“Due to a disruption at the end of the line, this train is now terminated. You must get off at the next stop.”

I locked eyes with my sister. Disruption? Terminated? The car buzzed and passengers looked up from their phones. I was filled with disbelief because it was the second time in three days that an estranged voice through a train intercom had declared our journey over, leaving us once again stranded in the middle of nowhere in England. I mulled over our chances of finding a reliable bus to get us to the next train to get us to another bus that would get us to the final destination of our backpacking trip: Grasmere, William Wordsworth’s home in the Lake District.

We dutifully disembarked and wandered out of the station. A group of middle-aged women waved us down. Would we split a cab seven ways? It was either this or the doubtful chance of a bus. Why not? My sister climbed in the back of the big black cab, taking the last seat between the women and their suitcases. I sat up front with the driver, who seemed a kind man, though his Northumbrian accent was thick and hard to follow.

Halfway through the drive, I glanced over to see him hitting the dashboard. The “check engine” light had come on. As we rolled through the countryside he would grimace at the bottom of each hill, growling, “I ’ope we make ’er up.” Somehow, we got from Haltwhistle to Carlisle without using my backup backup plan, hitchhiking.

What was I thinking, I asked myself again as I watched my younger sister heave a backpack, as wide as she was tall, through various towns – Southwaite, Cathwaite, Penrith – as we traced bus routes that didn’t exist. Maybe the better question was: What were my parents thinking? I had taken their youngest child and whisked her to the United Kingdom with a dwindling debit card to chase our dream of a Wordsworthian pilgrimage.

This dream had been sparked five years before, in the summer of 2019, when I visited Tintern Abbey, a crumbling medieval monastery on the banks of the River Wye in Wales. I was on a high-school trip, and that day, after a long bus ride through the rain, we had spent a rushed hour walking among the remains of the abbey, everyone and everything coated in cold mist.

Our professor had gathered us afterward in the basement of an inn beside the ruins and remarked on the piece that had inspired our outing: William Wordsworth’s poem, “Lines, Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798.” 

Despite the surroundings – artificial lighting and carpeted walls – that lecture revealed to me the depth of my desire for beauty. Here were living words to match a living desire. Our professor brought Wordsworth’s challenge to the forefront: perhaps the natural world transforms your soul. Wordsworth writes how recalling the “beauteous forms” of the Wye Valley brought about sublime feelings –

Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,
As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man’s life,
His little, nameless, unremembered, acts
Of kindness and of love.

Can the natural world quicken one to love? Can it soften the heart to tenderness, and allow us, as Wordsworth says, “to see into the life of things”? This was my first cognizant interaction with a true Romanticism – not egotistical or individualistic, nor pantheistic or the cause of all modernity’s problems – but a Romanticism that believes the pursuit of beauty is steeped in love.

The poem, “Tintern Abbey,” as it is commonly called (though the abbey never appears in the text), is the story of Wordsworth’s evolving relationship with nature and beauty. It is a long poem, composed like a symphony, with repeated melodies woven throughout.

In the poem, a twenty-eight-year-old Wordsworth returns to a hill above Tintern Abbey with his younger sister Dorothy and reflects on the familiar and beautiful landscape he had last seen five years before. He meditates on the nature of beauty, how through recollection, its powers can instill hope, engender good deeds, and transform the heart. Wordsworth recalls his understanding of nature as a young man, how he was short-sighted, fear-driven, and full of “aching joys” and “dizzy raptures.”  He then turns to the present, setting forth a matured vision of how the divine works through nature to enlighten his mind, instruct his moral being, craft his perception, guide his heart, and acquaint him with the sublime force that “rolls through all things.” Finally, Wordsworth turns to Dorothy and teaches her how to reconcile the great evils and sadnesses she will encounter with the great beauty and goodness before them.

After returning home from this first trip to Tintern, I wanted a way to remember all that I had seen and learned. The words of the poem, my professor’s pointed lecture, the beauty of the Wye Valley, and the towering ruins of the old abbey formed the Romantic bedrock that I use to face the world. Wordsworth tells Dorothy their “cheerful faith” is “that all which we behold is full of blessings.” This became my creed of hopefulness and renewal.

I set about memorizing the poem. It took a year. The Covid stretch-of-nothingness gave me ample time to walk in circles round my cul-de-sac with a coverless and battered edition of English Romantic poetry as my companion. Then my sister, four years younger, had an oration competition at her grade school. Though it wasn’t on the suggested list of pieces, she asked her teachers if she could memorize “Tintern Abbey.” I was thrilled.

