My Heart Leaps Up

“My Heart Leaps Up” occupies an interesting place in the chronology of Wordsworth’s poetry and the evolution of his vision and thought in connection with nature. Wordsworth was acutely aware that his poetry rested on the special relationship he had with nature, which nourished him personally from childhood and was the source of his creativity. In his late 20s, however, Wordsworth's relationship to nature changed. He wrote of this in one of his most famous poems, “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” which appeared in Lyrical Ballads in 1798. In this poem, he recalls that when he visited the River Wye five years earlier, nature to him was “all in all.—I cannot paint what then I was. / The sounding cataract haunted me like a passion” (Wordsworth, William. “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour, July 13, 1798.” Poets.org, 1798. Lines 77-79), and rock, mountain, and wood “were then to me / An appetite, a feeling and a love” (“Lines Composed,” Lines 81-82). Things are different now, though. All those “aching joys” (“Lines Composed,” Line 86) and “dizzy raptures” (“Lines Composed,” Line 87) have vanished, replaced by a more sober and thoughtful feeling—one of awe. Wordsworth senses in nature

A presence that disturbs me with the joy

Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean, and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things (“Lines Composed,” Lines 96-104).

He now regards nature as “the nurse, / The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul / Of all my moral being” (“Lines Composed,” Lines 112-13). Thus, although he has lost his earlier instinctive, passionate, and all-enveloping involvement with nature, nature is now his moral teacher—he is mature enough to experience it as the “sublime” (“Lines Composed,” Line 97), or an overwhelming power that brings with it ego destruction and enlightenment.

However, a few years later, in the early spring of 1802, Wordsworth revisited the issue of his relationship with nature. He was worried that he could no longer rely on his ability to experience nature as a source of wonder that fed his poetry. Two short poems that he wrote in March, "To the Cuckoo" and “My Heart Leaps Up,” do not fully assuage his anxiety.

In “To the Cuckoo,” Wordsworth affirms that he does still possess the imaginative vision in connection with nature. The first two lines convey the same kind of joy that he expresses in the first two lines of “My Heart Leaps Up”: “O blithe New-comer! I have heard, / I hear thee and rejoice” (Wordsworth, William. “To the Cuckoo.” Poetry Foundation, 1807. Lines 1-2). In childhood, when he heard a cuckoo and went searching for it, he never managed to find it—and it remains an elusive, enchanting enigma: “Even yet thou art to me / No bird, but an invisible thing, / A voice, a mystery” (“To the Cuckoo,” Lines 14-16). The final stanza affirms that he still possesses a vision of nature as a place where imaginative power can thrive:

O blessèd Bird! the earth we pace

Again appears to be

An unsubstantial, faery place;

That is fit home for Thee! (“To the Cuckoo,” Lines 29-32).

In “My Heart Leaps Up,” which he wrote the next day, according to Wordsworth's sister Dorothy, he affirms the continuing presence of his childhood joy in the rainbow, although the line “Or let me die!” (Line 6) strikes a note of concern about the possibility of losing that joy, stimulated by nature, which produces poetic vision and creativity. Without it, there would be no point in living. The speaker fears that something vital to his existence may disappear—and this death wish precludes the possibility of an intolerable fate. This reading becomes all the more persuasive when one realizes that the next poem Wordsworth began was “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” in which he deals head-on with a devastating loss regarding the way he perceives nature. He used to see nature “[a]ppareled in celestial light” (Wordsworth, William. “Ode: Intimations of Immortality From Recollections of Early Childhood.” Poetry Foundation, 1807. Line 4), but that has vanished now: “The things which I have seen I now can see no more” (“Ode,” Line 9). He adds in the second stanza, “[T]here hath passed away a glory from the earth” (“Ode,” Line 18). He still responds to the beauty and joy of nature, but something profound has changed, which he explains in Stanza 4:

—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? (“Ode,” Lines 51-57).

Having completed these four stanzas of the ode in the spring, Wordsworth put the poem aside for two years. He completed the poem in 1804, and it was published in 1807. In the intervening years, Wordsworth clarified his thoughts on the questions the first four stanzas raise. Although he can never recover the “radiance which was once so bright” (“Ode,” Line 75) and “nothing can bring back the hour / Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower” (“Ode,” Lines 77-78), he finds consolation in the immortal, silent, eternal level of life, the compassion of the human heart that enables people to endure suffering, and the fact that he still loves nature with a passion and it moves him to deep thoughts: “To me the meanest flower that blows can give / Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears” (“Ode,” Lines 202-03).

In 1815, Wordsworth used the last three lines of “My Heart Leaps Up” as an epigraph for “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” because they express the essence of what the ode tries to convey: The solace he found in nature, in spite of what he lost, is the “natural piety” (Line 9) of the earlier poem.