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 123-131 Oh! yet a little while May I behold in thee what I was once, My dear, dear Sister! and this prayer I make, Knowing that Nature never did betray The heart that loved her; 'tis her privilege, Through all the years of this our life, to lead From joy to joy: for she can so inform The mind that is within us, so impress With quietness and beauty, and so feed With lofty thoughts, The speaker goes on to celebrate all that he sees in his sister and being able to see his “former heart” in her, saying, “yet a little while / May I behold in thee what I was once, / My dear, dear Sister!” The repetition of “dear” in these lines connects them to the lines earlier in the stanza, and the capitalization of “Sister” connects it visually to “Friend,” endowing both with importance and emphasis. This turn to the sister, the first feminine presence in the poem, seems to lead to another shift, as the speaker goes on to personify nature itself as a woman. He begins a “prayer,” that will develop over much of the stanza, for nature to protect and help his sister as it has helped him. The capitalization of “Nature” here (the first place in the poem that it has been capitalized) also connects it to the words “Sister” and “Friend.” Notably, too, the speaker’s personification of nature envisions it as a woman who fits traditional gender norms: she is faithful (not “betray[ing] / The heart that loved her”) as a wife would be expected to be; and it is her “privilege” or honor to attend to the speaker and “lead” him from “joy to joy.” The speaker expresses the hope that nature will likewise attend to and lead his sister in “this our life.” The phrase “joy to joy,” meanwhile, recalls the speaker’s account of his own development, from the “aching joys” of his younger self to the “joy / Of elevated thoughts” that he has experienced in maturity. The speaker continues to build on this celebration and gendered personification of “Nature,” saying that “she can so inform / The mind that is within us, so impress / With quietness and beauty, and so feed / With lofty thoughts.” Just as the earlier description of the sister brought together words previously used for the speaker’s own experience, this description of the personified “Nature” uses words used earlier for the landscape and for nature as a whole. The word “impress” recalls the speaker’s use of the word in the first stanza, when he said that the “cliffs” within the “wild secluded scene impress / Thoughts of more deep seclusion.” Similarly, the cliffs were described as “lofty,” a word repeated here to describe human thought. The sky, in the opening stanza, was described as “quiet,” and the scene as a whole was recalled in terms of its “beauteous forms.” In a sense, the speaker’s repetition of these words works to emphasize his argument, as he brings up qualities in the natural world that he has already listed within the poem and uses this as a basis for his hope that his sister will have a similar experience of nature. Meanwhile, the opening lines of the stanza have implicitly connected the figure of the “Sister” with the feminine “Nature,” in their gendered qualities (they are both viewed as faithful, quiet, patient, helpful, and nurturing), and in the capitalization of the words used for each. In a sense, both the sister and personified nature here work as unifying figures, just as the “presence” the speaker described earlier in the poem was unifying.