Now we could recite the poem together and talk about what made it great. Perhaps it was inevitable that the conversation turned. Wouldn’t it be crazy if we went to Tintern in five years? We could live out the plot of the poem! I return in five years’ time – the summer of 2024 – and, just like Wordsworth, bring my younger sister with me. Teenage-girl-late-night-dreaming rarely goes anywhere, but this was too perfect.

And here we were. The bus dropped us off in Tintern, Wales, with our heavy backpacks and dying phones. Tintern was quiet. We stood in an empty, narrow street, looking up at the steep hills surrounding us, the dark-green faces of the fells dotted with little homes that gazed into the valley. 

Tintern wishes not to be noticed. Everything is fortressed, guarded by its wooded hills. The River Wye is the trespasser. Everything else is demure, gentle, and silent, while the river is brazen, forceful, and loud, slashing an oxbow through the little valley. It rages and rages, but the residents and surroundings alike shrug their shoulders and roll back into a dreamy slumber. 

The next day I woke up before my sister and stepped onto the riverbank to watch the sunrise. We were staying at a farmhouse on the Wye; the water was glossy and still, with only ducks cutting its surface, and the air was thick with mist and waking light. I prayed prayers of thankfulness.

At first we weren’t sure where to go. Our only directions from the poem were “a few miles above Tintern Abbey.” We studied a map and noticed a path to a viewpoint labeled “Devil’s Pulpit” one and a quarter miles away. “What’s this place?” we asked a clerk at the abbey gift shop. “It’s an overlook of the abbey. Legend says that the devil would tempt young monks away from their duties there.”

The devil’s temptations notwithstanding, the location seemed to roughly match the Wordsworths’, and after passing through ruins of the abbey, we began our ascent. We took the long route by the river, following the Wye’s oxbow out of Tintern. There was no one around, and no conversation fit this long-awaited moment, so we started singing hymns and psalms we had learned as children.

Our singing came to an embarrassed end when we came to a bridge and crossed paths with an old man, a seasoned backpacker with a walking stick in hand. He said he had been on the opposite side of the Wye.  Had it been us that he had heard singing? We giggled and stumbled away from his enthusiastic applause.

The actual climb was tough and long. The path was unclear and we had to work our way through knotted, spindly roots and hanging limbs. “Can you imagine Dorothy doing this in a dress?” I asked my sister. You couldn’t see out of the brush and branches. Above, you couldn’t see the sky.  

At last we made it to Devil’s Pulpit. We climbed over the manmade embankment and toward the overlook, a rock wide enough for two people to sit on. There was Tintern Abbey – so small now – with its scaffolding shining in the sun. We rested there and I braided my sister’s hair.

The German Romantic poet Novalis writes, “The world must be made Romantic. In that way one can find the original meaning again.” Romanticizing the world probably sounds silly, or like a waste of time. Perhaps the word “idealism” rings in your ears. But Novalis’ call to make the world romantic is a serious, simple twofold claim: first, that the world has meaning, and second, that faithful engagement with the world reveals that meaning. To Novalis, it is our ceaseless duty to peer into the heart of the world: to look at the commonplace and see higher meaning, to approach the ordinary with mysterious respect, to find infinitude within finite things. A belief in an “original meaning,” what we could also call divine or ultimate truth, has guided Western philosophy and religion for millennia. Talk of “romanticizing” is neither new nor nonsense, but a call back to a belief that has long inspired those who seek truth. And to romanticize – to faithfully engage with the world – is inherently a relational project. Wordsworth’s poetry and life help us see this.

“Tintern Abbey” shows that our pursuit of beauty is a desire for relationality; we want to know beauty and in turn to be known. Yet when our pursuit of beauty is disordered, reality becomes dizzying and dim. The first time Wordsworth visited the Wye, he lacked understanding of beauty because he failed to be in a relationship with her. He recalls how,

like a roe
I bounded o’er the mountains, by the sides
Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams,
Wherever nature led: more like a man
Flying from something that he dreads, than one
Who sought the thing he loved.

Wordsworth’s fault was not the pursuit of feeling, but the pursuit of feeling without the work and stakes of relationship. Instead of coming face to face with the beloved, he had turned his back in fear and distracted himself with fleeting pleasures.

Wordsworth leaves this perspective behind – “not for this faint I / nor mourn nor murmur; other gifts / Have followed” – and as he grows, he enters a relationship with nature. He tells Dorothy:

I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue.

