Great writing jumps from the page and bolts through the air, to resound in the mind and memory. This blog series is devoted to great lines that strike - in literature, speech, music and film.

An aptronym is a name that matches the occupation or character of a person, and there is no more aptly named poet than William Wordsworth (1770-1850). Together with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Wordsworth founded the Romantic movement in English literature, which brought to the world some of the most spectacular and esteemed poetry in history. The Romantics are lauded greats, with Wordsworth at the helm.

Romanticism most values the natural world and the independent self and spirit, and these elements feature prominently in Wordsworth’s lyrical poems, in which he explores the inherent spirituality in the ‘beauteous forms’ in nature he so loves. His poem Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour, July 13, 1798 (known as Tintern Abbey) is an extended reflection upon the sublimity of being at one with nature. In aesthetics, the sublime is an ethereal concept understood as ‘the quality of greatness’. It is the elevated feeling experienced through lofty thought, art and language.

These lines from Tintern Abbey capture the sublime sensation, as Wordsworth imagines the absolute truth of life and existence in the world around him, and within himself:

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.

The flowing enjambment of these lines evokes a swirling wind in the world around the speaker, while the repeated ‘and’ accumulates the features of the earth and atmosphere touched by that ‘living air’. This grand ‘something’ is everywhere, ‘rolls through’ everything, and resides ‘in the mind of man’. Whatever one might imagine the spirit to be, these lines manage to capture it for a moment, before releasing it into the sky.