Page 293 - DENG405_BRITISH_POETRY

British Poetry

Notes the fact that time has stripped away much of nature’s glory; depriving him of the wild spontaneity
he exhibited as a child.
As seen in “The world is too much with us,” Wordsworth believes that the loss stems from being
too caught up in material possessions. As we grow up, we spend more and more time trying to
figure out how to attain wealth, all the while becoming more and more distanced from nature. The
poem is characterized by a strange sense of duality. Even though the world around the speaker is
beautiful, peaceful, and serene, he is sad and angry because of what he (and humanity) has lost.
Because nature is a kind of religion to Wordsworth, he knows that it is wrong to be depressed in
nature’s midst and pulls himself out of his depression for as long as he can.

Explain briefly the summary of William Wordsworth “Ode on intimations of
immortality”.
In the seventh stanza especially, Wordsworth examines the transitory state of childhood. He is
pained to see a child’s close proximity to nature being replaced by a foolish acting game in which
the child pretends to be an adult before he actually is.

Wordsworth wants the child to hold onto the glory of nature that only a person in
the flush of youth can appreciate.

In the ninth, tenth and eleventh stanzas Wordsworth manages to reconcile the emotions and questions
he has explored throughout the poem. He realizes that even though he has lost his awareness of the
glory of nature, he had it once, and can still remember it. The memory of nature’s glory will have to
be enough to sustain him, and he ultimately decides that it is. Anything that we have, for however
short a time, can never be taken away completely, because it will forever be held in our memory.

27.1.3 Form

Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode, as it is often called, is written in eleven variable ode stanzas with
variable rhyme schemes, in iambic lines with anything from two to five stressed syllables. The
rhymes occasionally alternate lines, occasionally fall in couplets, and occasionally occur within a
single line (as in “But yet I know, where’er I go” in the second stanza).

27.1.4 Commentary

If “Tintern Abbey” is Wordsworth’s first great statement about the action of childhood memories of
nature upon the adult mind, the “Intimations of Immortality” ode is his mature masterpiece on the
subject. The poem, whose full title is “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early
Childhood,” makes explicit Wordsworth’s belief that life on earth is a dim shadow of an earlier,
purer existence, dimly recalled in childhood and then forgotten in the process of growing up. (In
the fifth stanza, he writes, “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting.../Not in entire forgetfulness, /
And not in utter nakedness, /But trailing clouds of glory do we come / From God, who is our
home....”)

While one might disagree with the poem’s metaphysical hypotheses, there is no arguing with the
genius of language at work in this Ode. Wordsworth consciously sets his speaker’s mind at odds

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