A Monster Named Technology

When William Wordsworth indeed composed his lines “a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” in 1798, the Industrial Revolution had already been in motion in England for nearly 50 years. The first factories had been created; innovations were spreading into many different areas of society. As my classmates have previously pointed out, this poem is quite Romantic in its glorification of nature and memory! Another characteristic of Romanticism is the condemnation of technology (which leads to the destruction of nature), and Wordsworth does a bang-up job at convincing his reader how terrible “the din of towns and cities” is to the individual. In lines 17 through 25, Wordsworth refers to “the fretful stir unprofitable, and the fever of the world” and how they hang heavy on his heart. I believe the word unprofitable was chosen precisely to reference the capitalistic scourge that has attached itself to the minds of the general public and diseases the world. This is in direct relation to the growth of technology and the factory system. Throughout the poem, everything besides nature is implied to give bad feeling and be harmful to the soul. The only way to purge oneself is to turn to the “sylvan Wye,” or nature.