Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood -- William Wordsworth

Ode: Intimations of immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood

—William Wordsworth

 

William Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” is one his most celebrated poems, reflecting his profound views on Nature, memory, childhood and the spiritual connection between humans and the world. The poem is divided eleven stanzas, each of which contributes to the exploration of how childhood wonder and the perception of a divine presence in the world diminish with age.   

The child is father of the man;

And I could wish my days to be 

Bound each to each by natural piety.

(Wordsworth, “My Heart Leaps Up”)

 

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,

The earth, and every common sight,

To me did seem

Apparelled in celestial light,

The glory and the freshness of a dream.

It is not now as it hath been of yore;—

Turn wheresoe’er I may,

By night or day.

The things which I have seen I now can see no more.                                                  1

 

The Rainbow comes and goes,

And lovely is the Rose,

The moon doth with delight

Look round her when the heavens are bare,

Waters on a starry night

Are beautiful and fair; 

The sunshine is a glorious birth;

But yet I know, where’er I go,

That there hath past away a glory from the earth.                                                         2

 

(Stanzas 1—2) The loss of Early Joy.

 

William Wordsworth begins by lamenting the loss of the radiant, almost divine glory he once saw in nature as a child. While the natural world — birds, rivers, meadows — remains beautiful, it no longer inspires the same transcendental joy. He reflects on the “celestial light” that illuminated his childhood perceptions of the world, suggesting that this light has faded with maturity. 

 

* Contrast between childhood innocence and adult disillusionment 

* A sense of spiritual estrangement from nature.

Now, while the birds thus sing a joyous song,

And while the young lambs bound

As to the tabor’s sound,

To me alone there came a thought of grief:

A timely utterance gave that thought relief;

And I again am strong:

The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep;

No more shall grief of mine the season wrong;

I hear the Echoes through the mountains throng,

The winds come to me from the fields of sleep,

And all the earth is gay;

Land and sea 

Give themselves up to jollity,

And with the heart of May

Doth every Beast keep holiday; —

Thou Child of Joy,

Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy Shepherd-boy.                         3

 

Ye blessèd creatures, I have heard the call 

Ye to each other make; I See

The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee;

My heart is at your festival,

The fulness of your bliss, I feel —I feel it all.

Oh evil day! If I were sullen 

While Earth herself is adorning,

This sweet May-morning,

And the Children are culling 

On every side,

In a thousand valleys far and wide,

Fresh flowers; while the sun shines warm, 

And the Babe leaps up on his Mother’s arm; — 

I hear, I hear, with joy I hear!

—But there’s a Tree, of many, one, 

A single field which I have looked upon,

Both of them speak of something that is gone;

The Pansy at my feet

Doth the same tale repeat:

Whither is fled the visionary gleam?

Where is it now, the glory and the dream?                                                                   4

(Stanzas 3 – 4) Glimpses of Hope.

 

Despite his initial lament, Wordsworth acknowledges that the beauty of nature still brings him fleeting moments of joy. He finds comfort in the idea that memories of childhood can serve as a source of spiritual renewal. The speaker begins to explore the philosophical idea that the soul retains a connection — a pre-earthly, divine by the platonic notion of the soul’s immortality. 

 

* Memory as a bridge between past and present.

* The persistence of spiritual truths despite temporal changes 

 

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar:

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God, who is our home:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

Shades of the prison-house begin to close

Upon the growing Boy,

But he beholds, who daily farther from the east

Must travel, still is Nature’s Priest, 

And by the vision splendid 

Is on his way attended;

At length the Man perceives it die away,

And fade into the light of common day.                                                                    5

 

(Stanza – 5) The Pre-existence of the soul.

 

This stanza introduces the concept of the soul’s pre-existence, which is the central idea in the poem. William Wordsworth suggests that when we are born, we carry with us the memories of a heavenly realm, which gradually fade away as we grow older. This fading explains why children possess a unique ability to see the world with wonder and divine insight.  

 

* The “trailing clouds of glory” from heaven that children bring to the world.

* The loss of divine perception with age.  

 

Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own;

Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind,

And, even with something of a Mother’s mind,

And no unworthy aim,

The homely Nurse doth all she can

To make her Foster-child, her Inmate Man,

Forget the glories he hath known, 

And that imperial palace whence he came.

