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The tranquil ebb and flow of the speaker’s thoughts and feelings produces a tone that is generally meditative, though also at times wistful and optimistic. The poem’s meditative quality may easily be felt in Wordsworth’s masterful manipulation of meter. Although he composed the poem in iambic pentameter, he uses enjambment and caesura in ways that add subtle variation to the iambic rhythm and thus bring complexity to the speaker’s cadences. In the opening lines, for instance, in-line punctuation shapes the rhythm of the speaker’s speech in a way that reflects the real-time unfolding of his thoughts (lines 1–4):

     Five years have past; five summers, with the length
     Of five long winters! and again I hear
     These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
     With a soft inland murmur.

As the speaker continues with his meditation, he thinks about both past and future. When reflecting on his past, the speaker conjures a feeling of wistfulness, which entails a regretful—though also pleasurable—sense of longing for what’s gone. The speaker refers to this complex feeling as a “sad perplexity” (line 60), one that prompts recollections of many “aching joys” (84) from his youth. By contrast, when he projects into his future, the speaker conjures an optimistic mood. He expresses this optimism, for example, in his belief “that in this moment there is life and food / For future years” (lines 64–65).

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