Wordsworth turns to face beauty; he is still and listens. He lets nature affect him, challenging and changing his heart. And because of this education in listening and beholding, knowledge and insight characterize his return to Tintern.

I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  .
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.

Wordsworth senses the original meaning; he becomes susceptible to something greater than himself or the material world, that is, spirit. Nature lifts Wordsworth’s thoughts to the divine, which in turn allows him not only to see the divine in all things but to love all things more wholly and faithfully. This “elevation” does not make him disregard the initial relationship, but beckons a return. You can hear a wide smile when he says, “Therefore am I still / A lover of the meadows and the woods / And the mountains; and of all that we behold.”

“So what?” a reader might ask. Well, just look at what Wordsworth does next. Upon gaining this understanding of – as Hopkins might say – a “charged world,” he turns his attention to others and devotes his life to hopefulness, perseverance, gratitude, and charity. See how he turns to his sister – “my dear, dear Sister! and this prayer I make” – and asks her to join him in this cheerful faith that everything is a gift. Here in “Tintern Abbey” – a hallmark of Romantic poetry – loving nature teaches one how to love God and love others.

We shouted out our poem to the Wye Valley. The familiar words fell together joyously as my voice harmonized with my sister’s. She grabbed my hand mid-recitation, and when I caught her eyes, they were the brightest blue. We professed that neither loss nor loneliness could hinder our love of God, beauty, or each other. We had fulfilled our Wordsworthian dream.

And then, it was over. I stood, stunned, on that overlook. I had expected revelation – a feeling of something new – but was instead surprised by a feeling of affirmation. This word seems to best capture the moment.

Our backpacking adventure was an attempt to live out Novalis’s call to romanticize the world, to try to know its original meaning. This knowledge does not come from gathering facts; it is like knowing a person, which means time, trust, vulnerability, shared joys and sorrows, betrayal, and forgiveness. This knowing is love.

Paul writes to the Corinthians: “Anyone who claims to know something does not yet have the necessary knowledge; but anyone who loves God is known by him” (1 Cor. 8:2–3). Paul understands that coming to “know” God is entering into relationship with him – to be endlessly known and desired by him. I find a similar pattern in Novalis’s call. There is no complete revelation of the original meaning, no pulling the infinite out of the proverbial finite hat, but there is a constant revealing when we love the world and others faithfully.

This is what I mean by affirmation. Traveling to Tintern did not teach new truths; it pulled back veils. That hilltop moment was a reassuring message that the Lord is good, his world beautiful, my sister a precious soul, and this life meant for a love that ever deepens and renews. And these relationships, shared loves, and promises to keep knowing each other actually do make the whole world more dear. Or at least, that is what Wordsworth concluded. His closing lines address Dorothy, declaring that he loves beauty and nature more because of her:

Nor wilt thou then forget,
That after many wanderings, many years
Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs,
And this green pastoral landscape, were to me
More dear, both for themselves and for thy sake!

That, I guess, is why I had to fulfill a five-year dream and take my sister “a few miles above Tintern Abbey.” The life of faith in a real sense is an adventure of terminated trains and tough climbs searching for affirmation of the promise that “all which we behold is full of blessings.” And that, I like to think, is the meaning behind our trip: we confirmed Novalis’s claim that this world means something, and we vowed to faithfully engage with it forever and together.

It was our last evening in Grasmere. My sister and I had left our youth hostel after a rainstorm and walked away from the town. The paved road brought us to a muddy footpath, which led us through a thick patch of trees until they were no more and we found ourselves under the open sky among the living mountains.

A silver river scored the fell ahead of us. It ran vertically down and then wound through the little valley, creating a natural barrier between the herds of sheep and cows. A barn sat at the foot of the mountain, while in front of us a large stone bridge rested proudly over the trickling water. I sat on the railing of the bridge as my sister made her way through the mud and tall grass toward the sheep and their lambs.

All she wanted was to touch one. She was so patient. She stood, all eagerness, her body slightly hunched with one hand out. She was there for half an hour, moving so slowly, but with every motion the lambs scurried back to their mothers. She held out grass for them, her smile lost in her earnestness. The sun was setting; rays of light broke the sky and the once-storming clouds were falling around us. There was no one else there. Just smoke from the chimneys of the shepherd’s house and warm light streaming from its windows.

I was in love with the Creator who created all this, and felt known.