The Full Text of “Expostulation and Reply”
1"Why William, on that old grey stone,
2Thus for the length of half a day,
3Why, William, sit you thus alone,
4And dream your time away?
5"Where are your books?—that light bequeathed
6To Beings else forlorn and blind!
7Up! up! and drink the spirit breathed
8From dead men to their kind.
9"You look round on your Mother Earth,
10As if she for no purpose bore you;
11As if you were her first-born birth,
12And none had lived before you!"
13One morning thus, by Esthwaite lake,
14When life was sweet, I knew not why,
15To me my good friend Matthew spake,
16And thus I made reply:
17"The eye—it cannot choose but see;
18We cannot bid the ear be still;
19Our bodies feel, where’er they be,
20Against, or with our will.
21"Nor less I deem that there are Powers
22Which of themselves our minds impress;
23That we can feed this mind of ours
24In a wise passiveness.
25"Think you, ’mid all this mighty sum
26Of things for ever speaking,
27That nothing of itself will come,
28But we must still be seeking?
29"—Then ask not wherefore, here, alone,
30Conversing as I may,
31I sit upon this old grey stone,
32And dream my time away."
The Full Text of “Expostulation and Reply”
1"Why William, on that old grey stone,
2Thus for the length of half a day,
3Why, William, sit you thus alone,
4And dream your time away?
5"Where are your books?—that light bequeathed
6To Beings else forlorn and blind!
7Up! up! and drink the spirit breathed
8From dead men to their kind.
9"You look round on your Mother Earth,
10As if she for no purpose bore you;
11As if you were her first-born birth,
12And none had lived before you!"
13One morning thus, by Esthwaite lake,
14When life was sweet, I knew not why,
15To me my good friend Matthew spake,
16And thus I made reply:
17"The eye—it cannot choose but see;
18We cannot bid the ear be still;
19Our bodies feel, where’er they be,
20Against, or with our will.
21"Nor less I deem that there are Powers
22Which of themselves our minds impress;
23That we can feed this mind of ours
24In a wise passiveness.
25"Think you, ’mid all this mighty sum
26Of things for ever speaking,
27That nothing of itself will come,
28But we must still be seeking?
29"—Then ask not wherefore, here, alone,
30Conversing as I may,
31I sit upon this old grey stone,
32And dream my time away."
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“Expostulation and Reply” Introduction
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"Expostulation and Reply," William Wordsworth's reflection on nature's inherent wisdom, was first printed in Lyrical Ballads, his 1798 collaboration with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In this poem, the speaker's friend bursts in on the speaker as he quietly sits on a stone and asks him why on earth he's not inside with his books, storing up wisdom. The speaker replies that there's a certain kind of wisdom that one can only passively absorb: sitting receptively in nature can teach one deep, subtle lessons that don't fit into any book. Along with its sister poem "The Tables Turned," this poem makes a profoundly Romantic declaration of faith in the power of "wise passiveness."
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“Expostulation and Reply” Summary
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"William, why have you been sitting on that old gray rock for so long, daydreaming all by yourself?
And where on earth are your books? They're a true and enlightening gift to human beings, who would be shortsighted, helpless fools without them. Get up and read, absorbing the knowledge passed down from the already-dead to us soon-to-be-dead mortals!
You're looking idly around at Mother Earth as if she gave birth to you for no reason—as if you were the only person alive and didn't have anything to learn from earlier generations!"
I was sitting by Esthwaite Lake one day, relishing life for no reason in particular, when my buddy Matthew said these words to me. Here's how I answered him:
"Our eyes can't help seeing, our ears can't help hearing, and our bodies feel things whether we like it or not.
Likewise, I happen to believe that there are some forces in the world that make an impression on us all by themselves, so we can learn merely by having the wisdom to sit quietly and wait.
Do you really think that, in this world that's talking to us all the time, nothing will ever come to us on its own—that we always have to run after knowledge?
No? Then don't ask me why I'm sitting here quietly (well, having a conversation now, I guess), perched on an old gray rock and daydreaming."
