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

Poems (1815). The reprinted version also contained an epigraph that, according to Henry Crabb Notes
Robinson, was added at Crabb’s suggestion. The epigraph was from “My Heart Leaps Up”. In 1820,
Wordsworth issued The Miscellaneous Poems of William Wordsworth that collected the poems he wished
to be preserved with an emphasis on ordering the poems, revising the text, and including prose that
would provide the theory behind the text. The ode was the final poem of the fourth and final book,
and it had its own title-page, suggesting that it was intended as the poem that would serve to represent
the completion of his poetic abilities. The 1820 version also had some revisions, including the removal
of lines 140 and 141.
11.1 Poem-Ode On Intimations of Immortality

The ode contains 11 stanzas split into three movements. The first movement is four stanzas long and
discusses the narrator’s inability to see the divine glory of nature, the problem of the poem. The
second movement is four stanzas long and has a negative response to the problem. The third movement
is three stanzas long and contains a positive response to the problem. The ode begins by contrasting
the narrator’s view of the world as a child and as a man, with what was once a life interconnected to
the divine fading away.
There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;—
Turn wheresoe’er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more. (lines 1-9)
In the second and third stanzas, the narrator continues by describing his surroundings and various
aspects of nature that he is no longer able to feel. He feels as if he is separated from the rest of nature
until he experiences a moment that brings about feelings of joy that are able to overcome his despair:
To me alone there came a thought of grief:
A timely utterance gave that thought relief,
And I again am strong:
The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep;
No more shall grief of mine the season wrong; (lines 22-26)
The joy in stanza III slowly fades again in stanza IV as the narrator feels like there is “something that
is gone”. As the stanza ends, the narrator asks two different questions to end the first movement of
the poem. Though they appear to be similar, one asks where the visions are now (“Where is it now”)
while the other doesn’t (“Whither is fled”), and they leave open the possibility that the visions could
return:
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? (lines 52-57)
1804 holograph copy of Stanza III-V by Mary Wordsworth

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