Trauma of Modernity in Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey

Critics of the 1960s and 1970s have largely interpreted Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey as projecting a Romantic poet “Cartesian /Kantian / Hegelian in his thinking, concerned more with imagination than with nature or history” (Richard Gravil 36). Their critical verdict is that Wordsworth, in the poem, has been looking “for transcendence through Romantic inwardness” (Thomas Brennan 14). Since the 1980s, however, there have been historicizings of Wordsworth. New historicism, with its materialist strain, provides a fundamentally contradictory conception of the persona's self :rather than a transcendental, the person's self is thought of as empirical and defined by what Jerome McGann calls The Romantic Ideology,” as a “false consciousness” (91). McGann cites Tintern Abbey as example to sustain his charge. He argues, according to Leon Waldoff, thatthe poem displace[s] and elide[s] specific social, economic, and political problems and discontents, as well as historical facts that serve as a background for thepoems (bad harvests, poverty, war, the French Revolution, and transientsand beggars). To the extent that the poems posit or recommend atranscendent or transhistorical (spiritual, religious, or psychological) solution to human problems, they are illusory. (4) This “illusory” tendency, according to McGann in The Romantic Ideology, is nowhere more pronounced than Tintern Abbey, at the end of which “we are left only with the initial scene's simplest natural forms” (80). Marjorie Levinson further builds on McGann's ruling on Wordsworth's disregard of his empirical poetic self to elision and exclusion. In Wordsworth's Great Period Poems: Four Essays, she defines the consciousness of the poetic self the persona of Tintern Abbey by its “blindness which assumes autonomy of the psyche, its happy detachment from the social fact of being” (48). Like McGann, she scrutinizes the absences in Tintern Abbey with a spotlight on the elision of the indigence of the poor populations around the abbey. She takes the elision as sacrificing his sensitivity to communal and the collective for the sake of idealizing the landscape for adapting it into a “devotion” that is individual and private (29). Her adverse verdict goes one step ahead of McGann when she, according to Eric Yu, hauls up Wordsworth “for ‘apostasy', betrayal of his earlier radical ideals and withdrawals into consoling selfhood” (132). Alan Liu echoes McGann and Levinson when he asserts that “what is there in a poem is precisely what is not there: all the history that has been displaced, erased, suppressed, elided, overlooked, overwritten, omitted, obscured, expunged, repudiated, excluded, annihilated, and denied” (556).

poet. Like McFarland, HelenVendler too finds Levinson's accusation of Wordsworth's skirting of history is utterly untenable, unfortunately giving away that a new historicist like her "has never found anything to like in the poem" (178), which she takes as a deliberate disregard of the palpably lyrical element of the poem. The lyrical dimensions of Tintern Abbey have drawn the critical attention of a critic like Nicholas Roe who, in The Politics of Nature: Wordsworth and Some Contemporaries, rescues the poem from the charge of Romantic ideology, replacing politics with aestheticizing beauty that he attributes to the influence of William Gilpin's theory of the picturesque, which requires the elevation of the scenery, downplaying the deformities and moderating "the human details of landscape in a remote perspective" (Roe 119). Like Nicholas Roe, Steven Cole too takes on the new historicists whom she accuses of looking for the politics of romanticism in where it does not belong to: new historicism takes "retreat to what Levinson calls a 'transhistorical causality' [whereas] politics of romanticism is located somewhere else" (49).
As the review of literature above on Tintern Abbey shows, despite the defence of Wordsworth against new historicist onslaughts, the materiality of even the so-called transcendental poem like Tintern Abbey cannot be brushed aside. The materiality is most evident in the Romantic reaction in general and Wordsworthian response in particular to the crisis brought about the burgeoning modernity of the early nineteenth century. Wordsworth's poetry connects a concern for nature to a fear that the extinctions of natural creatures as were ongoing during his time due to industrialization, urbanization, and materialization would be dystopia.
