ine and the essentially human as is possible for us to go on earth. He sums up the glory that he finds in nature later in the poem and the way in which they remind him both of his own lost childhood but also of his love for his sister:
A lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye, and ear, - both what they half create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognise
In nature and the language of the sense
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being (http://www.bartleby.com/145/ww138.html).
For Edna St. Vincent Millay, writing a collection of sonnets a century and a quarter after Wordsworth penned "Tintern Abbey", the romance of the natural world had faded. Her work is fundamentally Modernist; her Sonnet III from Renascence and Other Poems also reflects something of the despair of the time in which she was writing this collection, which was published in 1917 (http://pages.ivillage.com/crowyne/millaybio.html). Millay's twinned image of nature and the memories of past times that the natural world calls up are anything but Romantic: The world of nature (and its intersection with the human heart) is almost grotesque. Certainly there is no empathetic bond between the natural world and the human heart:
Mindful of you the sodden earth in spring,
And all the flowers that in the springtime grow,
And dusty roads, and thistles, and the slow
Rising of the round moon, all throats that sing
The summer through, and each departing wing,
And all the nests that the bared branches show,
And all winds that in any weather blow,
And all the storms that the four seasons bring
(http://www.geocities.com/Athens/2464/28.html).
Millay writes of a world in which there is only loss, a world in which there is no longer any possibility of refuge. If W...