Free Why Read? by Mark Edmundson Page A

faith (pious Coleridge always feared
for Wordsworth's soul) to find any reason to continue on?
    Wordsworth's answer is that there is a part of himself that is free from the fallen society in which he's immersed. It is
a part that lives on deep in him, although covered over by custom, convention and fear. And in this region of half-remembered
being he finds hope, or, as he puts it, "life and food / for future years."
    He remembers himself as a child free in nature, with a spirit that belongs to nothing but the gorgeous, frightening natural
world and has not been colonized by the city and its dispiriting ways. He thinks of the time "when first / I came among these
hills; when like a roe / I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides / Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams, / Wherever
nature led." In memories of that free self, Wordsworth finds an authentic pleasure, a vision of life lived without the anxieties
that attend on awareness of death. The child in Wordsworth is free of that mortal fear; he senses that he will return painlessly
to the natural world that brought him forth and gave him his vital, unambiguous force.
    There is something in the poet that was there before civilization left its imprint. That something is free and it makes Wordsworth
freer, however temporarily. In the last phase of the poem, he worries, edging again toward gloom, about whether in time the
freedom will be foreclosed. He is becoming aware, in other words, of the merely transitory power that Emerson associated with
even the most impressive human expansions. In time, they can "solidify and hem in the life." Maybe this contact with nature
existing inside of him won't serve Wordsworth as an antidote all his life through.
    Some critics like to look at this poem as a major moment in "the Romantic invention of childhood." But that is too ironic
and distancing a notion. For the poem asks us to look into our own childhoods and into the lives of the children around us,
and to see if they might not have something to teach us. May they show us how to live in a less guarded, more joyous and exuberant
way? Could they teach us how, for a while, to stanch our fears of the future, and live in the present moment in nature? ("We
are blessed always if we live in the present," says the American Wordsworthian, Thoreau.)
    And what about this nature? The poem asks us to look around at nature as it exists in our moment, and to consider what sort
of restoration is to be found there. It suggests that in nature is the perpetuation of human vitality, that between civilization
and nature there is a dialectic, and that letting one element in the tension grow too mighty, as Wordsworth's eighteenth-century
forebears seem to the poet to have done, can be killing. This poem has legitimate connections to the best current ecology
movements. The work can add to—or create—the conviction that in the love of wilderness and its preservation, there lies hope
for humanity.
    In "Tintern Abbey," one also encounters the bracing hypothesis that depression or melancholia or what-have-you is a great
force, to be sure, but that it is a force we may combat through individual resourcefulness and faith. Maybe the answer to
one's despondency does not lie in nature or memory or childhood per se, but Wordsworth's poem enjoins us to feel that it lies
somewhere within our own reach. The site of our sufferings, what J. H. Van den Berg called the overfilled inner self, may
also be the source of our cure. We are creatures who have the capacity to make ourselves sick, collectively and individually,
but we often have the power to heal ourselves as well.
    All these things, and many more besides, readers may draw from "Tintern Abbey." They may say, "Yes, of course, I've always
thought so, but never quite had the words to say as much." Or "All right, I'll try Wordsworth's cure, or something like it.
It could very well work." Others will be put off by this particular vision. Perhaps they'll find it too