Download Free Audio of LINES 159-162 Nor wilt thou then forget, Tha... - Woord

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LINES 159-162 Nor wilt thou then forget, That after many wanderings, many years Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs, And this green pastoral landscape, were to me More dear, both for themselves and for thy sake! The closing lines of the poem conclude the speaker’s address to his sister, and restore the speaker, his sister, and his reader to the present moment and landscape. The closing description of the landscape here is both familiar and new. It repeats the earlier images of the woods and the “lofty cliffs,” here transposing the word “steep” (previously used for the cliffs) for the woods themselves, to suggest a steep wooded embankment. It also repeats the word “pastoral,” used previously for the farms, and invokes, again, the color green that in the first stanza the speaker said “clad” the orchards and covered the ground around the “farms … to the very door.” At the same time, the simplicity and broad strokes with which the speaker describes the landscape here recall more closely the description of the transcendent vision he had of nature as a whole, with its “round ocean and … living air, / And … blue sky.” In a sense, this closing image of the immediate landscape is both grounded and transcendent, suggesting that the speaker has integrated his visionary experience and his present reality. The speaker closes by saying to his sister that she won’t forget that all of these aspects of the landscape “were to me / More dear, both for themselves and for thy sake!” The word “dear” recalls the speaker’s earlier description of his sister as his “dear dear friend,” aligning his feeling for the setting and for her. Finally, where in much of the poem the speaker has described the landscape in terms of how it has helped him and what he has felt within it, here he seems, almost, to step out of the scene, saying that what makes the setting “more dear” to him is the land itself and what it will mean to his sister. This shift at the end suggests that, through the process of growth, change, and experience that the poem has described, the speaker has undergone an internal shift into yet another way of being, in which he loves this landscape on its own terms and because of how it will help others. There is a sense, almost, of the speaker fading away here, at the poem’s ending, almost as though he has become, through the course of his poem (and implicitly the course of his life) the kind of “living soul” that he described.