Rich repetitions allow the poem's language to mirror the speaker's deep belief that all life is part of one big, rhythmic cycle.
Perhaps the most striking repetitions are the full lines that reappear across the poem. The speaker begins and ends his tale with the words "it was my thirtieth year to heaven," a line that plays with time in two different ways:
- On the one hand, the phrasing "my thirtieth year to heaven" suggests that the speaker sees his life as a journey toward death. He might not know when he's going to reach "heaven," but he knows he's made thirty years of progress in that direction!
- On the other, by repeating the phrase at the beginning and towards the end of the poem, the speaker reminds readers that the whole mystical experience he describes in this poem, which soars through his past, his present, and his hopes for what he'll be doing in "a year's turning," takes place in one small spot of time: his thirtieth birthday.
- This repetition suggests that, while time can't turn backward, it's also not just a straight line!
The poem's other full-line repetition does something similar. From his perch up on a hill, the speaker declares:
There could I marvel
My birthday
Away but the weather turned around.
The same words appear at the beginning of the final stanza. Again, there's a repeated image of standing still to "marvel" the time away connected with an image of "turn[ing] around": when the weather turns, so will the speaker's experience of his life, until he feels as if he's living his boyhood feelings again. In both these repeated lines, then, time moves forward, stands still, and turns around, all at once!
Other repetitions show how joyfully overwhelmed the speaker feels by the abundant beauty around him. Take a look at his polysyndeton as he describes waking up on his birthday:
Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood
And the mussel pooled and the heron
Priested shore
All those "ands" make it feel as if the speaker can't stop finding something new to delight in everywhere he looks. This isn't just a laundry list of nearby interesting landmarks, but a moment of rediscovery: the speaker notices each of these features of the landscape carefully, one by one.
The word "and" plays an important role all through this poem, in fact. Many lines begin with the word, creating a thread of anaphora that subtly suggests the continuity and odd mystical logic of the speaker's experience: he wakes up and feels that the world is beautiful and walks out and watches the sun come out and feels transported back to his childhood. The speaker's "ands" evoke both the momentum of this meaningful day and the speaker's sense of glorious abundance. His "heart's truth," the poem's repetitions suggest, will never burn out; there's always another "and" coming.