This chapter study zeroes in on Wordsworth's fear of dystopia and links it to the trauma accruing from his personal problems and the continual exploding of his beliefs, including the integrity of nature. The ensuing analysis posits that the location in the poem of the so-called apostrophe to what is known as Romantic Imagination is actually an attempt to come to terms with the trauma. The foregrounding of imagination reconstitutes the traumatic situation in a textual imaging that at the same time undercuts the idealized transcendentalism even as it builds it for efficacious purpose, a perfomativity that repeats the trauma. It is in this light that the affect of certainty hinting at the healing of the trauma that the poet seeks to communicate to his listening sister, Dorothy and with which he tries to unburden himself of the trauma of the ravages of modernity should be understood.
The Wordsworthian negotiation with trauma in Tintern Abbey evokes two contrasting affects of doubt and certainty, thereby giving rise to a pronounced tension between the causal world of material objects and the balming effect of natural serenity. As Richard Eldridge rightly remarks, Wordsworth typifies a poet capable of "a stably and powerfully enough formed manner of thought, expression, and (writerly) action . . . in the face of the chaos of life, rather than simply reverting to metaphysical pantheism or any other epistemically well-founded doctrine or doxa" (75). Wordsworth's thought in Tintern Abbey and struggle alongside him to understand what value life has even through a spotlight on the materiality of his vision or vice versa, for the material and the pantheistic visions are integrally intertwined. It is this integrated vision-the reflective-discursive awareness-through which, as Eldridge asserts, "the poet . . . arrives at the aptness and fullness of response that must animate the life of a subject, if the subject is to find anything interesting at all" (77) by"mov[ing] through or in and out of such moments " (82). As Tintern Abbey shows, through a performative, fluctuating movement between materiality and abstractness, doubt and certainty Wordsworth successfully works through the trauma of the ravages of modernity telling upon his personal life and beliefs so as to come to terms with it by taking an attitudinally appropriate stance.
Before the critical investigation of the poem along the above suggested line, it will be worthwhile to understand the historical contexts underpinning the poetic texture. The contextualization will give a comprehensive picture the materiality of modernity bothering Wordsworth.
By 1798, when Tintern Abbey was published, Wordsworth (then twenty-six) was living with his sister in Somerset in the neighbourly proximity of Coleridge. Both the poets, at this time, had undergone a big change in their socio-political beliefs. Peter Kiston observes in this regard: It is thought that around this time both Wordsworth and Coleridge began to lose their commitment to shared political beliefs and become more conservative in outlook. In 1801 they both were able to support the continuance of war the war against France and, in later years, they both became supporters of the government. Wordsworth and Coleridge were French spies, the fact that Wordsworth had thrown himself into Lyrical Ballads as muchout of poverty as of artistic commitment, and his concern at the reality of the massive destruction of the natural ecology due to industrialization and urbanization: In 1798, the Wye Valley, though still affording prospects of great natural beauty, presented less delightful scenes as well. The region showed prominent signs of industrial and commercial activity: coal mines, transport barges noisily plying the river, miners' hovels. The town ofTintern, a half mile from the Abbey, was an ironworking village of some note, and in 1798 with thewar at full tilt, the works were usually active.The forests around Tintern-town and Abbey-were peopled with vagrants, the casualties of England'stottering economy and of wartime displacement.Many of these people lived by charcoal burning,obviously a marginal livelihood. The charcoal wasused in the furnaces along the river banks. (Levinson29) The historicities underpinning the poetic texture of Tintern Abbey, this chapter seeks to argue, are not attempts at dematerializations in favour of the valorizations of nourishment and redemption as new historicists have alleged but as building up a performative tension between the trauma of modernity and the bliss of picturesque Nature.
The task of building up the performative tension is undertaken by the speaker who accomplishes it through his self-dramatizations which "represent[. . .] a transitional self of the poet . . . attempt[. . .] to act out and achieve a selftransformation. The lyrical mode is in this sense not only intertwined but given direction and enhancement by the dramatic" (Waldoff 50). While the presence of both the speaker and the listener help create the overall dramatic ambiance, what, however, adds to its effect is the use of the repetition of certain words and phrases-Five years have passed; five summers, with the length/Of five long winters! (1-2), "a wild secluded scene impress /Thoughts of more deep seclusion" (6-7), "again I hear/These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs/With a sweet inland murmur. Once again" (2-4), "These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts" (11)-which, at the same time, represent the ebb and flow of the mood and consciousness of the speaker across a period of time in which the past, the present, and the future crisscross each other. The most striking attribute of the dramatic situation is obviously the presence of a silent listener-the "dear, dear Sister" (121) at whomthe last third of the poem is directed.