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“Expostulation and Reply” Themes
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Natural Wisdom vs. Human Knowledge
William, the speaker of “Expostulation and Reply,” is having a perfectly lovely afternoon sitting on an “old grey stone” and daydreaming—until his friend Matthew interrupts him, nagging him to get back to his books. In Matthew’s view, the accumulated human knowledge contained in books is the only thing that keeps people from being helpless and “blind,” stumbling ignorantly through life. William retorts that there’s no need to run after human knowledge all the time: the natural world is full of “Powers” that communicate deep wisdom to anyone who’s willing to sit quietly and listen. The poem thus suggests that nature isn’t just full of wisdom, but generous with it—and that, unlike human knowledge, natural wisdom comes, well, naturally.
Matthew’s argument for books is that they illuminate people’s lives by passing down knowledge from one generation to the next. Books keep people from being stuck in the dark: they record what earlier thinkers have already discovered, and thus light the path for those who come after them. Only through study, Matthew believes, can one lead a worthwhile life. To him, William’s daydreaming looks like an isolated self-indulgence that cuts William off from the rest of society and prevents him from striving.
But to William, book-learning isn’t the only kind of wisdom: nature also has a lot to teach those who know how to listen. Merely sitting on an “old grey stone” and gazing out over “Esthwaite lake,” he can feel the “Powers” of nature stirring, teaching him without any effort of his own. Nature reaches out to people who are willing to embrace “wise passiveness,” absorbing the world on its own terms—and gives them a soul-deep wisdom that could never be contained in mere books.
Daydreaming outdoors might look like doing nothing useful, this poem suggests. But those who sit quietly in nature and open themselves expectantly to its silent “Powers” actually gain a kind of wisdom one can’t get any other way.
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Actively Seeking vs. Passively Receiving Knowledge
“Expostulation and Reply” frames a debate between Matthew, who argues that people should spend their time actively learning from books, and William, who replies that people can learn plenty just from sitting quietly outside. On the one hand, this is an argument about human knowledge versus natural wisdom. But on an even more basic level, it’s an argument about seeking versus receiving. To William (and, the reader suspects, to William Wordsworth), wisdom isn’t always a matter of actively seeking knowledge. It can also be a “wise passiveness,” a willingness to wait for new understandings to arrive rather than rushing after them.
Matthew argues that the only way to learn is to try to learn, applying oneself to a rigorous course of study. To do anything else—like idly sitting on an “old grey stone,” just for instance—is to “dream one’s life away,” wasting one’s time and living only for oneself.
To William, though, a “wise passiveness” is in fact the only way to gain certain kinds of understanding. Observing that people see, hear, and feel all the time—whether they like it or not!—William suggests that everyone can always pick up messages from the mysterious “Powers” that surround them. What’s more, those powers can “feed” people’s minds without people even trying: just as one sees and hears effortlessly, so one can learn effortlessly, just by sitting down calmly and waiting for nature’s “Powers” to communicate in their own time.
And the kind of wisdom one gets from “wise passiveness,” the poem suggests, is a different flavor than the wisdom one gets from books. Books can collect and transmit things that are already known, the “spirit breathed / by dead men” to their descendants. But “wise passiveness” allows nature to speak directly to individual people, teaching them personal, mysterious lessons that might not altogether fit into a book-learning framework.
While “wise passiveness” might look like laziness or selfishness to Matthew, the poem argues that it’s actually just another way of learning: a willingness to sit with (and embrace!) what one doesn’t know, not just chase after what people already know.
- See where this theme is active in the poem.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Expostulation and Reply”
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Lines 1-4
"Why William, on that old grey stone,
Thus for the length of half a day,
Why, William, sit you thus alone,
And dream your time away?"Expostulation and Reply" begins with an exasperated outburst from an as-yet-unknown speaker. This, readers will soon learn, is Matthew—and he's fed up with his old friend William, who's sitting on an "old grey stone" as if he didn't have a care in the world.
Right away, Matthew sounds like a pretty exacting guy. He notices that William has been sitting there for precisely "half a day," for instance, and feels that to sit thoughtfully alone like this is to "dream your time away." And his voice suggests that he feels rather indignant about the way that William chooses to use his time: he asks "Why William" not once, but twice, his emphatically alliterative repetition suggesting his righteous bafflement. These first words also hint that part of what he objects to is the way William is sitting alone, not participating in the social world.
