Wordsworth tells us that although it’s been five years since he last clapped eyes on this scene, the memories of the beautiful landscape have often returned to him when he has been in busy ‘towns and cities’ or sitting ‘in lonely rooms’. Well, actually, according to Wordsworth, he didn’t ‘write’ a word of the poem until he got to Bristol, where he wrote down the whole poem, having composed it in his head shortly after leaving the Wye. This poem was not actually composed at Tintern Abbey, but, as the poem’s full title (‘Lines Written (or Composed) a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798’) reveals, was written nearby, overlooking the ruins of the medieval priory in the Wye Valley in South Wales. On that best portion of a good man’s life, Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,įelt in the blood, and felt along the heart The rhyming couplets offer an uncomplicated rhyme scheme, which reflects this.But oft, in lonely rooms, and ‘mid the din This simple, straightforward metre is in keeping with the subject of the poem, which praises the ‘perfect woman’ for her plain charms. So, in the first line: ‘She WAS a PHAN-tom OF de-LIGHT’. ‘Perfect Woman’ is written in fairly regular iambic tetrameter, which means there are four iambs per line, an iamb being a metrical foot comprising an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one. Before Coventry Patmore coined the phrase ‘angel in the house’ to describe the Victorian wife and mother, Wordsworth celebrates the ‘angelic light’ of his wife. Nor is Mary simply a comforter to her famous husband, the great poet Wordsworth: yes, she is there to ‘warm’ and to ‘comfort’ him, but also to ‘command’. Mary is still described somewhat condescendingly as a ‘being’ (recall ‘creature’ from the previous stanza), but her ‘reason’ is ‘firm’ and her endurance, foresight, strength, and skill are all praised. ‘Machine’ here is not a reference to the Industrial Revolution, or at least almost certainly not: Wordsworth is using ‘machine’ in the sense of ‘body’ or ‘living organism’. In the final stanza of the poem, the focus remains firmly on the visual: ‘And now I see with eye serene / The very pulse of the machine’. In other words, then, the lines ‘A creature not too bright or good / For human nature’s daily food’ praise Mary as not being too proud or haughty to take pleasure in the ‘daily food’ of ordinary humankind. The line ‘A creature not too bright or good’ sounds patronisingly insulting, and hasn’t aged well but Wordsworth, who wanted to write poetry in the language of ordinary people and capture the lives of ordinary folk, has a reverence for the daily. Both the past (‘Sweet records’) and future (‘promises as sweet’) are written in her face or ‘countenance’. In the second stanza, Wordsworth continues to put his wife on a pedestal: ‘A Spirit, yet a Woman too!’ The poet then moves into the domestic sphere, drawing attention to his wife’s ‘household motions’. The emphasis is on images and seeing: Wordsworth goes back to when his wife ‘first … gleam’d upon my sight’. This ghostly or quasi-ghostly language (‘apparition’, ‘haunt’) continues throughout the opening stanza of the poem. Wordsworth praises his wife as semi- supernatural or ethereal. The clue to the meaning of ‘Perfect Woman’ lies in that first line: ‘She was a phantom of delight’.
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