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

substance might have formed a part. In this ode the poet unlocks his heart and describes a crisis in his Notes
intellectual development. In his childhood he lived in ‘the glory and the freshness’ of the senses, in the
immediate report given by the senses of ‘principle of joy’ in the world. But with advancing years this
report comes to be fitful and dim. The things that the poet had seen he now can see no more. Wordsworth’s
loss of’ vision’ marks the decline in poetic power which begins with the ending of the ode.
Referring to Wordsworth’s loss of’ vision’, Bowra observes: “He lived not only with, but on nature,
and what he prized most in it was its capacity to open to him another world through vision. It is this
which he has lost, perhaps not entirely, but enough to cause him a deep anxiety. It is idle to ask too
closely what Wordsworth means by ‘the visionary gleam’ or ‘the glory and the dream’. If it were
simple, he would probably have expressed it in simple words, but because it is complex and unfamiliar,
he uses image and symbol.”
In the Immortality Ode Wordsworth laments the loss of’ vision’; but he makes also the compensating
discovery of new and soberer power, springing out of the harsher realities of “man’s inhumanity to man”:
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.
A Philosophical Poem
Like Tintern Abbey, the Immortality Ode is a great philosophical poem. The first four stanzas of the
poem are lyrical and emotional, offering no reasons or explanations; but in the fifth stanza of the poet
embarks upon philosophy. The middle part of the poem gives Wordsworth’s philosophy of childhood;
here more than anywhere else in his works, he tries to reduce his scattered impressions and convictions
into an orderly system.
“His philosophy has been compared to Plato’s, but it is in fact less of an abstract system than a
description of his own personal experience of life and the process of ageing. Briefly, his theory seems
to be something like this: the new born soul does not come from nowhere, out of nothingness, but
from some other ill-defined country—from afar’, ‘from an imperial palace’. (This is a fairly common
conviction, held by mystics of various religions.) The little child still has clear memories and visions
of this other, heavenly place, but as he grows older they begin to fade. Earth does her best to make
him forget this other place, and its glories, and the child himself tries (unwisely) to hurry on this
process of forgetfulness, longing to be grow up, playing at being a grown-up, imitating adults in his
games. Eventually he does grown up and forget, though he goes through a period when he still has
rare glimpses of memory and vision, though unable to keep in constant contact with his sense of
glory. When he is fully mature, even these glimpses are lost and ‘fade into the light of common day’.
On one level, this is a plain description of Wordsworth’s own progress from childhood through
youth to a somewhat bleak and disillusioned middle age; it is the same story that The Prelude tells. It
is only Wordsworth’s attempts to make his own experiences into a general philosophy, applicable to
all men, and true of the whole human condition, that make the Ode confusing; Wordsworth was no
philosopher, though he felt he ought to be one. His mind never dealt as early in abstract ideas as it
did with some massive single physical symbol like the leech gatherer.
A Difficult Poem
Like Tintern Abbey, the Immortality Ode is a difficult poem. Many readers have felt the poem to be
confused, or not completely unified.
“There are, if we look closely, two quite different ‘intimations of immortality’. Whereas one implies
the mortality of nature:
questionings
Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings;
Blank misgivings of a Creature
Moving about in world not realiz’d.......

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