Finding Faith in a Ruined Abbey
Lines from a honeymoon composed at Tintern
I was no longer single.
The hermit, “alone,” no longer sat “by his fire” without a companion, writing page after page in his cave. I now had a wife. No more defiled pages with blank verse. My pen, alas, back then, did only blanks shoot.
Likewise, two hundred years earlier, as a hermit at 23, William Wordsworth visited the ruins of Tintern Abbey. After college and a stay in France, he was directionless. Five years later, William Wordsworth brought his dear sister, Dorothy, back to Tintern Abbey, the famous and dissolute Cistercian Abbey along the Wye River in Southeast Wales.
In a similar fashion, of connubial nature, I brought Mary Jane, my wife, just a few days after civil marriage.
Was a ruined abbey from 1536 an appropriate substitute for a genuine church? Like the English Romantics, Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, I also was a Romantic, newly made with a purpose and a wife. Did I feel the same pull to Tintern? Ydw. Or, yes.
In Welsh, Tintern Abbey is called Abaty Tyndryn.
