Vocabulary from " What Makes William Wordsworth's Poem 'Tintern Abbey' a Masterpiece" by David Lehman

Adam C.
It's not often that an extended appreciation of a poem that is more than 200 years old appears in a major newspaper. The November 17th Wall Street Journal contained a remarkable dissection of Wordworth's "Tintern Abbey" by David Lehman, a teacher of writing and a poet himself, as well as commentary on what the poem means to him personally. Here are 19 words from Lehman (and Wordsworth) about how one can experience great poetry, even centuries after it was composed. From The Wall Street Journal, November 17, 2013 What Makes William Wordsworth's Poem 'Tintern Abbey' a Masterpiece
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Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. piety
    righteousness by virtue of being religiously devout
    The refreshing heterodoxy of Wordsworth's youthful verse gave way to the piety of his "Ode to Duty."
  2. galleon
    a large square-rigged sailing ship with three or more masts
    Not for Wordsworth the ghostly galleons of Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"; Wordsworth's imagination was tamer than that of his collaborator on the landmark "Lyrical Ballads," to whom he was a less than generous friend.
  3. adroit
    quick or skillful or adept in action or thought
    Nor was he as adroit a craftsman as Keats or Shelley, masters of lyric forms, although he single-handedly revived the sonnet from a century of neglect.
  4. consummate
    having or revealing supreme mastery or skill
    Yet Wordsworth, personally the least likable of the major English Romantics, was arguably the most indispensable—the one to whom we turn for the consummate exposition of a crucial movement of thought.
  5. melancholy
    a constitutional tendency to be gloomy and depressed
    "Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the banks of the Wye during a tour" presents the crisis of melancholy, specifically the melancholy over the passing of youth.
  6. palpable
    capable of being perceived
    If the majestic prospect of a ruined 12th-century church on the Welsh side of the River Wye triggers the meditation, the landscape's fourth dimension—time as an almost palpable presence—dominates it.
  7. trepidation
    a feeling of alarm or dread
    Now his thoughts turn naturally to the changes since then and to trepidations over what may ensue.
  8. reverie
    an abstracted state of absorption
    But the reality principle is strong in him; he shuts off the reverie in four curt syllables: "That time is past."
  9. impel
    urge or force to an action; constrain or motivate
    The conviction that there is "a motion and a spirit that impels / All thinking things, all objects of all thought, / And rolls through all things" expresses itself with the force of a soul-restoring epiphany.
  10. epiphany
    a usually sudden insight, perception, or understanding of something
    The conviction that there is "a motion and a spirit that impels / All thinking things, all objects of all thought, / And rolls through all things" expresses itself with the force of a soul-restoring epiphany.
  11. rhapsodic
    feeling great rapture or delight
    This sentence, for example, stretches across 16 lines like a rhapsodic passage in a symphony, where the music rises, meets resistance, dips to a low, hesitates, and then recovers, as tensions are teased out and resolved:
  12. ecstatic
    feeling great rapture or delight
    "Tintern Abbey" has a double climax—the second not a restatement of the first but an ecstatic application of it.
  13. predicate
    involve as a necessary condition or consequence
    The first "Therefore" prefaces a statement of resolution, a vow predicated on a belief: "Therefore am I still / A lover of the meadows and the woods, / And mountains, and of all that we behold / From this green earth."
  14. exhortation
    an earnest attempt at persuasion
    As radiant as this affirmation is, I believe it is eclipsed by the exhortations that the second "therefore" introduces—if only because the second-person pronoun keeps at bay the solipsism to which a sublime egoist like Wordsworth may otherwise be susceptible:
  15. solipsism
    the philosophical theory that the self is all that exists
    As radiant as this affirmation is, I believe it is eclipsed by the exhortations that the second "therefore" introduces—if only because the second-person pronoun keeps at bay the solipsism to which a sublime egoist like Wordsworth may otherwise be susceptible:
  16. sublime
    of high moral or intellectual value
    As radiant as this affirmation is, I believe it is eclipsed by the exhortations that the second "therefore" introduces—if only because the second-person pronoun keeps at bay the solipsism to which a sublime egoist like Wordsworth may otherwise be susceptible:
  17. susceptible
    yielding readily to or capable of undergoing a process
    As radiant as this affirmation is, I believe it is eclipsed by the exhortations that the second "therefore" introduces—if only because the second-person pronoun keeps at bay the solipsism to which a sublime egoist like Wordsworth may otherwise be susceptible:
  18. succor
    assistance in time of difficulty
    When my own "genial spirits" fail, the poem I turn to for wisdom and succor beyond consolation is "Tintern Abbey."
  19. consolation
    the act of giving relief in affliction
    When my own "genial spirits" fail, the poem I turn to for wisdom and succor beyond consolation is "Tintern Abbey."
Created on Mon Nov 18 15:33:10 EST 2013 (updated Tue Nov 19 15:20:53 EST 2013)

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