Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood

Wordsworth chose the last three lines from another poem (“My Heart Leaps Up”) as the epigraph to his “Ode,” which serves as an elaboration of the earlier poem. “Ode” clarifies the meaning of the famous line “The child is father of the man,” and the phrase “natural piety,” which appear in its epigraph. The title spells out the poem’s purpose: It describes the speaker’s sense that memories from early childhood provide intimations (hints) of immortality, or something beyond earthly life. The poem begins with the speaker’s recollection of the natural sights—such as “meadow, grove, and stream” (Line 1)—that he enjoyed “of yore” (Line 6). Back then, there was more to these sights than simple natural beauty. In his eyes, they were endowed with “celestial light” (Line 4); that is, he felt that there was something heavenly about them and they gave him an otherworldly sensation. Now, as an adult, he tries hard to recover that feeling, but is unsuccessful: “The things which I have seen I now can see no more” (Line 9).

The second stanza explains that the speaker is still able to perceive the beauty of nature, such as in the rainbow or the rose (Lines 10-11). He is delighted by the moon “when the heavens are bare” (Line 13), which is to say on a cloudless night, and by “[w]aters on a starry night” (Line 14): when a river or a lake reflects the light of the stars. The rising sun is a daily “glorious birth” (Line 16). Even though he is aware of all of this, the speaker repeats at the end of this stanza the sentiment which concluded the first stanza: For him, there has been a loss of “a glory from the earth” (Line 18).

The third stanza reveals that the speaker is burdened by sorrow, even when he is surrounded by joy. He hears the “joyous song” of birds (Line 19) and watches lambs jump around as if they were dancing to “the tabor’s sound” (Line 21). The tabor is a small drum typically used to accompany the playing of a simple pipe. Therefore, the speaker finds himself amid a happy rural scene, yet “a thought of grief” (Line 22) troubles his mind. Fortunately, a “timely utterance” (Line 23) gives him relief and strength. This “utterance” may refer to the poem “My Heart Leaps Up,” since that text describes a man delighted by a rainbow in the same way he was as a child; however, it could also be some other poem or statement Wordsworth made or heard. It makes the speaker realize that it is wrong to spoil the joyous spring with his grief (Line 26) and enables him to enjoy again the sound of the cataracts (waterfalls) and the echoes of the winds emerging from “the fields of sleep” (Line 28). This last phrase may simply mean that he was temporarily oblivious to these sounds (he was not awake to them) or that the winds were asleep in the fields before they started blowing. In Wordsworth’s poems, and in Romantic poetry more broadly, winds often represent spiritual awakening; in this case, the speaker reawakens to nature’s glory despite his personal sorrow. Everything around him (Lines 29-30) celebrates spring, “the heart of May” (Line 32)—especially animals, “every Beast” (Line 33), and children, represented here by a happily shouting “Shepherd-boy” (Line 35). The speaker calls him “Child of Joy” (Line 34), but that phrase could refer to all children, whose guileless joy in life the poem celebrates. Describing children as akin to animals in their lack of inhibiting self-consciousness is another prominent Romantic trope.

The “blessed creatures” (Line 36) the speaker addresses at the beginning of the fourth stanza probably include both children and animals. The speaker has heard their call to each other, the many sounds with which they celebrate nature and life, and has realized that their celebration has a spiritual, even divine, quality: “The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee” (Line 38). He metaphorically identifies with shepherd boys when he says that his “head hath its coronal” (Line 40). The coronal is a circlet of wildflowers shepherd boys would put on their hats in May to celebrate spring. Through this identification, the speaker feels the bliss of the “blessed creatures” (Line 36), and through them, he reconnects with a sense of heavenly glory he lost as an adult. He admits it would be evil if he “were sullen” (Line 42) on such a lovely May morning when “Earth herself is adorning” (Line 43) and children are gathering “[f]resh flowers; while the sun shines warm, / And the Babe leaps up on his Mother’s arm” (Lines 48-49). The use of the same phrase as in “My Heart Leaps Up” suggests that the speaker is like an infant again. When he exclaims “I hear, I hear” (Line 50), he refers to the sounds of a rural spring, but they symbolize a spiritual call to perceive and embrace nature’s holiness.

