Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood

William Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” was first published in his 1807 collection Poems, in Two Volumes, where it is titled simply “Ode” and has the Latin words Paulo maiora canamus (“Let us sing of higher things”) as an epigraph. In 1815, Wordsworth made slight revisions and gave the poem a subtitle and a new epigraph. He wrote the first four stanzas in 1802 and completed the other seven in 1804. The latter part of the poem expounds the personal sentiments and musings of the former part into a more general exploration of changes that transpire as one moves from childhood into adulthood. Specifically, the poem explores the growth of a more worldly and pragmatic outlook which causes the loss of the ability to perceive the holiness of nature and life.

The purpose of an ode as a poetic genre is to celebrate and praise a person, an event, an idea, or an abstract entity. Wordsworth’s “Ode” celebrates the idea that, even in adulthood, one can preserve a trace of the child’s blissful experience of life, which serves as the core of the mature mindset of tranquility and fortitude.