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LINES 13-14 Dear God! the very houses seem asleep; And all that mighty heart is lying still! Lines 13 and 14 revise the image of the sleeping city. They suggest that, as the sun gets higher and the city starts to wake, the speaker experiences a vision that is still beautiful, but also terrifying. To mark the change in attitude, line 13 begins with an abrupt apostrophe: “Dear God!” These two stressed syllables, which form a spondee, jerk the reader from the daydream of the sweetly gliding river: DearGod! Though the poem has hinted at religious themes with words like “soul” and “temple,” line 13 contains the first explicit reference to Christianity. As a direct appeal to God, the apostrophe rings out with extra clarity. The outburst seems spontaneous, as if the glare of the sun has grown so powerful that the speaker can’t help but yell. In the preceding lines the speaker has expressed many contradictions and has implicitly raised many questions. Unable to answer these questions, he or she appeals to God. The remainder of the line reiterates one of the images laid down in the octave: the sleeping city. In the octave, the speaker describes the city as a single being, but in line 13, the sleeping units multiply. Note the plural: “the very houses seem asleep.” It seems that, for the speaker, imagining a single being is far easier, and more pleasant, than imagining many. This is why the apostrophe includes a note of terror or at least a clear disruption of the speaker's previous calm. The amount of people sleeping in those houses surpasses the imaginative capacity of a single person. This is perhaps why, in the final line, the speaker attempts to unify the city once again. Line 14 combines every previous image of the city into the image of a “mighty heart.” In the same way that line 13 revises its counterpart in the octave, line 14 revises line 8. The key word between lines 8 and 14 is “all.” In line 8, “All” is “bright and glittering.” In line 14, “all” contributes to the formation of “that mighty heart.” Unlike the city at dawn, the heart is not clothed. It is terrifying for its rawness, yet beautiful for its life force, not to mention what it represents—love, life, health. And though the speaker doesn’t flinch, he or she backs away from the heart. Whereas the speaker refers to the city in line 4 as “This,” he or she refers to the heart with the more distant “that.” No longer able to fully imagine the city, the speaker hesitates to embrace it. In this way, the speaker loses control, but another ordering power takes over—the poem’s meter. And all thatmighty heart is lying still! This is the only line in the poem that’s purely iambic and uninterrupted by caesura. Like a heart, the line steadily beats. Except that, of course, this heart doesn’t beat, at least not yet. Ironically, at the moment the speaker observes it, the “heart is lying still,” despite the iambic pentameter. This line, with its contradictory heart, asks a final question: does the city represent life or death? In doing so, it reminds the reader of the many other difficult and probably unanswerable questions it has raised.