Not quite a "fault," but rather, a characteristic often encountered in other poems from Lyrical Ballads is persistent repetition, i.e. "We are seven," "Oh, misery! oh misery!", happy, happy Johnny's lips "burring," Betty's hysterics. According to Wordsworth's Preface to the 1800 edition of LB, repetition is a vital part of the "low and rustic life" from which he hoped to trace "the primary laws of our nature." He postulates that the "sameness and narrow circle of their intercourse" was in part responsible for the development of their "plainer and more emphatic language" and of course, we cannot ignore the relation of a circular routine to a kind of physical manifestation of the possibility of feelings recollected or reactivated in tranquillity.

"Tintern Abbey" is not repetitive in a songlike fashion as the aforesaid other poems are, but it is a poem that describes the speaker's circular path to the same spot, first as a young man, then through his imagination while in the city, then with his sister (which is a double return, as he not only returns to the spot but returns to his first experience of the spot through his sister's eyes), and at last through his writing of the poem. While in a poem such as "The Idiot Boy," where the repetitiveness seems at last to be relieved in advancement of the plot (whereby the readers, at least, are released from the cycle), there is a sense in "Tintern Abbey" that the progression is in the circularity and that each revisitation is both evocative of every other and a distinct experience in itself. Additionally, although he describes a particularly lovely spot, his emphasis is on the return of the developing mind rather than the body -- or even the return of the developing mind to itself -- which gives the non-Lake District-dwelling denizen (and never mind the redundancy) "life and food" for his/her own imagination.

Irene Hsiao