It Is a Beauteous Evening, Calm and Free

“It is a Beauteous Evening, Calm and Free” embodies several fundamental ideas of the English Romantic movement: love of the natural world, a sense of the divine that animates the environment, and the belief that children possess an intuitive wisdom and a special connection to nature that adults may have lost. It is not surprising that these elements appear in a poem by Wordsworth, who is regarded as the greatest of the English Romantic poets. Indeed, it was the publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1798, on which Wordsworth collaborated with his friend and fellow poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, that marked the beginning of the Romantic literary era. Following Wordsworth’s lead, Romantic poetry placed an emphasis on emotion, feeling, intuition, and spontaneity; personal experience rather than received tradition became the touchstone of truth. Wordsworth particularly emphasized his appreciation of nature. In “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey,” which appeared in Lyrical Ballads, he honors nature and the divine spirit flowing through it in lines that mirror “It Is a Beauteous Evening, Calm and Free”:

And I have felt

A presence that disturbs me with the joy

Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things. 

Coleridge expressed similar views about nature and the spirit of love and beauty that flows through it in poems such as “The Eolian Harp,” and “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison.” For both Wordsworth and Coleridge, it was through the creative imagination that the individual mind could connect with its transcendent source. This belief in the imagination was shared by other Romantics, such as William Blake and Percy Bysshe Shelley. 

Coleridge also shared Wordsworth’s view about the special nature of children in regard to nature. For example, in “The Nightingale,” Coleridge’s baby son, upset by a disturbing dream, only has to be taken outside to the orchard, where he gazes at the moon, stops crying, and laughs. Blake and Shelley had similar views. Many of Blake’s Songs of Innocence (1789) show the unselfconscious joy of children, who are always in touch with the spirit of the divine. “Introduction, “Laughing Song” and “Nurse’s Song” serve as examples. 

Perhaps the most relevant for “It is a Beauteous Evening, Calm and Free,” however, is Wordsworth’s own “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollection of Early Childhood,” which he began just a few months before he wrote the sonnet and finished two years later. In the ode he describes the time in his own childhood when he saw nature, including “meadow, grove, and stream, / The earth, and every common sight, [...] Apparelled in celestial light.” He lost this heightened awareness, he writes, as he grew to adulthood. Wordsworth sees this as a common pattern in human life. The child “beholds the light, and whence it flows, / He sees it in his joy,” but gradually it “fade[s] into the light of common day.” This gives biographical context for the “beauteous evening” sonnet, in which the adult speaker regains a glimmer of this elevated perception on the beach at Calais and then comments about how the little girl must see and experience it too, perhaps in even greater measure.