Page 179 - DENG201_ENGLISH_II

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

And see the Children sport upon the shore, Notes
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore. (lines 164-170)
The children on the shore represents the adult narrator’s recollection of childhood, and the recollection
allows for an intimation of returning to that mental state. In stanza XI, the imagination allows one to
know that there are limits to the world, but it also allows for a return to a state of sympathy with the
world lacking any questions or concerns:
The Clouds that gather round the setting sun
Do take a sober colouring from an eye
That hath kept watch o’er man’s mortality;
Another race hath been, and other palms are won. (lines 199-202) The poem concludes with an
affirmation that, though changed by time, the narrator is able to be the same person he once was:
Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears. (lines 203-206)

11.2 Critical Appreciation

Introduction
The Immorality Ode is one of the most famous poems in English literature. In the whole series of
Wordsworth’s poems it is the greatest and that to which all others lead up. Wordsworth reached one
of the highest peaks of the English poetry of the Romantic period with this ode. Indeed, it is the high
water-mark of poetry in the nineteenth century.
Title
Originally the poem did not bear any title, being simply designated as Ode. Nothing the uncertainty
of some critics Henry Crabb Robinson suggested to Wordsworth that there should be a descriptive
title for the work ‘to guide the reader to a perception of its drift’. The poet then deliberately chose the
title, Ode: ‘Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, to emphasize what he conceived
of the essential meaning.
“An understanding of the poem’s imaginative source and meaning is not helped by the sub-title. It
can be referred to simply as the Ode without risk of confusion with other odes which have their own
fuller titles.
Sources in the Poet Personal Life

Referring to the sources of the ode in his personal life, Wordsworth observes:
“This was composed during my residence at Town-End, Grasmere. Two years at least passed between
the writing of the first four stanzas and the remaining part. To the attentive and competent reader the
whole sufficiently explains itself; but there may be no harm in adverting here to particular feelings or
experiences of my own mind on which the structure of the poem partly rests. Nothing was more
difficult for me in childhood than to admit the notion of death as a state applicable to my own being.
I have said elsewhere:
‘A simple child
That lightly draws its breath,
And feels its life in every limb,
What should it know of death !’
But it was not so much from the source of animal vivacity that my difficulty came, as from a sense of
the indomitableness of the spirit within me.

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