Behold the child among his new-born blisses,

A six years’ Darling of a pigmy size! 

See, where ‘’mid work of his own hand he likes,

Fretted by sallies of his mother’s kisses,

With light upon him from his father’s eyes!

See, at his feet, some little plan or chart,

Some fragment from his dream of human life,

Shaped by himself with newly-learn{e}d art

A wedding or a festival,

A mourning or a funeral;

And this hath now his heart,

And unto this he frames his song:

Then will he fit his tongue

To dialogues of business, love, or strife;

But it will not be long

Ere this be thrown aside,

And with new joy and pride

The little Actor cons another part;

Filling from time to time his “humorous stage”

With all the Persons, down to palsied Age,

That Life brings with her in her equipage;

As if his whole vocation

Were endless imitation.                                                                                              6

 

(Stanza – 6) The Process of Forgetting.

 

The poet elaborates on how earthly life gradually distances humans from their divine origins. As we grow up, societal expectations and worldly concerns overshadow our innate connection to the spiritual realm. Childhood, he suggests, is a sacred phase of life, during which this connection is the strongest. 

 

° The burden of adulthood.

° The spiritual decline caused by worldly distractions

 

Thou, whose exterior semblance doth belie

Thy Soul’s immensity;

Thou best Philosopher, who yet dost keep

Thy heritage, thou Eye among the blind,

That, deaf and silent, read’st the eternal deep,

Haunted forever by the eternal mind,—

Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!

On whom those truths do rest,

Which we are toiling all our lives to find,

In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave;

Thou, over who why Immortality

Broods loke the Day, a Master o’er a Slave,

A Presence which is not to be put by;

Thou little Child, yet glorious in the might

Of heaven-born freedom on thy being’s height,

Why with such earnest pains dost thou provoke

The years to bring the inevitable yoke,

Thus blindly with thy blessedness at strife?

Full soon thy Soul shall have her earthly freight,

And custom lie upon thee with a weight,

Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!                                                                    7

 

O Joy! That in our embers

Is something that doth live, 

That Nature yet remembers 

What was so fugitive!

The thought of our past years in me doth breed

Perpetual benediction: not indeed

For that which is most worthy to be blest;

Delight and liberty, the simple creed

Of Childhood, whether busy or at rest,

With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast: —

Not for these I raise

The song of thanks and praise

But for those obstinate questionings

Of sense and outward things,

Fallings from us, vanishings;

Blank misgivings of a Creature

Moving about in worlds not realized,

High instincts before which our mortal Nature

Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised:

But for those first affections,

Those shadowy recollections,

Which, be they what they may

Are yet the fountain-light of all our day,

Are yet a master-light of all our seeing;

Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make

Our noisy years seem moments in the being

Of the eternal Silence: truths that wake,

To perish never;

Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour,

Nor Man nor Boy,

Nor all that is at enmity with joy,

Can utterly abolish or destroy!

Hence is a season of calm weather

Though inland far we be,

Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea

Which brought us hither, 

Can in a moment travel thither,

And see the Children sport upon the shore,

And heart the mighty waters rolling evermore.                                                         8

 

Then sing, ye Birds, sing, sing a joyous song!

And let the young Lambs bound

As to the tabor’s sound!

We in thought will join your throng,

Ye that pipe and ye that play,

Ye that through your hearts to-day

Feel the gladness of the May!

What though the radiance which was once so bright

Be now for ever taken from my sight,

Though nothing can bring back the hour

Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;

We will grieve not, rather find

Strength in what remains behind;

In the primal sympathy

Which having been must ever be;

In the soothing thoughts that spring

Out of human suffering;

In the faith that looks through death,

In years that bring the philosophic mind.

And O, ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves,

Forebode not any severing of our loves!

Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might;

I only have relinquished one delight

To live beneath your more habitual sway.

I love the Brooks which down their channels fret,

Even more than when I tripped lightly as they;

The innocent brightness of a new-born Day

Is lovely yet;

The clouds that gather round the setting sun

Do take a sober colouring from an eye

That hath kept watch o’ver man’s mortality;

Another race hath been, and other palms are won.

Thanks so the human heart by which we live, 

Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,

To me the meanest flower that blows can give

Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

 

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