Page 295 - DENG405_BRITISH_POETRY

British Poetry

Notes

The speaker declares that all of the earth is happy, and exhorts the shepherd boy to
shout.
In the fourth stanza the speaker continues to be a part of the joy of the season, saying that it would
be wrong to be “sullen / While Earth herself in adorning, / And the Children are culling / On
every side, / In a thousand valleys far and wide.” However, when he sees a tree, a field, and later a
pansy at his feet, they again give him a strong feeling that something is amiss. He asks, “Whither is
fled the visionary gleam? / Where is it now, the glory and the dream?”
The fifth stanza contains arguably the most famous line of the poem: “Our birth is but a sleep and a
forgetting.” He goes on to say that as infants we have some memory of heaven, but as we grow we
lose that connection: “Heaven lies about us in our infancy!” As children this connection with heaven
causes us to experience nature’s glory more clearly. Once we are grown, the connection is lost. In
the sixth stanza, the speaker says that as soon as we get to earth, everything conspires to help us
forget the place we came from: heaven. “Forget the glories he hath known, and that imperial palace
whence he came.”
In the seventh stanza the speaker sees (or imagines) a six-year-old boy, and foresees the rest of his
life. He says that the child will learn from his experiences, but that he will spend most of his effort
on imitation: “And with new joy and pride / The little Actor cons another part.” It seems to the
speaker that his whole life will essentially be “endless imitation.” In the eighth stanza the speaker
speaks directly to the child, calling him a philosopher. The speaker cannot understand why the
child, who is so close to heaven in his youth, would rush to grow into an adult. He asks him, “Why
with such earnest pains dost thou provoke / The years to bring the inevitable yoke, / Thus blindly
with thy blessedness at strife?” In the ninth stanza (which is the longest at 38 lines) the speaker
experiences a flood of joy when he realizes that through memory he will always be able to connect
to his childhood, and through his childhood to nature.

Hence is a season of calm weather
Though inland far we be,
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither,
Can in a moment travel thither,
And see the Children sport upon the shore,
And hear the might water rolling evermore.
In the tenth stanza the speaker harkens back to the beginning of the poem, asking the same creatures
that earlier made him sad with their sounds to sing out: “Then sing, ye Birds, sing, sing a joyous
song!” Even though he admits that he has lost some of the glory of nature as he has grown out of
childhood, he is comforted by the knowledge that he can rely on his memory. In the final stanza the
speaker says that nature is still the stem of everything is his life, bringing him insight, fueling his
memories and his belief that his soul is immortal: “To me the meanest flower that blows can give /
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.”

Self Assessment

Multiple Choice Questions:
1. Composed at Grasmere, in the ......, between 1802 and 1804, “Intimations of Immortality”
was first published in poems in two volumes (1807).

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