In leaping straight into this dialogue, the poem bursts in on the reader just as Matthew bursts in on William's peaceful daydreaming. This abrupt, lively beginning introduces what will become a debate between, not just two friends, but two approaches to life: an active, striving mode, and a passive, receptive mode. The question at hand is: does all wisdom come from the active pursuit of knowledge and from the study of what humanity has already discovered? Or are there subtler, quieter, more personal ways of knowing and learning?
That the daydreamer here is named "William" suggests that the author of this poem—one William Wordsworth, don't you know—is likely to think at least a little differently than the idealistic-but-blustery Matthew. This will be a poem about what one can learn from being not a seeker, but a receiver.
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Lines 5-8
"Where are your books?—that light bequeathed
To Beings else forlorn and blind!
Up! up! and drink the spirit breathed
From dead men to their kind. -
Lines 9-12
"You look round on your Mother Earth,
As if she for no purpose bore you;
As if you were her first-born birth,
And none had lived before you!" -
Lines 13-16
One morning thus, by Esthwaite lake,
When life was sweet, I knew not why,
To me my good friend Matthew spake,
And thus I made reply: -
Lines 17-20
"The eye—it cannot choose but see;
We cannot bid the ear be still;
Our bodies feel, where’er they be,
Against, or with our will. -
Lines 21-24
"Nor less I deem that there are Powers
Which of themselves our minds impress;
That we can feed this mind of ours
In a wise passiveness. -
Lines 25-28
"Think you, ’mid all this mighty sum
Of things for ever speaking,
That nothing of itself will come,
But we must still be seeking? -
Lines 29-32
"—Then ask not wherefore, here, alone,
Conversing as I may,
I sit upon this old grey stone,
And dream my time away."
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“Expostulation and Reply” Symbols
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The Old Grey Stone
The stone upon which William perches symbolizes his firm conviction in the power of nature.
Stones are a common symbol of steadfastness, and this one suggests that William both feels stubbornly convinced that dreaming in nature provides a special kind of wisdom. It's as if this ancient stone itself has taught him how to sit perfectly still.
The stone might also suggest the way that humans and nature interact: perhaps it's a fallen stone from an old wall, an image of the way that the natural world both provides for and outlasts humanity.
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Books
The books that Matthew tries to hurry William back to symbolize the collected mass of human knowledge and effort.
Book-learning, in Matthew's eyes, is both a way of understanding the world, and a way of being connected to all the people who have come before one. Books are a "light," but they also contain the "spirit" of "dead men," passing down ancient wisdom.
Books are thus an image of shared, collective, effortful learning—as against the kind of personal, mysterious wisdom that William draws from his "wise passiveness."
- See where this symbol appears in the poem.
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“Expostulation and Reply” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Chiasmus
The whole poem takes the form of an extended chiasmus, a pattern of thought that retraces its steps and ends back where it began. By responding to Matthew's "expostulation" point by point, the speaker at last makes it back to exactly where he was in the first place, content to "dream [his] time away."
The basic structure of this chiasmus runs like this:
- Matthew finds William sitting on an "old grey stone" and asks him why he's doing so.
- Matthew tells William to go energetically pursue the "light" of books and study.
- Matthew observes that William is just uselessly looking around him at "Mother Earth."
- William tells the reader the circumstances of this conversation (the midpoint of the chiasmus).
- William explains that looking receptively around at the natural world is an automatically enlightening experience.
- Matthew observes that William is just uselessly looking around him at "Mother Earth."
- William further explains that energetically pursuing knowledge isn't the only way to learn.
- Matthew tells William to go energetically pursue the "light" of books and study.
- Finally, William says that taking in natural wisdom is exactly why he's sitting on this "old grey stone."
This structure helps the poem to feel reflective, literally: by mirroring Matthew's argument in his "reply," William seems to be trying to give Matthew a new perspective. Rather than just saying "buzz off and let me enjoy my lake-gazing," he answers Matthew point by point.
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- Matthew finds William sitting on an "old grey stone" and asks him why he's doing so.