Besides the above imperatives that make the nature of the poetic texture of Tintern Abbey dramatic, what also lends to the drama is "Wordsworth's structuring of the speaker's utterance"-the "triadic" structure "that best represents the self-dramatizing nature of the speaker's utterance" (Waldoff 59). The three distinctly different pillars of the triadic structure are: the speaker's describing the scene now (lines1-22) and then (lines 23-111), and an address to Dorothy (lines 112-159). Of these three pillars, the second one-the narrative autobiography-is presented in two movements: the first (lines 23-49) demonstrating how the speaker's association with Nature has been continued in absence, the second (lines 49-111) unfolding the three stages of the association with Nature.
The opening structure offers us some recognizable Wordsworthianimagery helping to set the local matter of time and place: the speaker revisits the Wye after a lapse of five years: These plots of cottage-ground, these orchardtufts, Which at this season, with their unripe fruits, Are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves 'Mid groves and copses. 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 wreaths 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. (1-22) Once again the speaker hears the mumrmur of the Wye, and sees the steep and lofty cliffs, the dark sycamore, the plots of cottage ground, the orchard with its unripe fruits, the hedge-rows, the pastoral farms, and columns of smoke rising from the trees with a distant glimpse of the gipsy tents in the woods or of some hermit's cave.
A careful scrutiny of the above opening lines points towards a tension between harmony and disharmony: while the landscape is harmonious-varied but without abrupt transitions with earth and sky wrapped in the same "quiet" and the verdure of the landscape looks invasive-, the disharmony is attributed to material human activities like the cottages, the pastoral farms, the orchards and wreaths of smoke. Whereas the harmony in Nature as etched in the speaker's consciousness is a matter of the past, the present reality is that of disharmony. Right at the beginning, Wordsworth sets up a tension between creative memory and the atrophic present: the poet's "memory is creative rather than nostalgic: still sensitive to a past that can modify and even reverse a present state of mind" (Geoffrey Hartman  11). Thus, what we also see in Wordsworth's construction of this tension is his hint towards its resolution: the present description of the natural landscape containing the synchronic structure of human mind and nature runs counter to the diachronic feature of the speaker's memory of an invasive Nature of five years ago. The temporality that the memory reveals makes it possible for us to read the poem in the light of trauma theory which insists on an ethical redemption from trauma. Here, right at the outset, the speaker hints at the healing power of Nature through his recollection of the past: by connecting the speaker's present self (the I) with his pastself (the other I) through the memory, Wordsworth foreshadows an ethical recovery from the trauma of the vagaries of modernity.Despite the beckoning towards regeneration, the overall tenor of the first pillar in the triadic structure of Tintern Abbey remains towards stasis: the wilderness has been largely compromised by material activities like the cottageground,orchard and pastoral farms, the polluting smoke and the temporary shelters of vagrants and beggars.
