Download Free Audio of LINES 48-50 While with an eye made quiet by the... - Woord

Read Aloud the Text Content

This audio was created by Woord's Text to Speech service by content creators from all around the world.


Text Content or SSML code:

LINES 48-50 While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things. The closing lines of the stanza are charged in their meaning and sound. In this state of the sublime, this blessed mood, the speaker says, “with an eye made quiet by the power / Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, / We see into the life of things.” As the speaker describes this pinnacle of his experience, in which he has been able to gain insight "into the life of all things," the poem regains some of its use of repetition, but it does so in a transformed way. These lines maintain the emphasis on long, open vowel sounds, indicating the openness and profundity of the speaker’s experience. Yet they repeat the word “quiet” from earlier in the poem—previously used to describe the sky—and, more closely together, the word “power,” as the speaker suggests that he has gained a kind of power that is not the power of ordinary humans but one more deeper and joyful, a kind of power of vision and understanding. These words connect the speaker in this state to the landscape he previously described, with its silent, calm sky and the powerful impression of its high cliffs. The last line of the stanza stands apart and is emphasized by its departure from iambic pentameter (it contains just four feet instead of five) and by its words that are nearly all monosyllabic. The line is profoundly simple in its music, and also in its meaning, as the speaker doesn’t elaborate on what he sees, but simply states that he sees “into” the “life of things,” or into life itself. In a sense, then, the line enacts the speaker’s experience, in all of its clarity and depth that at the same time defies interpretation. Notably, the second stanza as a whole is divided into two long sentences, the first extending from line 23 to midway through line 36, the second from line 36 to the end of the stanza at line 50. Where the first sentence described the subtle, almost “unremembered” impact of the landscape on the speaker, as memories of it made him kinder and more loving, the second describes this profound experience of the “sublime” in which the speaker, rather than being more grounded as a human being within the human world, has transcended his body and the world altogether. That the stanza is almost evenly divided into these two sentences suggests that the speaker finds equal value in both experiences: the humble experience of those “nameless” acts of kindness, and the profound, transcendent experience of the sublime.