Download Free Audio of LINES 37-47 Nor less, I trust, To them I may... - Woord

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LINES 37-47 Nor less, I trust, To them I may have owed another gift, Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood, In which the burthen of the mystery, In which the heavy and the weary weight Of all this unintelligible world, Is lightened:—that serene and blessed mood, In which the affections gently lead us on,— Until, the breath of this corporeal frame And even the motion of our human blood Almost suspended, we are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul: In the second part of line 36, the speaker starts to describe “another gift” that memories of this landscape have brought him—this one “of an aspect more sublime.” Where the previous lines emphasized acts of the speaker that were “unremembered” and unnamed because they were so small ("little" and "nameless"), here the speaker celebrates an experience that is so big, so profound that it is almost unnameable in its grandeur (this is essentially what the speaker means by calling this gift "more sublime"). So what is this gift? A “blessed mood.” That is, remembering this natural place lifts the speaker's spirits and lightens the heavy “burthen” (or burden) “of the mystery” and “the heavy and the weary weight / Of all this unintelligible world.” The alliteration of /w/ sounds in “weary weight” and “world” helps to slow these lines down, making the reader almost labor through them as the speaker implicitly labors under this burden of the world before thoughts about nature help him feel better. The speaker repeats the phrase “blessed mood” in line 41, emphasizing the sacred quality of this experience, while also adding the adjective “serene,” which contrasts strongly with the weariness of the preceding lines. That this mood is "blessed" imbues it with religious or spiritual connotations, something that has been bestowed upon the speaker by a greater force (in this case, by nature itself). Within this mood, the speaker goes on to say, "the breath of this corporeal frame"—that is, the speaker's body—"And even the motion of our human blood" becomes “suspended” until “we are laid asleep / In body, and become a living soul.” Here, the speaker describes how through remembering time spent in the natural world, he has experienced a form of transcendence, becoming free of the “weight” of the world and even of his own body. The “blood,” which he described previously as feeling and experiencing the “sensations sweet” of the memories, is here “suspended,” or paused in its movement. Breathing, too, is temporarily stopped, and the speaker himself is “laid asleep.” This imagery creates a sense of absolute stillness even as it describes an experience of transformation, as the speaker becomes “a living soul.” The sound of the poem becomes more fluent and calmer her as well, especially through the sibilance and soft /th/, /f/, and /l/ sounds that weave through these lines.