William Wordsworth’s “It is a Beauteous Evening, Calm and Free” is a Petrarchan, or Italian, sonnet with the rime scheme, ABBAABBA in the octave and CDECED. The sonnet develops a quintessential romantic theme of the intertwining of earthly beauty and innocence with the divine.
Wordsworth claimed that poetry results from the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” This poem is an excellent example of the poet’s statement on poetics.
The poem features the speaker and a companion taking an evening stroll on a peaceful evening. The “dear Girl” mentioned in the sestet is said to be Wordsworth’s daughter, Caroline, who was about ten years old when this poem was written.
Octave: “It is a beauteous evening, calm and free”
The speaker portrays the peaceful atmosphere experienced by the characters in the poem, likening the evening to “the holy time” that is “quiet as a Nun.” And this Nun is “breathless with adoration,” deep in meditation on the Divine Beloved.
The landscape through which the speaker and his companion walk has a settled feeling that yields its tenor to the very essence of peace that is “calm and free.” The sun is setting, or as the poet recollects and then fashions into poetry, it is “sinking down in its tranquility.” And he recalls, “gentleness of heaven broods o'er the Sea.” He then avers, “the mighty Being is awake / And doth with his eternal motion make / A sound like thunder—everlastingly.”
Such precise details resemble the descriptions offered by yoga practitioners and other spiritual devotees of the Divine Beloved, who naturally yield the magic of the evening to the power of that Beloved: the thunder sound rolls like the great Aum sound of the Bhagavad Gita to the yogis who practice techniques with which Wordsworth was not acquainted but whose intuitive power led him to the same awareness.
Sestet: “Dear child! dear Girl! that walkest with me here”
The sonnet then shifts from the description of the awe-inspiring evening to the direct address by the speaker to his companion, “Dear child! dear Girl! that walkest with me here.” The girl is a simple child who does not observe the power of the tranquility, as her father does.
But he asserts that despite her obliviousness to the “solemn thought” that fills his mind, she is as much a part of the divine as anyone or anything. Her “nature is not therefore less divine.”
The child is a descendent of “Abraham,” founding patriarch of the Judeo-Christian tradition; thus, she “lie[s] in Abraham's bosom all the year.” And she “worship[s] at the Temple's inner shrine,” even if she is not aware of her devotion. The speaker then lovingly adds, “God being with thee when we know it not.”
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