In the second pillar of the triadic structure, the traumaticstasis of the present moment is contrasted with the liveliness five years before when "like a roe/I bounded o'er the mountains. . . (68-9). A long absence does not seem to have blotted the beautiful forms of the landscape around the Wye River near Tintern Abbey out of his memory. The memory, as the first movement of second pillar of the triadic structure, sets forth has been efficacious to him in combating the traumas of modernity: These beauteous forms, Through a long absence, have not been to me As is a landscape to a blind man's eye: But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din Of towns and cities, I have owed to them, In hours of weariness, sensations sweet, Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart; And passing even into my purer mind With tranquil restoration:-feelings too Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps, As have no slight or trivial influence On that best portion of a good man's life, His little, nameless, unremembered, acts Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust, To them I may have owed another gift, Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood, In which the burthen of the mystery, In which the heavy and the weary weight Of all this unintelligible world, Is lightened:-that serene and blessed mood, In which the affections gently lead us on,-Until, the breath of this corporeal frame And even the motion of our human blood Almost suspended, we are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul: While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things . (23-49) The beautiful shapes of Nature have been a source of comfort to him, and have sustained him in exile amid the noise and bustle of towns and cities. He owes to them that exalted mood in which he can perceive the reality above and beyond material things. In these moments of illumination, when all is wrapped in a state of joy and harmony, he has an insight into the life of things. But if this were a vain belief, the speaker knows that whenever he has been oppressed by the unprofitable and meaningless materiality of the world he has turned to the ever-sustaining memory of the wooded landscape of the Wye for comfort. Result and Discussion: The speaker's psychological stasis reversed by the memory is an ethical state accruing from the redemption from trauma which reveals self-conscious scrutiny of how he has taught himself to keep discovering new ways of understanding the revitalizing power of Nature amidst its destruction due to the onslaughts of modernity. One of these onslaughts that has been so traumatizing to Wordsworth has been the bloody aftermath of the French Revolution referred to in Tintern Abbey as "The still, sad music of humanity" (91). 1 The speaker's transition from a lesser toa greater consciousness of Nature's efficacy culminates, as it is suggested by the second movement of the second pillar of the triadic structure, in a climacticmoment of new awareness: 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 light of the setting sun and the round ocean, in the living air and the blue sky, and in the mind of man. This awareness has made him take Nature as his nurse, guide, and guardian of his heart and the soul of his moral being. To put it succinctly, Nature functions, for Wordsworth, as a bulwark against the trauma of the onslaughts of modernity.
The representation of the speaker's self-transformation from a traumatized self to a redeemed self is dramatized in a special way in his address to his sister with which the poem concludes. Wordsworth's dramatization of the invisible conversation between the speaker and his sister implies that the poetregards Dorothyas a communal member to whom he transmits this message of his own recovery from the trauma of modernity: Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men, Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all The dreary intercourse of daily life, Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb Our chearful faith that all which we behold Is full of blessings. Therefore let the moon Shine on thee in thy solitary walk; And let the misty mountain winds be free To blow against thee: and in after years, When these wild ecstasies shall be matured Into a sober pleasure, when thy mind Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms, Thy memory be as a dwelling-place For all sweet sounds and harmonies; Oh! then, If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief, Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts Of tender joy wilt thou remember me, And these my exhortations! (129-146) Wordsworth wants Dorothy who was with him on his previous trip to Tintern Abbey to imbibe this message of the efficacy of communion with Nature. In her eyes he can still see gleams of pleasure which he had enjoyed five years ago. The memory that has been metaphoric has helped him to deal with atrophy of the present experience of the ravages of modernity. The metaphoric memory of the landscape around Wye River near Tintern Abbey fills his mind with quietness and beauty so that evil tongues, unsympathetic judgments, the sneers of selfish men and dreary intercourse of material life cannot disturb the optimistic outlook. It is the affect of certainty and hope which he wants to evoke in his sister-an affect that may come to good stead in case in future years she is traumatized by the overwhelming pressures of modernity. Thus, Wordsworth's dramatic address to Dorothy, which is nothing but a pretext to his https://dx.doi.org/10.22161/ijels. 3.5.16 ISSN: 2456-7620 www.ijels.com Page | 801 message to the public at large, is "a rededication to humanitarian concerns" at the inroads made by modernity into the psychology of sensitive people like him (William Richey 212). Conclusion: To wrap up, through the performative dramatization of self-transformation in Tintern Abbey, Wordsworth's metaphoric memory of natural bliss can help deal with the traumas of present life. Through these performative self-dramatizations, he repetitively selfscrutinizes his present maladies by pitting them against the balming, specular memory-a ritual-like performance which ultimately leads to self-stabilization despite serious threats of destabilization. The final affect of reassurance conveyed through his address to Dorothy not only confirms the resolution of tension between doubt and certainty but it also gives an unmistakable working-through of the trauma of modernity, which may be taken as a better, more human polis disposed towards a co-existence of modernity with Nature.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
In order to complete this article, Prof. Dr Beerendra Pandey has helped me as well as in the publishing accessories Prof. Dr A.K.Jha helped as possible as he can.