However, the feeling does not last. Even as this holy joy permeates “a thousand valleys far and wide” (Line 47), a specific tree and “a single field” (Line 52) remind the speaker of his individual sorrow and failure. Once again, the “visionary gleam” (Line 56) has fled and “the glory and the dream” (Line 57) have been lost. The original four stanzas end on this pessimistic note, but it seems that Wordsworth could not leave it there, so he returned to the poem two years later.

The fifth stanza begins with an assertion that caused some controversy when the poem was first published (see Religious Context for details). The speaker states that human birth initiates the process of forgetting that the soul, “our life’s Star” (Line 59), comes from “God, who is our home” (Line 65). The soul “rises” (Line 59) in the newly born body after it had “its setting” elsewhere (Line 60)—in a heavenly realm. However, it does not join the human body in “entire forgetfulness” (Line 62) of that realm. Thus, humans are born “not in utter nakedness” (Line 63), but covered in “clouds of glory” (Line 66) that originate in God; hence, “Heaven lies about us in our infancy!” (Line 66). Unfortunately, the process of growing up brings about “[s]hades of the prison-house” (Line 67) because it takes one out of innocent freedom and into the social world of convention and practical concerns. A boy still “beholds the light […] in his joy” (Lines 69-70): The child’s joy has a holy quality; a youth is still “Nature’s Priest” (Line 72), that is, able to see “the vision splendid” (Line 73) of nature’s holiness. However, an adult man loses that ability because of his immersion in “common day” (Line 76) ambitions and worries of daily life. In the traditional patriarchal manner, Wordsworth uses masculine words to represent all humankind.

The poem continues with an assurance that “Earth” offers “pleasures of her own” (Line 77) and “yearnings […] in her own natural kind” (Line 78), which implies desires appropriate for mortal human life. Moreover, the speaker employs personification to describe Earth as having “a Mother’s mind” (Line 79), and as being a “homely Nurse” (Line 80); here, Wordsworth uses “homely” in the old British sense of simple and friendly (for a person) or cozy and comfortable (for a place). Nevertheless, although it lovingly prepares the man for ordinary life—a “no unworthy aim” (Line 80)—Earth also makes “her Foster-child, her Inmate Man, / Forget the glories” (Lines 82-83) of heaven: “that imperial palace” (Line 84) from which his soul came. Building on the previous description of earthly life as a prison-house (Line 67), the speaker sees the adult man as an “inmate” whose increasing adaptation to his pretty jail cell—his life on Earth—causes him to forget that something more magnificent lies outside its boundaries.

In the seventh stanza, the speaker observes “the Child, among its new-born blisses” of earthly life (Line 85). His parents love him: His mother’s kisses are so incessant that they “fret” (Line 88) or annoy the child; his father’s watchful eyes ensure he is safe (Line 89). He is at an age (six) when by “work of his own hand” (Line 87) he makes “some little plan or chart” (Line 90). In other words, the child is at play, perhaps drawing, but that play expresses “his dream of human life” (Line 91). Through such play, he processes what he observes: “A wedding or a festival, / A mourning or a funeral” (Lines 93-94), and learns about the meaning and value of various aspects of life. That is what he now cares and talks about, what has “his heart” (Line 95) and “frames his song” (Line 96). Later, he will “fit his tongue / to [learn] dialogues of business, love, or strife” (Lines 97-98) and, eventually, everything else “[l]ife brings with her in her equipage” (Line 105). Equipage is an old word for equipment or carriage, so the speaker’s point is that the child will gradually learn and learn to care about—all areas of life. It will do so through “endless imitation” (Line 107) of people around him, which is why the speaker calls him the “little Actor” (Line 102) studying parts with which to fill his “humorous stage” (Line 103). This view of life as imitation—the idea that humans learn to act and think like other people they see—is at least one reason why the speaker sees life as a “prison-house” (Line 67) of custom and convention.

