It Is a Beauteous Evening, Calm and Free

Line 1 sets the scene that Wordsworth will elaborate on in the following lines of the poem’s first eight lines, or octave. The description of the beautiful calm evening is straightforward, and only the addition of another adjective, “free,” calls for some explication. In what sense can an evening be “free”? Wordsworth is using a poetic device known as a transferred epithet: The adjective “free” applies not to the evening but to the speaker, in whom the calm beauty of the evening inspires a feeling of freedom. The sentiment aligns with Wordsworth’s frequent suggestion that the human mind in quiet moments senses its deep kinship with nature, which creates the feeling of inner freedom. 

Line 2 introduces a religious or spiritual element, referring to the evening as “the holy time,” meaning that it is sacred, in some way linked to God, and endowed with divine qualities. This sense of holiness is reinforced by the simile of the “Nun / Breathless with adoration” (Lines 2-3), which suggests that the beauty of the evening is like a woman who has dedicated herself to religious life—its peace is the expression of God and therefore worthy of adoration or worship. 

Lines 3 and 4 are more purely descriptive, adding to the picture of the evening as sunset approaches. The setting sun is “broad” because, when low in the sky, it tends to look larger than when it is high overhead. This is a precise recording of an optical illusion, since the size of the sun does not actually change; it just looks bigger by comparison to how small trees, hills, or buildings appear on the horizon. 

Line 5, “The gentle heaven broods o’er the sea,” develops the religious theme. It alludes to Book I of Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), in which the “mighty wings” of the spirit of God “Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss” (Lines 20-21). This in turn alludes to the Book of Genesis, Chapter 1 Verse 2, in which the spirit of God moves, hovers, or broods over the formless abyss before he creates heaven and earth. 

The gentleness of this heaven is an interpretation of the “beauteous evening” rather than a simple description of it. It suggests that the spirit of God, in its tenderness, still broods (in the sense of watching or spreading over like a bird on a nest), over the world it created long ago. 

In Line 6, the speaker directly addresses an absent and unnamed auditor, telling him or her to listen. The reference to the “mighty Being” is another reference to God, who is active in his creation (“awake”), which is perpetually in motion and makes a sound like thunder. This is the sound of the sea on the Calais beach. In the Bible, the voice of God is sometimes described as thunder. Once again, the speaker takes a natural phenomenon—the sound of the sea—and gives it a spiritual dimension.  

In the sestet, or the poem’s ending six lines, the speaker directs his attention to the little girl who walks with him. He uses the archaic form “walkest” (Line 9), a verb conjugation that is used in the King James Version of the Bible, to put a religious cast on this simple activity. This prepares the way for the poem’s next four lines, which declare that the child walks in the presence of God. The archaism will recur in a more specific religious context in “liest” (Line 12). 

In Line 10, the speaker makes it clear that walking with God is not only for those who can engage in “solemn thought,” or serious reflection on the majesty of God or other religious notions. The child, not surprisingly, is “untouched” by the kind of weighty mental activity that adults engage in, and may even seem to be oblivious to the beauty of the natural scene that lies before her. The speaker emphasizes in the following line, however, that this does not make her any “less divine” (Line 11). Instead, she experiences God in a different manner; the speaker implies indirectly that the girl’s communion with the divine lies in the innocent joy that characterizes the state of childhood. He elaborates on the girl’s connection to God in Lines 12 and 13, saying that she “liest in Abraham’s bosom all the year / And worshipp’st at the Temple’s inner shrine.” The allusion here is to a passage in the gospel of Luke: “And it came to pass, that the beggar died, and was carried by the angels into Abraham’s bosom” (Ch. 16, Verse 22, KJV). Traditionally, Abraham’s bosom was a blessed state of rest for the dead, before their admission to heaven. It is an odd phrase for Wordsworth to use in this context, however, since the girl of which he speaks is very much alive. 

In the final line, the speaker clearly states his belief—“God being with thee” (Line 14)—and then adds the somewhat ambiguous phrase, “when we know it not.” Who “we” are is not defined, but this final phrase seems to contrast the constant state of being with God that the child experiences, even if she is not conscious of it, with the adult experience of at times feeling separated from or unaware of our connection to God (so the “we” may thus refer to adults). This is why the speaker is so moved by the sights and sounds of the Calais beach on this particular evening—they remind him of his deep connection to the divine.