Ode: Intimations of Immortality 

William Wordsworth was a creative and controversial

poet. A major figure in the English Romantic
movement, he was known as the optimistic author of
numerous lyrical poems, which were written in a
simple language dedicated to a daffodil, a daisy, or a
butterfly, symbols of the splendor of all nature (living
and nonliving).
The famous English poet and critic Matthew Arnold
thought Wordsworth’s poetry had “healing powers,”
educating people to feel again.
Wordsworth’s theory of poetry was based on
passion and emotions. He believed that even the
thoughts rest in feelings.
Ode treats the preexistence of human life, using the
poet’s personal life experience combined with a
Platonic concept. Wordsworth first mentioned the
lasting importance of childhood memories of nature
upon the adult mind in “Lines Composed a Few
Miles Above Tintern Abbey” (1798). In addition to
Plato’s famous theory regarding such memories,
another possible influence on the poet may have
been the book Silex Scintillans (1650, 1655) by the
Welsh-born religious poet Henry Vaughan.
The main concept of Wordsworth’s Ode is based on
the poet’s belief that the “Child is Father of the Man”
a sentiment taken from John Milton’s Paradise
Regained (1671) and used by Wordsworth in his
short poem “My Heart Leaps Up” (Complete Poetical
Works, 1802). In the Ode, he explains that birth is “a
sleep and a forgetting,” not the beginning of life.
Thus, he believes, children still carry a glorious
memory of the “imperial” heaven as their home with
God. Innocent babies and children see the beauty of
the terrestrial world not only with their physical eyes
but also and even more through their hearts and
souls, which carry a preexisting sense of the spiritual
presence. With an elegiac and definitely a nostalgic
timbre, the Ode starts with the poet’s own memory of
that blissful place (or state of spirit and mind).
Because of their still recent and fresh memory of the
celestial glory, Wordsworth claims, children live in a
dream-like world of pure joy and fascination.
Gradually, while growing, they start to forget. The
bliss fades into the light of ordinary day. Their
attention becomes self-absorbed, less dedicated to
solitary thinking and curious questioning. They
become physically and mentally involved in various
activities, in attending school, and in the distractions
of crowds. There are prevalent, pressuring,
mundane routines to be learned daily. According to
the poet’s vision of that stage of life, each individual
gradually becomes a “prisoner” and “imitator” of
other people and of conventional ways of life. To fill
the nagging feeling of innate loneliness, a youth
craves to blend in, to be accepted into something
larger, to belong. After losing the celestial freedom
and the previously owned grandeur of peace and
harmony, the individual is absorbed in a constant
search for the self and the lost paradise.
The poet laments this loss, but he believes that it is
not complete. His acclaimed positivity of outlook is
expressed in numerous poems, especially lyrical
poetry, and always with a philosophical, sometimes
didactic, touch. He combines the ancient, pre-
Christian Plato’s view with his own Christian-based
theory, adding a personal twist. Wordsworth
believes there is wisdom in maturity and a different,
truth-seeking joy in the acceptance of the body’s
imperfections, weaknesses, and ultimate mortality.
After physical death, the soul goes back where it
came from. Through the soul, humans live on. That
is what Wordsworth sees as immortality.
In Wordsworth’s view, the loss of the splendid
memories of the child is compensated for in an
adult. He is grateful that, through suffering and pain,
his awareness of mortality brings “piety,” “humanity,”
greater understanding, empathy, and closeness to
others. As a part of nature, human life repeats itself,
as do all other forms of life, including plants and
animals. Love of nature in all its varieties...
The ode can be divided into three sections for
analytical convenience: in the first four stanzas, the
poet mediates on the loss of the divine original
vision that the child (Wordsworth) was born with; the
second section from 5th to 8th stanza is an attempt
to explain the nature and causes of the loss; the
third section from 9th to 11th deals with the
compensating gain of another type of vision, namely
the philosophical vision by the grown-up man or
poet. The first stanza begins with a nostalgic
meditation on the loss.
But the poet, while lamenting the loss, describes the
childhood world, creating a beautiful image of
childhood life. He used to perceive everything as if
they all had “the glory and freshness of a dream”.
