We’d come to Tintern Abbey because it was located just across the border, just across the River Wye, in Wales, the land of my distant ancestors. We’d also come because of William Wordsworth, who mentions the abbey in a poem that isn’t about the abbey at all but about his ability to remember and contemplate and be inspired by experience. The abbey itself is referred to only in the poem’s title—“Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour. July 13, 1798”—which has to be one of the least inspiring titles about being inspired that has ever been applied to a poem.
But we came because I’d read Wordsworth in college, and I wanted to at least set foot on Welsh soil, even though we had many other places on our itinerary that beckoned to the east: Bath, Stonehenge, the medieval smuggler’s town of Rye, Bodiam Castle, and then, of course, London.
What we found on the sylvan banks of the Wye, much to our pleasure, were the ruins of a Cistercian monastery that Henry VIII had dissolved and plundered (after dissolving a few marriages first and founding the Church of England). The abbey’s roof is gone, some walls and outer buildings crumbled, but the primary structure of the church—its soaring pillars and archways—can stir the soul nonetheless. Instead of stone floor, you walk on grass. Here’s a place where the human endeavor to reach the heavens is pulled back into focus by the surrounding, tree-flush hillsides as seen through paneless windows and doorless doorways and by the verdant growth beneath your feet. The original spiritual activity of Cistercian monks is gone, but a spiritual connection remains and is in some ways magnified by the wreckage.
I sensed this would be the case before visiting, had Googled pictures of the abbey’s Old Red Sandstone remains while plotting our tour, but was not entirely prepared for the effect, especially since I’d seen other ruins in my life. In fact, visiting a ruin (or partial ruin) generally puts me in mind of a different poem—one by Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was a generation younger than Wordsworth. In “Ozymandias,” Shelley reminds us how the ravages of time can take down even the most powerful of rulers, including the King of Kings whose monument to testosterone has decayed into “two vast and trunkless legs of stone.” (Fun fact: Shelley, who had a beef with Wordsworth for deserting his nature-loving radicalism and becoming too conservative, wrote a sonnet cutting his predecessor down to size.)
But then I pulled a Wordsworth and started thinking about how I was feeling. In truth, Tintern Abbey inspired me to write a song, though not immediately—only when I returned home and recollected my emotions in tranquility, as was Wordsworth’s wont for poetic discourse. For me, nature’s inclination toward recapturing the spaces once filled by lofty human achievement (sky instead of roof, grass instead of floor) provided a suitable check to human hubris, which is what Shelley warbles about in “Ozymandias.” It also became, in the narrative I was conceiving, representative of the ephemeral, no-promises quality of a traveler’s romance—of a guy who meets a girl at the ruins of a church, travels with her to other places, falls in love, and discovers that such a romance, much like the abbey, has an expiration date.
Things fall apart. Castles, churches, and sometimes love.
But time also provides opportunity for new creation. If time destroys (and doesn’t give a damn about it), it also avails the distance necessary for emotions to be recollected, sifted, sorted, compressed, cooked, cooled, and reheated. Love among the ruins—once ruined—becomes fodder for a poem, a story, a song, or a made-for-TV movie starring Katharine Hepburn and Laurence Olivier.
And so I consume my fodder as I glance backward. I think of how we wandered the grounds at Tintern Abbey that day. Took our pictures, saw cows grazing in the nearby field, walked the nave, paused in the transepts, read placards about the night stair and the lavatorium and the presbytery, separated for quiet contemplation and converged for quiet commentary, jumped off stones (at least the kids did), and saw small indications of nature’s continuing impulse to seed new life into cracks and sills.
When we left, we crossed the River Wye and headed for Bath and the Roman times and, a few days later, Stonehenge, where time and human achievement took on yet another formulation in the grass beneath an open sky.