anything till Sara came upstairs to me and said, 'They are coming'. (Does Sara understand why Dorothy is strangely incapacitated?) This forced me from the bed where I lay, (Why must she force herself out of bed? She has just leapt into it with sufficient energy.) and I moved I know not how straightforward, faster than my strength could carry me, (Why is she weak?) till I met my beloved William and fell upon his bosom. He and John Hutchinson led me (Is she not strong enough to stand on her own?) to the house and there I stayed to welcome my dear Mary. As soon as we had breakfasted we departed. It rained when we set off. Poor Mary was much agitated when she parted from her brothers and sisters (How would Dorothy characterize her own state that morning?) and her home. (435)
(3c) Because William read Dorothy's Grasmere journal entries, it is reasonable to assume that he was aware of Dorothy's fears of losing him (see 3b, above, for a striking example of these fears as revealed in her account of William's wedding day) and he may also have been aware of her more general fears of solitude, abandonment and destitution. In her journal entries, Dorothy frequently emphasizes loneliness, loss and abandonment. Three such examples are found in her accounts of Susan Shacklock's funeral (see: 3d), an old man, a leech-gatherer, the source for William's 'Resolution and Independence' (see: 3e, and for a significant point regarding this entry, see: 4), and a graveyard experience the day of William's wedding (see: 3f).
(3d) From the Grasmere Journals, Wednesday 3 September 1800:
I was affected to tears while we stood in the house, the coffin lying before me. There were no near kindred, no children (433).
(3e) From the Grasmere Journals, Wednesday 3 September 1800:
He had had a wife, 'and a good woman, and it pleased God to bless us with ten children'; all these were dead but one of whom he had not heard for many years, a sailor (433).
(3f) From the Grasmere Journals, October 1802 (probably the day of William's and Mary's wedding -- during a two-hour stop in Kirby). Pamela Woof, ed., Dorothy Wordsworth: The Grasmere Journals (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991):
We [Dorothy and Mary] sauntered about & read the Grave-stones. There was one to the memory of 5 Children, who had all died within 5 years, & the longest lived had only lived 4 years. There was another Stone erected to the memory of an unfortunate woman (as we supposed, by a stranger). The verses engraved upon it expressed that she had been neglected by her Relations & counselled the Readers of those words to look within & recollect their own frailties. (126-7)
(4) Compare this passage to Dorothy's journal entry above (3e). David Perkins, Ed., English Romantic Writers (San Diego: Harcourt, 1967). William Wordsworth to Sara Hutchinson Monday 14th June 1802:
I am exceedingly sorry that the latter part of the Leech-gatherer has displeased you . . . I . . . describe him, whether ill or well is not for me to judge with perfect confidence, but this I can confidently affirm, that, though I believe God has given me a strong imagination, I cannot conceive a figure more impressive than that of an old Man like this, the survivor of a Wife and ten children, travelling alone among the mountains and all lonely places, carrying with him his own fortitude, and the necessities which an unjust state of society has entailed upon him . . . whether you are pleased or not with this Poem . . . it is of the utmost importance that you should have had pleasure from contemplating the fortitude, independence, persevering spirit, and the general moral dignity of this old man's character. (352-3)