On First Reading "Tintern Abbey"

On First Reading “Tintern Abbey”

I first read William Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” at Tintern Abbey on April 21, 2012, while sitting in the back seat of David’s VW Passat with a cd playing American country music.  David is my sister’s sixty-four year old British boyfriend, an awfully nice man she met on the Internet.  While they strolled around the site in the light, cold rain, I stayed in the car and read the poem, half listening to  “Smoke, Smoke That Cigarette” by Tex Williams and then  “Ragtime Cowboy Joe” by the Hill Billies.

I was embarrassed to be reading for the first time a literary classic I should have read years ago.  I have an MA in English literature and taught college-level English  for more than twenty years.  However, it’s a moot point.  I’m finished with a career of talking about books set in places I’ve never been.  Chalk it up to the powers of the imagination.  As Emily Dickinson says, “I never saw a moor/I never saw the sea/Yet know I how the heather looks/And what a wave must be.“

Reading the poem while I looked at the ruins through a rain-spotted window was more about being able to say that I was reading “Tintern Abbey” while looking at Tintern Abbey, just as I would be able to tell them back home that a week later I bought cheddar at Cheddar.  It’s clever, but even I want to say, “So what?”

So what about the juxtaposition of a literary classic while listening to classic western swing tunes?  Could I make the case that American cowboys and the English Romantics are saddle pals at heart?  Maybe.  For both, it’s all about nature and nostalgia—and swagger.

I know that since meeting my sister two years ago, David, a retired banker, has had a crush on all things western.  He wants to learn how to ride a horse, loves driving ninety miles an hour on the wide open spaces between Reno and Elko, Nevada, our home town, and listens to a collection of vintage western music as he drives on the wrong side of the road between Winscombe and Bristol, where he and my sister attend vikram yoga three days a week.

Later, at my desk in Tuscarora, Nevada, I thought again about that quirky experience.  I remembered  lines from “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” the  poem by Wordsworth  I  love:   “for oft, when on my couch I lie/In vacant or in pensive mood…”.

There’s no more to this anecdote.  Sometimes odd juxtapositions in life are just that.  Maybe there are just so many universal themes.  Maybe there’s a little bit of cowboy in every man.