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The title tells us the poem’s setting with great specificity—that is, on “July 13, 1798,” “a few miles above Tintern Abbey,” which is located in the Wye Valley in Monmouthshire, Wales. Yet the specificity of this title is deceptive. For one thing, Tintern Abbey itself doesn’t appear in the poem. Being “a few miles above” it, the speaker may be able to see the building, but it would be a small speck in the distance. The Abbey is thus an absent presence in the poem. More important than the Abbey, then, is the particularity of the speaker’s vantage. The speaker stands near the banks of the River Wye, the sound from which creates the “soft inland murmur” (line 4) that he recalls so strongly from a previous trip to this place. If this landscape is so important to the speaker, it isn’t simply because it’s beautiful. Instead, it’s because he already knows this landscape, the familiarity of which jogs his memory and gets him to think about how he has engaged with the natural world throughout his life. In this regard, the geographical specificity of the setting isn’t important at all. Rather, it’s the landscape’s ability to prompt the speaker’s reflections that proves most significant.

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