throughout the nineteenth century, walking
excursions into this area were popular holiday
activities; people visited the Gothic ruins, long-
since left to crumble and covered with ivy, and
made their way along the river edge through pic-
turesque rolling and mostly unpopulated wooded
countryside. Wordsworth visited the area in 1793
and again 1798.
Returning to London, he thought about
these beautiful scenes, idealizing nature itself
and the life of common people who live in cot-
tages and work on small farms. Faced with Lon-
don’s polluted air and water and hounded by its
filthy, congested streets, Wordsworth was com-
forted to think about that beautiful area along
the Wye and prompted to write what it meant to
him. The full title of his poem is ‘‘Lines Com-
posed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on
Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour,
July 13, 1798,’’ commonly referred to as ‘‘Lines
above Tintern Abbey’’ or more simply ‘‘Tintern
Abbey.’’
‘‘Tintern Abbey’’ is virtually a cornerstone
of romantic poetry, both in itself as a poem and
in what it says about the value romantic poets
found in nature. For Wordsworth and other
romantic poets of his time and earlier, nature
expressed a divine life force or deity. Being in
nature brought people in touch with their
innate moral sense, their true inner being. This
awareness of essence or truth was degraded or
eclipsed in city life. Nature was pure; the city
wascorrupt.Sotoreturntonaturewas,ina
sense, to cleanse oneself of environmental con-
tamination, social materialism, moral decay,
and psychological confusion and disillusion-
ment. For the romantics, nature expressed a
revitalizing energy available to every person
directly. For them, going into nature was a
better way of worship than attending church.
So it makes sense that these walking tours along
the Wye were so meaningful to Wordsworth
that he felt compelled to write a poem about
them, about how his appreciation of the area
was more profound on the second visit, and
how once back in London comforting memo-
ries of the visit recurred to him.
In fact, it is memory of nature that Words-
worth stresses in his poem. He notes that between
the two visits he often thought about the river
scenes and surrounding views of orchards
and farms, deliberately meditating on these ‘‘In
hours of weariness.’’ Dwelling on the mental
images increased his pulse rate and redirected
his thinking in a new and beneficial direction. In
other words, he explains how remembered images
of nature can allow a person to access the spiri-
tual, healing power of nature. Focusing on the
‘‘beauteous forms’’ during meditation or reverie
caused his mind to shift from the city din and
loneliness to forgotten ‘‘acts / Of kindness and
of love,’’ and the pleasures those acts brought.
Sustaining the meditation longer, Wordsworth
describes, brought on a feeling of suspension. In
this transfixed state quite like sleep but not sleep,
he asserts, ‘‘with an eye made quiet by the power /
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, / We see
into the life of things.’’
The transformative role of nature in peo-
ple’s lives, the way it can heal the urbanite, the
way it can bring the disillusioned and lonely
person back to communion with deity, is at the
center of Wordsworth’s poem. ‘‘Tintern Abbey’’
serves as a call to people to reconnect with
nature, to return to their individual and personal
connection to spiritual essence, and to con-
sciously renew their appreciation of the divine
in nature and in human acts of kindness, despite
the hardships they confront in their workaday
urban lives. In a very different way, in 1963, Pak
Tu-Jin sought to arouse the love Koreans have
for their beautiful countryside and rivers and
through it to stimulate their latent sense of indig-
enous selfhood and national identity. In a way
not completely unlike Wordsworth’s purpose,
Pak intended to mobilize the spirit of his people,
to energize them in their difficult ongoing work
of reestablishing their nationhood. His ‘‘River of
August’’ does not describe a particular river or
setting, but it uses his readers’ memory of such
natural scenes to help them access the energy
that flows through nature and can empower
humans in their righteous purposes. Pak’s sym-
bolic river can be equated with the enthusiasm
and hope Koreans felt after their 1945 liberation
from the Japanese. Pak relies on his readers
to see the parallel between a forceful river
that flows inevitably toward the ocean and the
excited energy Koreans felt at the time of their
liberation for the work of reestablishing their
autonomous nation. Pak hopes his poem can
energize weary Koreans, who nearly twenty
years after liberation are discouraged and losing
commitment. Pak must have hoped that his
poem would give its readers renewed hope and
vitality.River of August