Early diagnosis of retinal diseases is crucial for preventing blindness. However, due to background variations and degradation in the images, retinal vessel segmentation has become challenging. As a result, accurate segmentation of the retinal vessels is essential for enhancing diagnosis to identify the disease. To achieve this, inspired by the special ability of the attention mechanism, which detects vital regions, and UNet, which segments the vital region, we propose a combination of a new attention mechanism and modified UNet for segmenting vessels in retina images. In the proposed segmentation model, the convolutional blocks have been modified to capture multiscale spatial information by varying the convolution dilation rates. Similarly, the Trainable tanh activation (T-Tanh) is adapted in a new way to identify changes in the flow of the feature gradients to differentiate between the retinal vessel pixels and the background. Furthermore, to make the segmentation robust, the Gated Edge Attention (GEA) network is proposed. The effectiveness of the segmentation is demonstrated by testing on two benchmark datasets, namely, STARE and CHASE. The results show that the performance of the proposed method is superior to the state-of-the-art methods.