It Is a Beauteous Evening, Calm and Free

Nature, however beautiful to regard objectively, also always contains within it evidence of its divine origins. In the poem, the beauty of the beach scene reflects the work of its creator, God—the overarching spirit that can be felt and sensed deep in nature by anyone who is awake to it. The physical manifestation of nature flows out of the divine and remains always connected to it. The view expressed by the speaker in this sonnet aligns with Wordsworth’s spiritual expression in many of his major poems, such as “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” and The Prelude. In the latter, for example, which was a work-in-progress at the time of this sonnet, he writes of the “holy calm” that would come upon him when he walked in the quiet of the early morning in the Lake District. Similarly, the words “holy,” “quiet” and “calm” appear in the first two lines of the sonnet in connection with the beauty of nature. That sense of the “the holy time” (Line 2), with its religious or spiritual connotations, is the key to fully appreciating the natural world; it leads inevitably to the response of “adoration”, like the nun worshipping God (Line 3). The word “adoration” also occurs in The Prelude, in which all creatures look “Towards the Uncreated / with a countenance of adoration, with an eye of love.” 

The spiritual dimension of life that pours out through nature is emphasized again when the sky is described as the “gentleness of heaven” (Line 5), and then again in the next line, which evokes the “mighty Being [that] is awake” (Line 6). In The Prelude, Wordsworth describes how he “felt the sentiment of Being spread / O'er all that moves and all that seemeth still,” which is the same idea. It also echoes the phrase in the sonnet about the “eternal motion” (Line 7) of this mighty force, which was perhaps stimulated by the sight of the ever-moving waves of the sea as the speaker looked out at them from the beach. 

The speaker then reinforces this idea of “eternal motion” with the temporal adverb “everlastingly,” another concept with religious connotations, since the Everlasting, capitalized as a noun, is one epithet of the Judeo-Christian God. In The Prelude, Wordsworth expresses essentially the same idea in similar language; the “Wisdom and Sprit of the universe / [...] giv’st to forms and images a breath / And everlasting motion!” The sonnet is thus a concise expression of Wordsworth’s ideas about how the infinite creative spirit permeates all aspects of nature. It is the speaker’s perception of this that gives him the sense of peace and freedom that he experiences on the Calais beach.