I read “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tinturn Abbey . . .” for the first time during my senior year of high school, and today was the first time I have read it since. I remember my surprise the first time around: I entered the poem anticipating a love letter to some picturesque ruins, and had my expectations perfectly satisfied until around line 115, when I discovered that the heart of the poem was Dorothy, William’s sister. In the intervening three years, my memory distorted to prioritize the surprise, and when I saw the poem on this class’s syllabus, I remembered it as “the poem in praise of Wordsworth’s sister, set in some mountains that he thinks of fondly due to their association with her.” This time around, though, I was surprised almost from the beginning: there is much less of Dorothy than I’d remembered in this poem. In fact, halfway through, I began doubting that I had remembered the right poem at all.
In isolation, I would not have thought much of it: for three years, in fact, I had thought of “Lines . . .” as a powerful testament to Wordsworth’s love for his sister. Within the context of Wordsworth’s other work, though, I look more critically upon this piece: given how much of his work was inspired by or directly drawn from Dorothy’s journals without credit given, it seems inadequate for Wordsworth to merely praise the memories that her voice and eyes evoke in him. There is no acknowledgement of her role as the deeply eloquent chronicler of their lives: Dorothy is a prop, a repository for memory, and nothing more. Even in the final line, ending with the claim that he loves the setting “for thy sake!”, Dorothy must share that honor with the inherent beauty of the landscape, and the whole compliment is wrapped up in the assumption that “Nor wilt thou forget”. I understand that an itemized list of Dorothy’s merits hardly belongs in a “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” but it seems strange and somewhat disrespectful to me that, of all the feelings overflowing a few miles above Tinturn Abbey on the banks of the Wye, gratitude apparently did not make the list.
