Page 294 - DENG405_BRITISH_POETRY

Unit 27: William Wordsworth: Ode to Intimations of Immortality

with the atmosphere of joyous nature all around him, a rare move by a poet whose consciousness is Notes
so habitually in unity with nature. Understanding that his grief stems from his inability to experience
the May morning as he would have in childhood, the speaker attempts to enter willfully into a state
of cheerfulness; but he is able to find real happiness only when he realizes that “the philosophic
mind” has given him the ability to understand nature in deeper, more human terms—as a source of
metaphor and guidance for human life. This is very much the same pattern as “Tintern Abbey”’s,
but whereas in the earlier poem Wordsworth made himself joyful, and referred to the “music of
humanity” only briefly, in the later poem he explicitly proposes that this music is the remedy for his
mature grief.

Write a short note on poem, Ode to intimations of immortality.

The structure of the Immortality Ode is also unique in Wordsworth’s work; unlike his
characteristically fluid, naturally spoken monologues, the Ode is written in a lilting, songlike cadence
with frequent shifts in rhyme scheme and rhythm. Further, rather than progressively exploring a
single idea from start to finish, the Ode jumps from idea to idea, always sticking close to the central
scene, but frequently making surprising moves, as when the speaker begins to address the “Mighty
Prophet” in the eighth stanza—only to reveal midway through his address that the mighty prophet
is a six-year-old boy.
Wordsworth’s linguistic strategies are extraordinarily sophisticated and complex in this Ode, as the
poem’s use of metaphor and image shifts from the register of lost childhood to the register of the
philosophic mind. When the speaker is grieving, the main tactic of the poem is to offer joyous,
pastoral nature images, frequently personified—the lambs dancing as to the tabor, the moon looking
about her in the sky. But when the poet attains the philosophic mind and his fullest realization
about memory and imagination, he begins to employ far more subtle descriptions of nature that,
rather than jauntily imposing humanity upon natural objects, simply draw human characteristics
out of their natural presences, referring back to human qualities from earlier in the poem.
So, in the final stanza, the brooks “fret” down their channels, just as the child’s mother “fretted”
him with kisses earlier in the poem; they trip lightly just as the speaker “tripped lightly” as a child;
the Day is new-born, innocent, and bright, just as a child would be; the clouds “gather round the
setting sun” and “take a sober coloring,” just as mourners at a funeral (recalling the child’s playing
with some fragment from “a mourning or a funeral” earlier in the poem) might gather soberly
around a grave. The effect is to illustrate how, in the process of imaginative creativity possible to
the mature mind, the shapes of humanity can be found in nature and vice-versa. (Recall the “music
of humanity” in “Tintern Abbey.”) A flower can summon thoughts too deep for tears because a
flower can embody the shape of human life, and it is the mind of maturity combined with the
memory of childhood that enables the poet to make that vital and moving connection.
The speaker begins by declaring that there was a time when nature seemed mystical to him, like a
dream, “Apparelled in celestial light.” But now all of that is gone. No matter what he does, “The
things which I have seen I now can see no more.”
In the second stanza the speaker says that even though he can still see the rainbow, the rose, the
moon, and the sun, and even though they are still beautiful, something is different...something has
been lost: “But yet I know, where’er I go, / that there hath past away a glory from the earth.” The
speaker is saddened by the birds singing and the lambs jumping in the third stanza. Soon, however,
he resolves not to be depressed, because it will only put a damper on the beauty of the season.

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