Page 176 - DENG201_ENGLISH_II

English - II Gowher Ahmad Naik, Lovely Professional University

Notes Unit 11: Poetry: William Wordsworth’s Ode
on Intimations of Immortality

CONTENTS
Objectives
Introduction
11.1 Poem-Ode On Intimations of Immortality
11.2 Critical Appreciation
11.3 Summary
11.4 Key-Words
11.5 Review Questions
11.6 Further Readings

Objectives

After reading this unit students will be able to:
• Know about William Wordsworth
• Understand Ode on Intimations of Immortality composed by William Wordsworth

Introduction

In 1802, Wordsworth wrote many poems that dealt with his youth. These poems were partly inspired
by his conversations with his sister, Dorothy, whom he was living with in the Lake District at the
time. The poems, beginning with The Butterfly and ending with To the Cuckoo, were all based on
Wordsworth’s recalling both the sensory and emotional experience of his childhood. from To the
Cuckoo, he moved onto The Rainbow, both written on 26 March 1802, and then on to Ode: Intimation of
Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood. As he moved from poem to poem, he began to question
why, as a child, he once was able to see an immortal presence within nature but as an adult that was
fading away except in the few moments he was able to meditate on experiences found in poems like
To the Cuckoo. While sitting at breakfast on 27 March, he began to compose the ode. He was able to
write four stanzas that put forth the question about the faded image and ended, “Where is it now, the
glory and the dream?” The poem would remain in its smaller, four-stanza version until 1804.
The short version of the ode was possibly finished in one day because Wordsworth left the next day to
spend time with Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Keswick. Close to the time Wordsworth and Coleridge
climbed the Skiddaw mountain, 3 April 1802, Wordsworth recited the four stanzas of the ode that were
completed. The poem impressed Coleridge, and, while with Wordsworth, he was able to provide his
response to the ode’s question within an early draft of his poem, Dejection: an Ode. In early 1804, Wordsworth
was able to return his attention to working on the ode. It was a busy beginning of the year with Wordsworth
having to help Dorothy recover from an illness in addition to writing his poems. The exact time of
composition is unknown, but it probably followed his work on The Prelude, which consumed much of
February and was finished on 17 March. Many of the lines of the ode are similar to the lines of The Prelude
Book V, and he used the rest of the ode to try to answer the question at the end of the fourth stanza.
The poem was first printed in full for Wordsworth’s 1807 collection of poems, Poems, in Two Volumes,
under the title Ode. It was the last poem of the second volume of the work, and it had its own title
page separating it from the rest of the poems, including the previous poem Peele Castle. Wordsworth
added an epigraph just before publication, “paulo majora canamus”. The Latin phrase is from Virgil’s
Ecologue 4, meaning “let us sing a somewhat loftier song”. The poem was reprinted under its full title
Ode: Intimation of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood for Wordsworth’s collection

170 LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY