The Old Man's Answer

We don't get any direct quotation from the old man. The speaker has given us a sort of voice over where he talks about the effect that this man is having on him, and why he thinks he might have been sent to sort of admonish him in some way. It's a strange sort of filmi technique wordsworth uses so we have a sense of the old man talking, but we don't know what he's saying because the speaker isn't hearing him. Remember all those dark thoughts he had, cold pain and labour and all fleshly ills, and mighty poets, in their misery, dead.