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Personification
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Repetition
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Metaphor
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Imagery
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Alliteration
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Assonance
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"Expostulation and Reply" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Bequeathed
- Else
- Forlorn
- The spirit breathed from dead men to their kind
- Bore
- Esthwaite lake
- Spake
- Bid the ear be still
- Where'er
- Powers which of themselves our minds impress
- 'mid
- Wherefore
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Passed down—especially as a legacy from someone who has died.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Expostulation and Reply”
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Form
"Lyrical Ballads," the collection this poem comes from, provides a good hint about this poem's form in its title: this is a ballad, but a lyrical one! That means it's using the ancient, folky ballad shape—originally a narrative, storytelling form—to explore the speaker's inner life, his "lyrical" emotion and thought. Here, the speaker is telling the story of the day a friend interrupted his peaceful musings to ask why he wasn't hitting the books, but also communicating the insights he gained from merely perching on a stone.
Ballads often use short, punchy four-line stanzas, and this one, with its eight quatrains, is no exception. (The poem does play around with ballad meter in some meaningful ways, though—see the Meter section for more about that.)
This down-to-earth form reflects the poem's themes. Rather than striving for elegant, elevated book-learning, this poem's primary speaker prefers to sit quietly, receiving wisdom from nature rather than striving. His unpretentious form reflects his simple approach.
Readers might also break this poem down into three parts: there's a passage of dialogue from Matthew, a stanza of context in William's voice, and then a passage of dialogue from William. In other words, there's an "expostulation" (an explosion of disapproval), an explanation—and then a calm "reply"!
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Meter
"Expostulation and Reply" uses—for the most part—iambic tetrameter. That means that each line uses four iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, as in lines 17-18:
"The eye—| it can- | not choose | but see;
We can- | not bid | the ear | be still;This simple rhythm is a natural fit for a "lyrical ballad": most ballads use either iambic tetrameter or common meter, a back-and-forth pattern that switches between lines of iambic tetrameter and lines of iambic trimeter (three da-DUMs in a row).
But there are many oddities and variations within the meter here to keep readers on their toes. The poem doesn't stick to solid lines of tetrameter all the way through: sometimes a stanza switches to common meter, and sometimes the speaker just throws in an unexpected line of irregular meter.
Take a look at the sixth stanza, for instance. This passage starts with three solid lines of iambic tetrameter, but ends with the line:
In a wise passiveness.
This important line, which introduces the very Wordsworthian idea of "wise passiveness," uses an irregular rhythm that appears nowhere else in the poem: an intentional stumbling block that forces readers to spend an extra moment with this mysterious idea, rather than just galloping onward
The poem's startling metrical variations reflect its purposes: this poem is a philosophical debate, and its changing meter helps reader to engage its arguments.
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Rhyme Scheme
The rhyme scheme of "Expostulation and Reply" runs like this throughout:
ABAB
That's no surprise in a poem modeled on the ballad form: most ballad stanzas rhyme either ABAB or ABCB.
What's a little more unusual is the language of this speaker's rhyme words. While this poem uses a simple, folksy ballad shape, it's full of sophisticated rhymes: this speaker doesn't just use plain, classic pairs like "alone" and "stone," but rather more elevated ones like "impress" and "passiveness," "bequeathed" and "breathed." That language hints that, in spite of the poem's outward simplicity, there's some complex thought going on here.
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“Expostulation and Reply” Speaker
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The speaker of this poem is William Wordsworth himself—though the poem begins with a speech from his friend Matthew, a severe-but-idealistic fellow who interrupts Wordsworth's perfectly pleasant daydreaming to encourage him to hit the books.
Wordsworth often wrote first-person poetry in his own voice, casting himself as a wandering philosopher who reflects on the lessons he's learned from nature and childhood. Here, he's treating one of his favorite subjects: the inherent power and wisdom of nature. (In fact, he liked this theme so much that he wrote a companion piece to this poem, a longer reply to Matthew and his ilk in which a speaker declares that a walk in the woods can teach one more than "all the sages can.")
In other words, this speaker seems to be delivering Wordsworth's own philosophy in Wordsworth's own voice. That voice is lyrical, thoughtful, reflective—and maybe a tiny bit grumpy about being interrupted in his contemplation of natural splendor.
But there's also a touch of complex irony here. After all, this speaker's "reply" might advocate for "wise passiveness"—but it's doing so in a poem, in the very kind of book that Matthew encourages William to get up and read!
