Seeing Tintern Abbey

Perhaps the landscape itself was decidedly different in Wordsworth’s time.  Maybe there were more trees, the abbey ruins tucked away in a copse, a forgotten gravesite.  There would be nothing but trees, trees and brooks and rivulets and birdsong.  The play sites of children, where he might have frolicked about with his sister before age took him, those are secret places, closed places.  Intimacy and dark comfort of a private world.  Tintern Abbey isn’t like that, if it ever was.  The air is clear and the sky bright.  Wispy cloud and the reverie of jet contrails laze overhead, and there is haze on the mountainsides.  It’s a long approach by bus, and the ruins are clearly visible to the approaching traveler, albeit not visible in the American way.  It’s a British visibility, self-apologetic; aware that its time of youthful triumph has passed, like American places rarely are. 

After a visitor’s center and the usual paltry shop: Tintern Abbey.  The ruins themselves are an essentially quiet place, utterly peaceful during those initial reverent steps through its aged masonry.  If you sit awhile, seeing and breathing and thinking nothing at all, will you find what Wordsworth remembered?  Possibly. 

But Tintern Abbey is no longer at peace.  It’s not essentially quiet, as I deem it was centuries ago in the time of the poem.  Sit awhile, breathe, and be accosted by a modern panorama of sound.  It is inescapable.  Even in this verdant Welsh paradise, washed all over by cool breezes and wispy clouds, the rumble and rush of modern highways remains.  Overhead, the fumes emitted by jet engines – and all around, the mechanical thunder!  It's not all that, really.  Relatively speaking, in many another place this would be tranquility itself.  But one expects perfection in such a place, and any modern noise at all spoils the possibility of wandering back through time.

Still, Tintern Abbey is very beautiful, and I greatly enjoyed my visit. There was a house next to the abbey, facing away, its aged walls covered by a spray of blooming vines.  To live there would be a pleasant fate, I think. 

On the way back to London, I dreamt of the electric towers crashing to the ground.