The eighth stanza opens with an apostrophe: a direct, excited address to a particular person. The speaker addresses the child; he asserts the child’s tiny appearance does not do justice to the “immensity” (Line 109) of the child’s soul. The child is still in touch with its heavenly “heritage” (Line 111). The child’s connection with God is still strong, which allows the child to be the “[e]ye among the blind” (Line 111)—among the adults whose original connections with God has been severed. They seek to recover it: “[T]oiling all our lives to find, / in darkness lost, the darkness of the grave” (Lines 116-17). Their efforts are hampered by an awareness of their own mortality, symbolized by the grave, which anchors their minds in worldly concerns and clouds their vision of God. In contrast, the child’s “[i]mmortality” (Line 118), their closeness to God, is “not to be put by” (Line 120), or easily set aside. That is why the speaker calls the child “Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!” (Line 114). The speaker wonders why the child is so eager to grow up and replace that freedom with “the inevitable yoke” (Line 124) of adulthood. This is a rhetorical question since the speaker knows adulthood is inevitable. Soon enough, the child’s soul—like the speaker’s—will be burdened by “earthly freight, / And custom” (Lines 126-27).

Nevertheless, even though blissful childhood is “fugitive” (Line 132), or fleeting, its “embers” (Line 129) persist even in adulthood, and recollections of it inspire “[p]erpetual benediction” (Line 134), or blessing. In the ninth stanza, the speaker reaches the main subject of his ode: his “song of thanks and praise” (Line 140). Childhood “is most worthy to be blessed” (Line 135) for all the reasons earlier addressed in the poem, yet this is not an ode to childhood. Instead, as its title indicates, the poem praises an adult’s “Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.” The speaker locates these hints of immortality, in several aspects of adult life: in persistent questions about what might lie behind the physical world of “sense and outward things” (Line 142); in “misgivings” (Line 144) that worldly life is “not realised” (Line 145) or that it is unreal or incomplete; in “instincts” (Line 146) of some otherworldly reality that makes “our mortal Nature / […] tremble like a guilty thing” (Lines 146-147); in precious “shadowy recollections” (Line 149) of the time when humans were not burdened by the awareness of mortality. These recollections remain the source of light and of the power to see the “noisy years” (Line 154) of adulthood as “moments in the being / Of the eternal Silence” (Lines 154-55); in other words, these memories of childhood make it possible to see the busy adult life of practical concerns still connected, if imperfectly, with the heavenly order. Once these “truths” awaken, nothing can “utterly abolish or destroy” them, including “listlessness” (low spirits) and “mad endeavour” (worldly ambition) (Lines 155-160). The final metaphor in the stanza presents adult life as “inland far” (Line 162) from God, the “immortal sea” whence humans came (Line 163), but recollections of childhood can momentarily bring people back to its “mighty waters” (Lines 167).

The tenth stanza revisits the joyous rural scene described in the third stanza, but now the speaker has more confidence that his sorrow will not inhibit his ability to take part in spring’s celebration. At least “in thought” (Line 171), he will join the exhilaration of the birds singing, the lambs bouncing, and all those who “pipe” and “play” out of the “gladness” of their hearts (Lines 172-174). He knows that childhood—"the hour / Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower” (Lines 177-78)—is lost forever, but he will “grieve not” (Line 179). Instead, he will find “[s]trength in what remains behind” (Line 180): the “primal sympathy” (Line 181) of childhood, the “soothing thoughts” (Line 183) gained through experience, his faith, and “the philosophic mind” (Line 186) that accompanies old age. (For more on “primal sympathy” and “the philosophic mind,” see Themes.)

The final stanza expresses the speaker’s abiding love for nature. He apostrophizes specific natural sights—“O, ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves” (Line 187)—to say that in his “heart of hearts” he still feels their “might” (Line 189), although more sporadically; as an adult, he “relinquished” the childhood “delight” of being under nature’s “more habitual” influence (Lines 190-191). He loves the brooks now even more than when his step was as light as their flowing waters (Line 193). He enjoys the sunrise, the “brightness of a new-born Day,” and “the setting sun” (Lines 195-96), although the clouds sometimes cast shadow over his vision because he has “kept watch o’er man’s mortality” (Line 198). This awareness of mortality makes it impossible for him to return to childhood bliss, but the “race” of adulthood has won him “other palms” (Line 199), or different rewards from those of childhood days. What matters is that adulthood has not completely hardened his heart because the heart’s “tenderness, its joys, and fears” (Line 201) allow him to find in every flower some consolation and comfort: “Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears” (Line 203). His love for nature and his recollections of how glorious nature and life seemed to him as a child will provide “Intimations of Immortality” amid his everyday existence.