It’s a great poem. But most people I know who know Wordsworth’s work well don’t consider it his best poem. That honor, in my experience, most often goes to his ode, “Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.” It’s a poem I also love well, but nothing gets to me quite like Tintern Abbey does. It is the most reliable source of comfort I know. It is the work of literature I return to most often when I feel detached from other people, even, somehow, disconnected from myself. Nothing remembers to me my own humanity as Tintern Abbey does. It is the poem I need most.

It’s a poem concerned with remembering, and unremembering (the unusual word “unremembered” appears twice), concerned with straining both not to forget, nor to be forgotten. Inspired by a ruin, a ruin of a holy site, it is suffused with a sense of decay. It is intimately alert to mortality. And although I couldn’t have been more than 21 when I first read it, I think its effect on me was so immediate and strong that it made me start thinking about—and accepting—mortality and decay even then.

It’s not a short poem, and for all of my devotion, even indebtedness, to it, I’ve never been able to commit it completely to memory. Instead, I’ve surrounded myself with reminders of the poem, small tokens scattered all around me, that now have an effect on me not so different from the poem itself, if largely by strength of the power of association. In a used bookshop in England, I found an old engraving of Tintern Abbey. It was probably torn from a book. It’s dark and gloomy, and I matted it in a murky gray-green and framed it in black. Much more cheerful is a reproduction of a travel poster, brightly colorful, showing the ruined abbey as if lit up by midday sunshine, foregrounded and framed by what appears to be a young beech tree.