Odes Of Immortality

1 Gloria Lloyd February 22, 2005 English 431 Prof. Gillen Wood Ode: Intimations of Immortality In William Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” the speaker finds himself grieved at the sight of nature, not in awe as he usually would be. Rather than experiencing full unity with nature, the speaker finds himself at odds with nature’s beauty, believing that he cannot see it in the same way he did as a child, and therefore can never be happy with it until he regains that elusive divine unity that only a child can possess. While everyone around him rejoices on a beautiful May day, the speaker theorizes that the only way for him to overcome the acute loss he feels, and to experience happiness in nature again, is to develop his own “philosophic mind,” a way of looking at the world in a mature way (Wordsworth 86). Through the philosophic mind, the speaker can overcome his fears and regain unity with nature. In the opening stanza, the speaker is in crisis—he longs for an earlier time, when all his natural surroundings seemed divine to him, “appareled in celestial light” (2). The speaker’s childhood and the time ensuing are likened to the original Fall of Man, when Adam and Eve were expelled from the garden. Despite his desire to see and experience life and nature as he did earlier, in childhood, the speaker says, “The things which I have seen I now can see no more” (9). As he implies in the second stanza, the speaker can indeed still physically see the art of nature that he so appreciated in his youth—but it does not carry the same sacred meaning as before. For instance, the rainbow “comes and goes” rather than staying in his memory to be enjoyed (10). But despite the continued existence of these essences of nature—the moon, the oceans, the flowers—the speaker

2 claims that “there hath past away a glory from the earth” (18). The choice of the word “past” over the usual verb “passed” implies that what the speaker yearns for is not something which has merely passed by, and can be found again, but something that is inextricably linked to childhood, a time of divine unity which is in the past and can never be regained. As the birds sing their song and the “young lambs bound” as he once did in his own youth, the speaker finds himself suffused with grief, but yet alone in his feeling—he is surrounded by others in their own gaiety and happiness (20). However, he is restored to joy through the sounds of nature— through the echoes of the mountains and the rustling of the winds. As he cries, “Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy Shepherd-boy!”, he makes clear that despite his personal grief, he can still recognize the beauty of the season, and encourage others to enjoy the beauty that he cannot (35). He even tells the animals themselves that he feels their joy, and the joy of the children surrounding them all. But, looking at one of the many trees surrounding the revelers, the speaker says that the tree and the field “speak of something that is gone… Whither is fled the visionary gleam?/ Where is it now, the glory and the dream?” (53, 56-7). Even when his mind decides to be happy with his surroundings, his heart just cannot help but feel the constant pain of something missing from them. What exactly is missing? It is a closeness to the Creator, and nature itself, that everyone begins to lose as soon as they are born—Wordsworth writes, “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting” (58). This directly contrasts to how most would portray life and birth—birth is usually seen as the beginning of all opportunities, and all things. Death is seen as the sleep that keeps us from life. However, Wordsworth positions birth as a sort

3 of death, and death as life for the eternal soul. The birth of a human being is also the birth of nature, and the growing and aging of that human being becomes a loss of nature, which is cyclic and fresh in its embodiment of new, not old, life. As humans are born, “trailing clouds of glory,” they are separated from the only divine they could ever know, “God, who is our home” (64-5). Heaven is not just a place to go after one dies—“Heaven,” Wordsworth writes, “lies about us in our infancy!” (66) Children, being closer to the “forgetting” of birth, can still remember what the arms of God felt like. Their perspective on Earth is therefore sacred—as close to the divine as anyone can be on Earth. But as the child grows to an adult, she or he will lose this divine perspective, as they fall into the earthly pleasures of life, as the “shades of the prison-house begin to close” and the divine connection to nature dissipates (67). Instead of the true pleasures of divinity, holiness and communion with God, a young boy is left to dream of a “fragment from his dream of human life” (91). Human life consists only of “some little plan or chart,” the tiny intricacies of everyday life that have no real benefit for our own minds or the human race as a whole. As he gazes on a real young boy, the speaker transforms the imaginary saga of the boy’s sad life into a tale of every human life, which is no more advanced than a six-year-old’s dreams, with their “endless imitation” (107). The speaker tells the boy that he is a revelation, an “Eye among the blind” and a prophet who is able to grasp immortality so much easier than adults, who are “deep almost as life!” with their “earthly freight” (128, 126). The little boy does not realize that one day he will look back and regret not being able to see nature with a child’s eyes, because he is too focused on growing to see life with an adult’s eyes. The child is not aware of their superior connection to the divine,

4 and they are also not aware that they are growing further away from it every passing day. Only the adult mind, looking back in retrospective, can know that the childhood mind is gone and never shall return. Nature herself contributes to humans’ downfall—but with only the best of intentions: “The homely Nurse doth all she can/ To make her Fosterchild, her Inmate Man,/ Forget the glories he hath known/ And that imperial palace from whence he came.” The nature we find on Earth cannot compare to the delights of nature as God wanted us to see it, and as God Himself sees it, along with children. Finally, the speaker realizes in the ninth stanza that the thoughts and memories of his childhood that he cherishes so much can provide him with a means to access that world of innocence and learning that he left behind years ago. Rather than moping in his grief as before, the speaker exhorts the birds outside to sing joyously, because he has “primal sympathy”—the ability to find the remnants of his childhood, which is still as much a part of him as it ever was, embedded deep inside the layers of ensuing adulthood (181). These memories of what his experiences as a child were can allow him to overcome the boundaries separating him from the experience of the divine through the “philosophic mind,” a more mature level of consciousness (186). The idea of the “philosophic mind” is key to the ability to regain that childishness —the child thinks only of living forever, with no concept of death or transience. However, the adult is familiar with mortality—the fact that everyone will eventually die. But, because the only way for us to experience the divine is by returning to Heaven, the adult could be just as close to experiencing it again as children are. They are not as far removed from this experience as it seems to the speaker at first, after all. As nature’s gifts, flowers, plants and animals, are all also transient and apart from God, the adult

5 mind can come to appreciate nature all the more, for its similarity to the adult’s own position. The adult is susceptible to “thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears,” because the adult can experience nature in a unique and complex way, more openly and wholeheartedly than the innocent child can (203). The speaker again describes nature’s beauty—but this time, with a more mature perspective, he describes nature in a more human and down-to-earth way, rather than exclaiming about the “glorious birth” of the Sun as he did earlier in the poem (16). Instead, he uses familiar, human imagery-- the brook “frets” in its path just as the sixyear-old’s mother “fretted” him with kisses in an earlier stanza (192, 88); they “trip lightly” as the speaker did as a child, and the Day is compared to a newborn child (193). In his “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” William Wordsworth writes about the divine communion with nature that children can experience, which adults can only experience secondhand, through their own prejudices and deep within the shadow of their formerly innocent and pure selves, who see the world for what it truly is. As the child grows, the ideas of the adult take precedence over the thoughts and feelings of the child—and the idea of what is forgotten between the divine and the earthly, the child and the adult, sends the speaker of the poem into a deep depression, which only thoughts of the “philosophic mind” of nature can solve.