But now, the poet says he cannot see anything
covered in that heavenly light, and there is nothing
glorious and dreamlike about the world that the
grown-up poet lives in. The rainbow does come and
go, and the rose does blossom in as lovely. He
changes the subject, with a change in tone, in the
next stanza. He hears all those sounds of the birds
and the lamb. But grief comes to his mind when he
hears them. However, there is a thing of
reassurance in this stanza: ‘a timely utterance’ of the
feeling whether of grief or joy gives him some
consolation, to make the poet somewhat strong to
go on with life. When he is reflecting on the nature
with a newly gained mature understanding, he
almost feels that the ‘earth is gay’ once again. Each
of the first three stanzas has a mixture of joy and
grief, but after having found a compensation for that
loss, the poet is now able to celebrate the spirit of
May. He will not fail to appreciate whatever he can
perceive of the nature, which has not changed. The
poet sees a tree and a field; the Garden of Eden and
the tree of knowledge, which speak of something
that is gone. The poet makes his best attempts at
regaining the same powers of perceptions in these
first four stanzas, but he fails to do so. He can no
longer command the beauty-making power form
within to go forth from him and clothe every common
sight in celestial light. The first four stanzas are full
of agonized questions and frantic exclamations in
the desperate attempt to regain the original powers
of intuitive perceptions of the spiritual aspect of the
nature. Stanza four is the climax of this dramatic
tension in the mind of the poet. In short, the feeling
of irrecoverable loss predominates this section,
despite the outbursts of momentary joy; the recovery
of another mode of experience is yet to be made.
This second section is a brief account of growth of
man and the loss of the vision; it is based on the
Platonic philosophy of pre-existence and the realm
of the pure idea. “Our birth is but a sleep and a
forgetting”, because the soul has its source outside
our individual being, and it becomes less and less
accessible to the child as he grows up. We come in
a kind of trailing clouds of glory from God, who is our
home: this idea is, however, a rather Christianized
version of the Platonic idea of soul. The poet says
that “heaven lies around us in our infancy!” But the
shadows of the “prison-house”, or reason that limits
feelings and experience, begin to close upon the
‘growing boy’. Wordsworth says that the earth
(nature) is filled with some blissful pleasures, but it is
the grown up man who is incapable of experiencing
and appreciating it fully. The nature, in the sense of
‘the formative influence’ of the natural process of life,
also makes man forget that ‘imperial palace’ from
where he came. The next stanza justifies with the
illustration of the child that children have much of the
spiritual vision so that they experience life and
nature so fully an intuitively. The child is seen in his
own world, living in imagination and in harmony with
all the things of the nature; he is vexed by the kisses
of his mother. Indeed, the child’s world of
imagination and intuitive relation with everything is
enviable. In stanza 8, the poet addresses to the child
himself and appreciates its powers and greatness, in
an almost envious way. He is only trying to ask him
a question: why is the child always trying to grow
up? It is indeed true that the child struggles always
to grow up, acting as he does, like adults, imitating
whatever frets and furies of life, not understanding
the burden of it all. The poet laments: for soon the
child’s soul will have the unbearable burden and the
heavy frost (coldness) of custom or habitualized
behavior will fall on him. And it will overpower his
capacity for living through the original vision, and
seeing and enjoying the celestial life on all the
common sights around him.
The very first line of the 11th stanza is an
exclamation: “O joy! That in our embers…”. The poet
is able to exclaim with a sudden realization that in
our embers there is something that does live, that
nature which yet remembers what was so fugitive.
Even in adulthood we can if we want and try to,
retain or still cultivate some vision. The adults are
also conscious of the fall from the bliss of childhood;
they are always anxious about the vanishing of it
and have misgivings about the invisible things,
rather than feel being protected by them.
Wordsworth adds other reasons about why he writes
these poems: besides writing about the loss of
childhood, he also writes to remember those
experiences and to revive them. The shadowy
recollections of childhood life are the fountain light of
all our life; though the fountain light or vision is now
not the primary mode of perception, the poet affirms
that it is the inner light of ‘all our seeing’. It is that
light, however much is retained, that sustains us,
and it is that light that makes our ‘noisy year’ (adult
life) seems like moments in the being of eternal
Silence. That light reveals the eternal truths of life,
which noting in adult life can destroy. The truth
intimated by the celestial spirit of the nature in our
childhood is so persistent that neither society,
adulthood, custom and the culture of reason not
grief can abolish or destroy. Thus, in the season of
calm weather in old age or moods of tranquility,
even if we are far inland away from the sea of spirit,
our souls can see that immortal sea, from which we
came into this world. At such age or mood, we can
still travel into the sea of the original spirit; there we
can see the children play on the shore and hear the
mighty waters moving in waves forever. The end of
his stanza is all symbolic; it is perhaps thematically
the most condensed part of the poem. The poet is
saying that he writes of two kinds of purposes: one
is to praise the child, as he has done in the previous
stanza, and the other is to muse about the loss of
the vision and thereby to glorify the remaining lights
of the spirits which do still allow us to revive some
powers to see and hear the children enjoying the
spiritual world near the sea