The fact that Tintern Abbey provides a backdrop for Wordsworth’s poem is relevant in ways both literal and symbolic. Composing this work after a visit to the Gothic abbey afforded Wordsworth the ideal setting for a rumination on nature, the passage of time and the gains and losses of memory. The fact that the Abbey does not appear in the poem renders it more of a symbolic destination for Wordsworth, eschewing the splendor of the actual ruins for a sublime psycho-visual creation of mind and memory, as
“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;” (103-107)
An abbey is traditionally a place of contemplation, spirituality, and transcendence. Wordsworth moves away from Tintern Abbey towards unbounded nature, perhaps as a metaphor for moving away from religion as the means to attain transcendence and finding spirituality in nature. The absence of the actual Abbey in the poem and its emphasis on nature also points to this move towards nature as the conduit to transcendence. If nature and sensory perception are such conduits, the space of contemplation would then become the mind as opposed to an external site. As Wordsworth stated in the quote Professor Jones provided from the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, poetry stems from an emotion evoked through tranquility (nature) which is then contemplated until “the tranquillity [the extrinsic/sensual experience] gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.”
Thus, the mind becomes a space for both contemplation and creation, and the senses serve as both perceptive and creative forces in that they take in “all that we behold” and interpret such impressions that become catalysts for reflection and artistic creation. This idea of sensory/physiological perception as opposed to cognitive/conceptual perception to me relates to the notion of the picturesque landscape. The artist sees an actual landscape, reflects on it, and then interprets it in a way that transcends reality. Thus what is presented as a landscape is a fusion of both what the “eye and ear…half create, and what [we] perceive”.
The half-creation has many possibilities. One is, as you say, the picturesque. Added to that is the moral imagination (that which in other times would have been linked to the Abbey). A third possibility is a little wilder: the sublime. There isn't a lot of room for that in this poem, but in others, the imagination also half-creates that which terrifies and astounds us.
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