Tintern Abbey

She died and decayed long ago, and her gnawed bones protruded from the mud and the short green grass. When I first saw her, Tintern Abbey, I felt the ghost of her memories bleeding at my feet. She whispered to me that life always goes on, that that which ends is not forgotten.

She was a Cisterian abbey founded by the earl of Chepstow in 1131. Most abbeys were more than self-sufficient communes; they were the heartbeat of nearby communities, the angels whispering Christian conscience to the laypeople. They were the mothers of literature and the creators of discipline. They framed the meaning of brotherly love.

How many footsteps padded here? How many men died in these walls? How many found God, and how many lost Him?

"I behold these steep and lofty cliffs, that on a wild secluded scene impress thoughts of more deep seclusion and connect the landscape with the quiet of the sky," wrote Wordsworth in "Lines Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting The Banks Of The Wye During A Tour" on July 13, 1798, 189 years and one day before I was born.

Yet his words capture today's essence of the fiery hills and the paralyzed sky surrounding Tintern Abbey, that quietly obtrusive ruin.

"In darkness and amid the many shapes of joyless daylight when the fretful stir unprofitable and the fever of the world have hung upon the beatings of my heart -- How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee."

I can picture him jabbing at his parchment, looking at her, feeling the same strange mix of life and death beating in me.

She has seen a thousand years of faith and folly; surely, her commune with nature and God account for some wisdom or peace.

During Edward II's wars, Edward stayed at the abbey for a short stint in 1326. Throughout the 1400s, Owain Glyndwr's quest to fight off the English hurt the abbey's finances, but by the early 1500s, the abbey was the wealthiest in Wales. It still could not escape dissolution and was effectively gutted by the first Act of Suppression in 1536. (http://cistercians.shef.ac.uk/abbeys/tintern.php)

Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries to give credit to his new protestantism and to put a crimp in the Catholics' formerly comfortable lives.

Tintern Abbey was killed, effectively, by a king and disrobed by an earl, but her soul sat still for a thousand years, welcoming the pilgrims who sought remnants of her solitude.

"For thou art with me here upon the banks of this fair river; thou my dearest Friend, My dear, dear Friend; and in thy voice I catch the language of my former heart, and read my former pleasures in the shooting lights of thy wild eyes."