Download Free Audio of LINES 138-142 Therefore let the moon Shine o... - Woord

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LINES 138-142 Therefore let the moon Shine on thee in thy solitary walk; And let the misty mountain-winds be free To blow against thee: and, in after years, When these wild ecstasies shall be matured Into a sober pleasure; Having celebrated the power of nature to protect the speaker and his sister from all the difficulties and immorality of daily life, the speaker expresses the hope that nature will continue to be present with his sister and help her even when he's no longer around. In expressing this wish, he again uses words and phrases that recall earlier moments in the poem. “Therefore let the moon / Shine on thee in they solitary walk,” the speaker says, “And let the misty mountain-winds be free / To blow against thee.” Although the moon hasn’t yet been present in the poem, it is implicitly present within the whole natural scene and in the image of the “setting suns” in stanza 4. The moon as an image has traditionally been associated with femininity, so its presence here in relationship to the speaker’s sister seems to fit with this stanza’s conception of both nature and the sister as synthesizing feminine presences. Meanwhile, the compound “mountain-winds” recalls the “mountain-springs” the speaker noticed at the beginning of the poem, as well as the other compounds in the opening stanza (“hedge-rows,” “cottage-ground,” and “orchard-tufts”). These words indicate a sense of playfulness on the part of the speaker, even as they work to connect two disparate elements together into a single image, conveying at the level of these phrases a sense of interconnection or “interfus[ing]” in the natural world. The alliteration of /m/ sounds in “moon,” “misty,” and “mountain” similarly connects these images together, and creates a sense of softness and gentleness within the lines, suggesting that nature will be similarly soft and gentle in its care for the speaker’s sister. The speaker then goes on to imagine “after years,” when his sister has grown older and “these wild ecstasies shall be matured / Into a sober pleasure.” Here, the speaker imagines that the sister will go through a similar process of growth and maturation that he has undergone, as his description of her “wild ecstasies” recalls his descriptions of his younger self, and the phrase "sober pleasure” recalls his description of the “still sad music of humanity” that had “ample power / To chasten and subdue” the speaker’s own mindset and inner world. The speaker thus conceptualizes his own process of aging as, implicitly, a universal one, since it is also a process, he says, that his sister will go through.