It is a beauteous evening, calm and free

It is a beauteous evening, calm and free,
The holy time is quiet as a Nun
Breathless with adoration; the broad sun
Is sinking down in its tranquillity;
The gentleness of heaven broods o'er the Sea:
Listen! the mighty Being is awake,
And doth with his eternal motion make
A sound like thunder--everlastingly.
Dear Child! dear Girl! that walkest with me here,
If thou appear untouched by solemn thought,
Thy nature is not therefore less divine:
Thou liest in Abraham's bosom all the year;
And worship'st at the Temple's inner shrine,
God being with thee when we know it not.

It is a beauteous evening, calm and free is a sonnet by William Wordsworth written at Calais in August 1802. It was first published in the collection Poems, in Two Volumes in 1807, appearing as the nineteenth poem in a section entitled 'Miscellaneous sonnets'.

The sonnet describes an evening walk on the beach with his nine-year-old daughter Caroline Vallon. Wordsworth reflects that if his young daughter is seemingly unaffected by the majesty of the scene it is because, being young, she is naturally at one with nature.

Until that Friday 21 May 1802, Wordsworth had shunned the sonnet form, but his sister Dorothy's recital of Milton's sonnets had "fired him" and he went on to write some 415 in all.

It is a beauteous evening is the only "personal" sonnet he wrote at this time; others written in 1802 were political in nature and "Dedicated to Liberty" in the 1807 collection.

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)).

The reference to Abraham's bosom (cf. ) 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 odeIntimations of Immortality.

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