Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh.Īnd I who have written much in prose and verseįor others’ uses, will write now for mine,–Īs when you paint your portrait for a friend, The poem is one of the great hymns to tranquillity, quiet contemplation, and self-examination in all of English literature, and a quintessential piece of Romantic poetry written in meditative blank verse. Well, actually, according to Wordsworth, he didn’t ‘write’ a word of the poem until he got to Bristol, where he wrote down the whole poem, having composed it in his head shortly after leaving the Wye. This poem was not actually composed at Tintern Abbey, but, as the poem’s full title reveals, was written nearby, overlooking the ruins of the medieval priory in the Wye Valley in South Wales. Thoughts of more deep seclusion and connect These waters, rolling from their mountain-springsĭo I behold these steep and lofty cliffs, Pope and his fellow eighteenth-century neoclassical (or ‘Augustan’) poets saw how heroic couplets could be used for discursive poetry about weighty moral topics as well as for retelling heroic epic stories.įive years have past five summers, with the length Whether he thinks too little, or too much …Īlexander Pope (1688-1744) also eschewed blank verse in favour of rhymed iambic pentameter: specifically, as with Chaucer, rhyming couplets. In doubt to deem himself a god, or beast īorn but to die, and reas’ning but to err He hangs between in doubt to act, or rest With too much weakness for the stoic’s pride, With too much knowledge for the sceptic side,

Plac’d on this isthmus of a middle state, Know then thyself, presume not God to scan

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