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LINES 75-80 For nature then (The coarser pleasures of my boyish days And their glad animal movements all gone by) To me was all in all.—I cannot paint What then I was. The sounding cataract Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock, The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, The speaker continues to describe his former self. First, through the use of a parenthetical, he reveals that even five years ago he had already lost some qualities of his childhood. Interestingly, the parenthetical is the longest part of the sentence, creating an extended pause the reader must traverse between the beginning of the sentence (“For nature then”) and its conclusion (“To me was all in all”). What the speaker says within the parenthetical is also striking. He remarks that even five years before, the “coarser pleasures of [his] boyish days / And their glad animal movements [were] all gone by.” The speaker’s use of the word “coarse” is notable, since “coarse” can mean rough in texture but also in manner or behavior; essentially, it means that the speaker’s childhood pleasures were unsophisticated. He then goes on to say that the “glad animal movements” of his boyhood were already “gone by.” This remark is intriguing, following as it does from the speaker’s previous description of his younger self as a deer. If the speaker had, five years ago, already lost his “glad animal movements” of childhood, then how was he still like a deer? Was there some animal quality that he lost gradually over time? Or was it the simplicity and gladness that he had already lost? The speaker’s remark builds on but also complicates, in an unresolved way, his previous comparison. At the same time, in building into the poem an awareness that even at a younger age, the speaker had already outgrown some of his childhood energy and innocence, the parenthetical creates the sense that the speaker’s experience of loss, change, and growth as he gets older is and has been ongoing. Though small in relationship to the entire poem, then, the parenthetical works powerfully to suggest that the time frames the speaker evokes—past, present, and future—extend beyond the bounds of the poem and even beyond what he includes. It implies a sense of the infinite, which is important to the poem as a whole, as the speaker encounters the vastness and beauty of nature. At the end of the sentence, the speaker describes nature to his former self as “all in all.” This repetition seems self-fulfilling, suggesting that nature was everything to him. At the same time, this phrase it also defies interpretation or translation, since the “all” is explained only through its repetition, “all.” The speaker seems to comment on this difficult of interpretation or description when he goes on to say, comparing his words to visual art, “I cannot paint / What then I was.” Instead, he goes on to describe how the landscape seemed to him them. “The sounding cataract,” or booming waterfall, “Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock, / The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood.” These images can be connected to images earlier in the poem—the “sounding cataract” and “tall rock” evoke the sound of water and the cliffs mentioned earlier, while the “mountain” was previously mentioned as the source of the rivers and streams, and the “deep and gloomy wood” was present in the “trees” and “woods” of the opening stanza. Yet the past landscape is described as somewhat creepy. A cataract is a waterfall, but it is also a condition in which the eye becomes clouded, obstructing light. It is described here as "haunt[ing]" the speaker, with the simile "like a passion." The rock is “tall” and perhaps intimidating. The “deep and gloomy wood” is similarly oppressive. In these images, then, the speaker implicitly describes how he used to be, by showing how he used to relate to the landscape: with a kind of fear or sense of it as overpowering.