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LINES 117-122 For thou art with me here upon the banks Of this fair river; thou my dearest Friend, My dear, dear Friend; and in thy voice I catch The language of my former heart, and read My former pleasures in the shooting lights Of thy wild eyes. The speaker goes on to explain that he wouldn’t let his good spirits “decay” because he isn’t alone in this setting but is there with his sister. In fact, William Wordsworth undertook this walking tour with his sister, Dorothy, who was one year younger than he was. As the speaker addresses his sister directly, the poem returns the speaker and the reader to his immediate setting and his immediate moment—the banks of the River Wye, in July 1798. These lines also shift the mode of the poem outward. Up to this point, the poem could be read as a dramaticmonologue: the speaker addressing himself, or the reader, about the landscape and his experiences. The exception to this is in the third stanza, when the speaker addressed the Wye valley in apostrophe as “thou.” Here, the reader realizes, perhaps for the first time, that the speaker isn’t alone “upon the banks” of the river. His sister has been with him the whole time. This turn to direct address, then, has the effect of making the reader look back over the poem as a whole differently: the reader now can understand the poem as a whole as part of a conversation, a single utterance, addressed, within the moment of the poem, to the speaker's sister. The speaker says that his sister is his “dearest Friend, / My dear, dear Friend,” the repetition emphasizing the speaker’s feeling as well as the unique position of confidant that the sister holds. The speaker then goes on to describe his sister, saying “in thy voice I catch / The language of my former heart, and read/ My former pleasures in the shooting lights / Of thy wild eyes.” Several aspects of this description are notable. First, it is worth noting that the speaker seems to only see in his sister only those things that he recognizes in himself. She is not viewed as a separate person with her own agency, feelings, and experiences. The speaker emphasizes this by his repetition of the phrase “my former,” implying that when he looks at her, he sees only a younger version of himself. The speaker also uses words to describe his sister that he has used, in previous places in the poem, to describe his own experiences: • He says he sees in her his “former heart,” and “former pleasures,” recalling his earlier use of the words “heart” and “pleasures” to describe himself. • He also describes the “shooting lights” in her eyes as “wild,” implicitly connecting her eyes to the “wild” natural scene and to his earlier, animal-like self. • Meanwhile, the image of the “lights” recalls the previous stanza, in which the speaker described his “gleams of half-extinguished thoughts.” It is also notable that the figure of the sister works here as a kind of synthesis of many of the elements introduced in the poem up to this point. She, like the speaker, is present within the setting, and she represents his former self (and by extension, his past visit to this landscape). She is also described in terms of her “heart,” “pleasures,” and “wild eyes,” words used previously in disparate moments of the poem: the speaker described his “heart” in stanza 2 and his “pleasures” in stanza 4. He described the landscape as “wild” in the first stanza of the poem and invoked the human sense of sight in the second part of the fourth stanza. Repeating as they do through the poem, these words and images become a kind of internal vocabulary for the poem and the speaker, a vocabulary that is brought together and unified in the figure of the sister. Finally, by representing the speaker’s past self, the sister also serves as a kind of synthesis of time, embodying the speaker’s past in the present.