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LINES 68-74 And so I dare to hope, Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first I came among these hills; when like a roe I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams, Wherever nature led: more like a man Flying from something that he dreads, than one Who sought the thing he loved. “And so I dare to hope,” the speaker goes on, meaning that he hopes that this current visit will sustain him going forward just as the past one did, despite the fact that he has “changed, no doubt,” from when he “first … came among these hills.” In other words, he hopes that this visit will be as restorative as the last one, even though he is profoundly different now than he was five years ago, the last time he was here. He then goes on to describe exactly what he was like back then. The speaker compares his younger self to a “roe” (a kind of deer), who: ... bounded o’er the mountains, by the sides Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams, Wherever nature led. Notably, this is the first place in the poem where the speaker uses similes. This use of figurative language follows the metaphors that come just before (in which the speaker implicitly compared his thoughts to “half-extinguished” flames, and the memories of this landscape to food). Here, the figurative language becomes more direct, as the implicit metaphors change to the more explicitly comparative similes. These comparisons are interesting in several ways: • First, by using similes, the speaker suggests that he can’t describe his past self directly. This could be taken to mean that the speaker’s past self might not have been as fully actualized as his present self, since he must rely on the poetic device of a simile to describe how he once was. • What the speaker compares his past self to is also important. He says that his young self was “like a roe,” meaning that he once was like an animal that would live within this landscape, not only visit and observe it. This suggests that the speaker’s younger self may have in some way been more in harmony with the natural world, a sense reinforced when the speaker notes that he “bounded … Wherever nature led.” At the same time, the speaker goes on to compare his younger self to “a man / Flying from something that he dreads.” Interestingly, the speaker says that his younger self (who was a man) was “like a man.” While the speaker qualifies this by noting that he is talking about a particular type of man—one fleeing from something he feared instead of actively seeking out what he loved—the comparison still subtly suggests that the speaker’s former self wasn’t truly “a man,” only like one. Following as it does from the previous simile of the roe deer, this also creates a kind of double simile, in which the speaker’s former self is compared to a deer, who is then compared to a man. This doubling creates a sense of the speaker’s younger self as inhabiting some ambiguous state, neither fully an animal-self nor fully an adult person. The assonance of long /o/ sounds in “hope” and “roe” connect the two words, suggesting that the speaker’s younger self had hope, even if he was in some ways lost or fearful. The internal rhyme of “led” and “dreads” complicate this sense, as they suggest that the speaker’s younger self both followed nature yet dreaded something that he was fleeing. These sound echoes and internal rhymes imply that the younger self was in some way trapped or enclosed within himself and his experience. The speaker then shifts out of this sense of entrapment in line 74, with the phrase “Who sought the thing he loved.” As “loved,” in contrast to “dreads,” has no internal rhyme in the lines before, the speaker suggests that this movement to “love” is a kind of movement forward, and that the speaker eventually transformed in this direction.