<P> The simile "quiet as a nun / Breathless with adoration" is often cited as an example of how a poet achieves her effects . On the one hand "breathless" reinforces the placid evening scene Wordsworth is describing; on the other hand it suggests tremulous excitement, preparing the reader for the ensuing image of the eternal motion of the sea . Cleanth Brooks provided an influential analysis of the sonnet in terms of these tensions in The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (see also Paradox (literature)). </P> <P> The reference to Abraham's bosom (cf . Luke 16: 22) has also attracted critical attention as that is normally associated with Heaven (or at least Purgatory) in the Christian tradition, inviting comparison with the Lucy poems . However, a natural reading is that Wordsworth was simply stressing the closeness of the Child to the divine: Stephen Gill references Wordsworth's ode Intimations of Immortality . </P> <P> The' natural piety' of children was a subject that preoccupied Wordsworth at the time and was developed by him in the Intimations, the first four stanzas of which he had completed earlier in the year but had put aside because he could not decide the origin of the presumed natural affinity with the divine in children, nor why we lose it when we emerge from childhood . By 1804 he believed he had found the answer in the Platonic doctrine of the pre-existence of souls and was able to complete his ode . The 5th line in the sonnet, "The gentleness of heaven broods o'er the Sea", references the creation myth of Genesis 1: 2 (compare Milton's Paradise Lost 7: 235, a poem Wordsworth knew virtually by heart), and a similar use of "broods" eventually appeared in the Intimations in stanza VIII </P> <P> Thou, over whom thy Immortality Broods like the Day, a Master o'er a Slave, A Presence which is not to be put by...</P>

Analysis of the poem it is a beauteous evening