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“Expostulation and Reply” Setting
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"Expostulation and Reply" has a very specific setting: "Esthwaite lake," one of the many lovely lakes in England's Lake District. Wordsworth and his collaborator Coleridge made this region famous: they lived and worked there in the most creatively fertile years of their lives, and they're still sometimes known as the "Lake Poets."
To the Wordsworth of this poem, this lake seems to be a fountain of wisdom. Perched on a simple "old grey stone," he's content to passively gaze out over the water, waiting for nature to teach him whatever it wants to teach him. That stone, which might come from a fallen wall or a ruined cottage, could even hint that nature doesn't just teach different lessons than humanity: it also outlasts all human endeavor.
For that reason, one might even say the setting is "Mother Earth" herself. The speaker draws his wisdom, not just from a specific view of a specific lake, but from all the "Powers" of the natural world.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Expostulation and Reply”
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Literary Context
While William Wordsworth (1770-1850) is now often seen as the most ubiquitous and canonical of English poets, in his time he was a revolutionary.
In collaboration with his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his sister Dorothy Wordsworth, Wordsworth wrote one of the most important books in world literature: Lyrical Ballads. This innovative poetry collection, first published in 1798, married the earthy English ballad tradition to deep emotion—and kicked off the English Romantic movement, changing poetry forever.
"Expostulation and Reply," which appeared in the first edition of Lyrical Ballads, is a quintessential Romantic poem both in its style and in its themes: the poem's reflections on the wisdom of nature and the value of dreaming are some of the bedrock ideas of Romanticism. And Wordsworth had even more to say on the subject. "The Tables Turned," his sequel to this poem, doubles down on the idea that nature is the wisest teacher there is, arguing that it can teach more "than all the sages can."
Alongside his intimate (and often fraught) collaboration with Coleridge, Wordsworth inspired a whole generation of younger poets—though some of them, like Keats and Byron, were later pretty disappointed with how conservative Wordsworth became in his older age. (See the painter Benjamin Haydon's account of a legendary and hilariously awkward dinner party with Wordsworth for just one good example.) Once rebellious in both his politics and his poetry, Wordsworth eventually settled into a comfortable retirement as Queen Victoria's Poet Laureate. But the vibrant, soulful poetry of his youth has endured, and he remains one of the best-known and most influential of poets to this day.
Historical Context
Wordsworth's poetry was part of a Romantic backlash against the elegant, satirical, and often merciless clarity of the Age of Enlightenment. This period of the 18th century was marked by huge scientific advances, but also by what the later Romantics saw as a bit too much reason. Where earlier Renaissance scholars and artists tried to know a little bit about everything, Enlightenment thinkers were categorizers and organizers, increasingly interested in sharp divisions between disciplines.
The art of that era, similarly, had an orderly, reasoned wit that Wordsworth and his followers began to find rather deadening. Romantics like William Blake and John Keats wanted to break out of the crystalline prison of Enlightenment-era poetry, preferring the wide, dark, glimmering world of the imagination. "Expostulation and Reply" is just one example of a Romantic answer to an Enlightenment worldview, arguing for the power of "wise passiveness" over the limitations of human knowledge and human striving.
The Romantic movement was also in part a rebellion against the Industrial Revolution, which was built on the back of Enlightenment advances in science and technology. As the countryside began to disappear beneath expanding cities and filthy factories, thinkers like Wordsworth tried to remind readers that nature was full of irreplaceable beauty and wisdom—qualities that can't be commodified.
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More “Expostulation and Reply” Resources
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External Resources
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Lyrical Ballads — Take a look at the 1798 first edition of Lyrical Ballads, the world-changing collection in which this poem was first printed.
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A Brief Biography — Visit the British Library's website to learn more about Wordsworth's life and work.
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The Poem in Context — Watch a short video from the Wordsworth Trust, in which scholar Catherine Kay discusses this poem's relationship to its sister poem, "The Tables Turned."
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Wordsworth's World — Learn more about the historical and literary context in which this poem was first published.
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The Poem Aloud — Listen to Wordsworth's great-great-great-great-grandson giving a lively reading of the poem.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by William Wordsworth
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