a. What are the 'beauteous forms' referred to in these lines?
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Already from its title, "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour, July 13, 1798," we learn that "Tintern Abbey" is a prospect poem - a poem that in describing a place from a distance gains perspective both on space and time - and, implicitly, that it is a religious poem, as until recently it was always understood to be. It is true that the abbey is not actually mentioned in the poem, as recent criticism has complained,1 and one would have to know of the spoliation of religious houses during the reign of Henry VIII to grasp the signi? cance of Wordsworth's symbol; but once one has grasped it, the problems supposedly attached to Wordsworth's title vanish; for whatever else the ruined abbey evokes for the poet in terms of his own private experience, it is also a symbol for a religious crisis, or crisis of modernity, that the poem will confront and that it will attempt to resolve. "Tintern Abbey," as this essay will try to show, is a poem that confronts a crisis that is at once personal or private - insofar as it involves a recognition of mortality and of the progressive loss of vitality as a result of the aging process - and religious or public - insofar as the awareness of mortality is connected to the loss of a shared belief in the afterlife and in the immortality of the soul.