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English - II

Notes the other implies its immortality:
the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be.
In stanza IX especially, when Wordsworth says that his thanks-givings are less for the visionary
gleam than for the visionary dreariness, and goes on to describe the latter as:
those first affections,
Those shadow recollections,
Which, be they what they may,
Are yet the fountain light of all our day,
Are yet a master light of all our seeing;
it is hard to follow him. He seems to be willfully confusing moments of darkness and fear in which
nature seemed alien to the child with moments of splendour and beauty which first developed the
child’s affections and drew them to nature in a more intimate way.”
Vision of Life Victorious
“The poem is far from easy. The term ‘immortality’ means ‘death negated’: it is a dramatic word and
may be equated with life itself provided some recognition of death is incorporated. Such recognition
our ode gives, celebrating life victorious over death. In poetic study we must never limit too closely
a vast unknowable which the poem itself is created to define. So, though Wordsworth’s ode, like
Shakespeare’s Pericles or Shelley’s Prometheus, is a vision of immortality of life victorious, it need
have nothing to say about life-after-death. It is rather a vision of essential, all-conquering life. The
symbols which carry this over to us are flowers, springtime joy, bird music, all young life, and, pre-
eminently, the child.
Two Childhoods
In this ode we get a double vision of childhood, ‘the childhood that we see being busily lived through
by children and which we ourselves lived through, and the childhood which we carry within us like
a memory, and which while grounded in our earliest years stays with us into adult life for good or
evil’.
As Alec King puts it: “These two childhoods may be called, for convenience, visible childhood and
invisible childhood. We are mostly aware of the visible childhood in children. It is the mother, as
Yeats understood, who knows best the invisible childhood, who in her ‘passion, piety, or affection’
knows the ‘shape upon her lap’ as a ‘Presence’ that symbolises ‘all heavenly glory’ and that mocks
‘man’s enterprise’.”
The poet has distinguished these two childhoods, not only by what he says of each, but by different
languages. The visible childhood of the ‘six years’ darling of a pigmy size is lived openly for us in the
factual language of the seventh stanza. On the other hand, the invisible childhood is referred to, as it
must be, in terms of metaphor and myth, especially in the eighth stanza, with its names for a child
like ‘thou best philosopher’, ‘thou eye among the blind’.
Two Different Ideas about Nature
“.......Wordsworth began the Ode at a time when he was exercised by two different ideas about nature.
In the first place, the fitful returns of his youthful vision made him ask why they were not more
frequent and more secure. This made him anxious and uneasy, and prompted the first stanzas of the
Ode. In the second place, he believed that in the moral inspiration of nature he had found something
to take the place of his visions, and this discovery gave to the Ode its positive and consoling character.
Such, no doubt, was his state of mind when he conceived the outline of the Ode. But we may ask why
this issue was forced so powerfully on Wordsworth in the spring of 1802, since he was aware of it
when he wrote Tintern Abbey four years before. No doubt in the interval he found that his visionary
gift was not so dead as he had thought, but still at times returned to him. No doubt, too, he saw more
clearly how much comfort was to be found in his moral conception of nature. None the less, something
must have happened to press the issue on him with a new and inescapable insistence.

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