On First Reading "Tintern Abbey"

  I first read William Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey'' at Tintern Abbey on April 21, 2012.  I was sitting in the back seat of David’s VW Passat with a cd playing American country music.  David is my sister’s sixty-four year old British husband, an awfully nice man she met on the Internet who happens to love classic country music. While they strolled around the site in the light, cold rain, I stayed in the car and read the poem, half listening to  “Smoke, Smoke That Cigarette” by Tex Williams and then  “Ragtime Cowboy Joe'' by the Hill Billies.

   Reading the poem while I looked at the ruins through a rain-spotted window was about being able to say that I was reading “Tintern Abbey” while looking at Tintern Abbey.   Just as I would be able to tell them back home that a week later I bought cheddar at Cheddar.  It’s clever, but even I want to say, “So what?”

     So what about the juxtaposition of a literary classic while listening to classic western swing?  Could I make the case that American cowboys and the English Romantics are saddle pals at heart?  Nostalgia and swagger.

  There’s no more to this anecdote.   Sometimes juxtapositions in life are just wonderfully odd.