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LINES 8-9 For this, for everything, we are out of tune; It moves us not. Lines 8 and 9 reveal the purpose of lines 5 through 7: that is, to describe what modern humans can no longer grasp. Their rhythm, broken by many caesuras, contrasts with the smooth, unbroken lines above and emphasizes the speaker’s dejected emotional state. "For this" refers to the description of the moonlit ocean; "everything" refers to all the descriptions of nature that could have followed that first one, which the speaker chooses to omit in the interest of time and clarity. As an Italian sonnet, the poem has a limited number of lines and is supposed to present a clear problem in its first eight. The poem stays true to the Italian sonnet form. It caps off the eighth line with a clear expression of the "problem" of the poem: "we are out of tune." It slightly subverts that form by once more specifying the problem at the beginning of line 9, thus delaying the sestet (final six lines). (This non-conformity is inconsequential, however, exactly what you might expect out of someone governed by inescapable societal norms.) When the speaker says "we are out of tune," he or she means that people no longer base their activity around nature. Artificial light, for example, allows people to get things done without the sun in the sky. In a sense, these material gains provide escape from the confines of the natural world, but in the speaker’s opinion that road only leads to another trap: life in the city. Being out of tune points to a spiritual loss as well. In an earlier time—for example, a few thousand years ago, before pagan religions had been replaced across large swaths of the globe by Christianity—people may have drawn great meaning from the changing of the tides and phases of the moon, or from the behavior of delicate flowers. Modern life, says the speaker, has made it impossible—or at least economically pointless—to engage with nature on a spiritual level. The meter and punctuation in line 8 reflect the meaning of "out of tune." For this, | for ev- | erything, | we are | out of | tune; There is an extra syllable here, giving the line 11 syllables instead of the 10 standard to pentameter. Additionally, the line contains what is arguably a pyrrhic (a foot of two unstressed syllables) in its fourth foot ("we are") followed by a definite trochee in its fifth (out of). In this sense, the line itself is "out of tune" with iambic pentameter. The caesura, which separates "for everything" from the rest of the line, also breaks the line’s rhythm. By emphasizing "everything," it points to the infinite depth of the problem the speaker describes, and gives the poem a mournful tone. As already mentioned, the poem breaks form by extending the end of the proposition beyond the end of the octave (the first eight lines of the sonnet). "It moves us not" concludes the expression of the poem's problem. "It," which refers to everything in nature, no longer has the emotional effect on people that it once had. The word "us"—the poem’s final use of a collective pronoun—asks the reader to wonder whom exactly the speaker refers to. Lines 1 through 4 make it pretty clear that the speaker is part of the "we" and unable to escape its habits of thought and behavior. Lines 5 through 7, however, whose descriptions are evidence of a deep attachment to nature, seem to separate the speaker from the crowd. Maybe because this question occurs to the speaker as well, he or she takes the opportunity to launch into the first person, and maintains it for the rest of the poem.