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LINES 60-67 And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought, With many recognitions dim and faint, And somewhat of a sad perplexity, The picture of the mind revives again: While here I stand, not only with the sense Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts That in this moment there is life and food For future years. The fourth stanza returns the speaker and the reader to the “now” of the speaker’s present visit to this landscape. Having reflected on his time away, the speaker uses a metaphor to describe how those recollections and thoughts seem to him now, at this moment: they are “half-extinguished,” like candles or flames, and are “dim and faint” (again, like fading light) in the face of the present reality, when with “somewhat of a sad perplexity / The picture of the mind revives again.” This imagery is both simple and complex. The speaker seems to suggest that in seeing the actual landscape, his recollections of the past now are “dim” (or less vivid or compelling) compared to the reality before him. Yet these “remembrances” seem to include both his thoughts of his time away in “towns and cities” as well as his recollections (while he was away) of the place itself. That “picture” that he carried in his mind now “revives,” or comes back to life, “again” as the speaker finds himself within this natural place. The speaker doesn’t exactly explain, either, what he means by the “sad perplexity” he experiences in returning. Is the landscape different from how he remembered it? Or is the sadness and slight confusion an experience brought about by returning to a place he had experienced as a much younger self? These lines suggest that the speaker experiences a kind of dissonance and even disorientation in reconciling his memories and his past self with his present experience, as that “picture,” no longer a picture, is an actual landscape all around him. That the picture “revives” suggests that, no matter how much the landscape comforted the speaker while he was away, there is some fundamental way in which it can only be truly real and alive to him when he is within it. These lines introduce a sense of melancholy and uncertainty into the poem. Even so, the speaker goes on to celebrate that while being here, he experiences both “present pleasure” and “pleasing thoughts / That in this moment there is life and food / For future years.” In other words, despite the difference he might experience between his memories and the present landscape (and the implicit difference between the actual landscape and the remembered one), this present visit will sustain him in the future, just as his past visit did. It is as though he is taking a big gulp of nature that fills him up now and that will keep him full for some time going forward (because he can remember it). The speaker seems to resolve the moment of “sad perplexity” as, present within the landscape, he experiences its comfort and knows that he will carry it with him when he leaves. This sense of resolution is registered in the lines musically, with the alliteration of “present pleasure” and “pleasing,” as well as the consonance in “life,” “food,” and “for future.” These sound clusters connect the meanings of the words, so that the present is linked to pleasure, and life and food (figuratively, generally sustenance or fulfillment) are present in the future. The speaker’s comparison of his present visit to “food” for his future self is interesting in several ways. • First, he suggests that this natural setting is so profoundly restorative that it will continue to sustain him when he leaves. • At the same time, food is something that can be depleted; eventually, the metaphor implicitly suggests, the speaker will “run out” of food and need to return. • This suggests that the natural world is fundamental and necessary to human life and existence, just as food is, but also that people need to revisit the natural world in order to sustain themselves physically and spiritually.