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LINES 51-56 If this Be but a vain belief, yet, oh! how oft— In darkness and amid the many shapes Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir Unprofitable, and the fever of the world, Have hung upon the beatings of my heart— Lines 51-56 mark the beginning of the shortest stanza in the poem. Like the poem’s first stanza break, the break before this stanza also includes a large white space—a kind of mid-line caesura—in which the pentameter of the line at the end of the preceding stanza is metrically “completed” in the first line of the following one. In this case, line 50 contained just four iambic feet (remember that each iamb has two beats in a da-DUM pattern), leaving one metrical foot (one da-DUM) for line 51: “If this.” Take the two lines together and it is essentially a regular line of iambic pentameter with a pause in the middle (after "things"): We see into the life of things. If this This break marks a shift in the speaker’s thinking. In this case, the speaker reflects on the transcendent experience he has just described and poses the possibility that it was just a “vain belief”—or something he believed he experienced only because he wanted to. He then responds to this possibility. Referring to his time spent away from this natural place—and implicitly in urban settings—he comments on “how oft” (or often) he “turned” in spirit to the landscape. That is, he thought about nature a lot while living in the city. The speaker clearly has some negative feelings towards urban life, describing his time spent away from nature as time in “darkness and amid the many shapes / Of joyless daylight.” This reference to the “shapes” of urban settings recalls and contrasts with the “beauteous forms” of the natural landscape and their earlier allusion to Platonic, ideal forms. Meanwhile, the consonance of /l/ sounds in “joyless daylight” and the cluster of /f/, /r/, and /t/ sounds (as well as /l/ sounds) in “fretful stir / Unprofitable, and the fever of the world” create a sense of the urban settings the speaker has inhabited as crowded, almost claustrophobic. This sense of claustrophobia is heightened by the alliteration of /f/ sounds in “fretful” and “fever.” Altogether, the city seems like a very overwhelming place indeed—nothing like the vast, pleasant natural landscape. Finally, the speaker’s remark that these daily experiences have “hung upon the beatings of [his] heart” recalls and builds upon the earlier imagery of the weight of the world, as well as the relief that remembering the landscape brought the speaker, with its “sensations sweet … felt along the heart.” In a sense, then, the speaker seems to be going back over his earlier remarks, and his earlier experiences, to prove to himself that he did not imagine the transcendent experience he has just described—that it was not simply "but a vain belief."