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 96-101 —And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man: A dash in the middle of line 95 creates another caesura, another pause, and then the speaker transitions to describing an experience that is a kind of climax of the stanza and even the poem as a whole. “And I have felt,” the speaker begins, recalling the “I have learned” of line 90. This echo suggests that each of the speaker’s insights and experiences has grown and developed from what came before. In this case, his learning to “look on nature” and hear “the still sad music of humanity” has led, he goes on to explain, to a profound experience of insight and understanding. The speaker goes on to say that what he has felt is a “presence that disturbs [him] with the joy / Of elevated thoughts." "Disturbs" here does not mean frightens or unnerves, but rather that this presence shakes the speaker out of his funk. This presence seems to have its own energy and agency—perhaps like the implicit spirit, being, or presence that he suggested inhabited the “sylvan Wye.” The phrase “elevated thoughts” contrasts with the speaker's description of his former self as “thoughtless,” while “elevated” recalls the loftiness of the cliffs within the natural setting the speaker is looking at. The speaker then describes this presence as “a sense sublime,” recalling his use of the word “sublime” back in stanza 2—when he described the experience that led him to a transcendent state. In this case, the speaker goes on to suggest that this “sublime” experience—brought about by the passage of time and the insight and wisdom he has gained—has led him to not only transcend his body (as he previously described) but also to have insight into a kind of profound connection between all things. Through this presence, he says, he has gained a “sense … Of something far more deeply interfused.” This “something,” which the speaker describes as profoundly interconnected, “dwell[s]” in: ... the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man: The speaker doesn’t just tell the reader that he has gained insight into a kind of interconnection and wholeness in the natural world. He offers a vision of this interconnection and wholeness. Using polysyndeton and parataxis to link the images together, and to suggest that each is of equal importance and is equally inhabited by this “presence,” the speaker describes the natural world in its entirety, including the sun or “suns,” the ocean, the air, the sky, and—importantly— the human mind. This vision is remarkable on its own, in its integration and completeness. It is also remarkable within the poem, as it demonstrates the shift the speaker has undergone. Elsewhere, the speaker describes the natural setting by describing elements of it (the sound of water, the high cliffs, the woods). Here, the speaker describes not only this natural setting, but the entire world, in a single utterance. It's as though his point of view has shifted; he is no longer smaller than the cliffs, looking up at them, but as though able to view everything at once, from within the world and outside it at the same time. The individual descriptions of each element of the world are also notable. Where the previous descriptions of the landscape ere described with some degree of complexity and specificity (the “orchard-tufts,” for example, or the “cataract” of water), here the imagery is remarkably simple, with each noun accompanied by a single modifying word or phrase: • The suns are “setting.” • The ocean is “round.” • The air is “living.” • The sky is “blue.” • The “mind” belongs to “man.” Importantly, too, the speaker doesn’t only describe how these things appear; he seems to have gained that insight he noted earlier “unborrowed from the eye,” and can now have insight into the actual nature of things, seeing the ocean as “round” or complete and surrounding the globe, and the air itself as alive.