The metre is the same as ballad metre: alternating lines of iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter. ‘The Tables Turned’, like ‘Expostulation and Reply’, is written in the ballad form: quatrains rhymed abab (strict ballads tend to be in the abcb rhyme scheme, but Wordsworth, in the Lyrical Ballads, favoured the fuller rhyme scheme). All Wordsworth’s friend needs to bring with him to appreciate nature is a readiness to observe and ‘receive’ the various impressions that nature gives: birdsong, a beautiful sunset, the green fields and woods, and so on. pages) of a book are ‘barren’, unlike the living leaves on the trees outside. Wordsworth concludes ‘The Tables Turned’ by calling for an end to man’s interference: enough of science and art (including poetry!). remove the numinous mystery of the rainbow by reducing it to an optical illusion involving the refraction of white light into its constituent colours of the spectrum (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet). Here, we might make a link with Keats’s later comment, in ‘Lamia’, about scientists who ‘unweave the rainbow’, i.e. The line is a condensing of the slightly longer sentiment that ‘in order to dissect something and analyse it, we kill it’. ‘We murder to dissect’ is the most famous line from the poem. Nature, without us interfering in it, is beautiful and sweet, but as soon as we start to meddle in it, we destroy it. Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things: –
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