Page 296 - DENG405_BRITISH_POETRY

Unit 27: William Wordsworth: Ode to Intimations of Immortality

(a) High street (b) Blencathra Notes
(c) Lake district (d) Scafell pike
2. ...... taught pre-existence, meaning that the soul dwelled in an ideal alternate state prior to
its present occupation of the body, and the soul will return to that ideal previous state after
the body’s death.
(a) Plato (b) Immanuel
(c) Aristotle (d) Bertrand Russell
3. ...... cantata Intimations of Immortality was premiered in 1950, when it was conducted by
Herbert Sumsion in Gloucester Cathedral at the Three Choirs Festival.
(a) Edward Elgar’s (b) Ralph Vaughan Williams
(c) Gerald Finzi’s (d) Gustav Holst
4. The poem was read by actor Timothy West at the ...... .
(a) Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall (b) Prince Harry of Wales
(c) Prince William of Wales
(d) Wedding of Charles, Prince of Wales and Camilla Parker Bowles
5. Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of early childhood is a long ode in eleven
sections by the english Romantic poet ...... .
(a) William Wordsworth (b) George Gordon Byron
(c) Samuel Taylor Coleridge (d) Romantic poetry

27.1.5 Analysis

In the first stanza, the speaker says wistfully that there was a time when all of nature seemed
dreamlike to him, “apparelled in celestial light,” and that time is past; “the things I have seen I can
see no more.”
In the second stanza, he says that he still sees the rainbow, and that the rose is still lovely; the moon
looks around the sky with delight, and starlight and sunshine are each beautiful. Nonetheless the
speaker feels that a glory has passed away from the earth.
In the third stanza, the speaker says that, while listening to the birds sing in springtime and watching
the young lambs leap and play, he was stricken with a thought of grief; but the sound of nearby
waterfalls, the echoes of the mountains, and the gusting of the winds restored him to strength. He
declares that his grief will no longer wrong the joy of the season, and that all the earth is happy. He
exhorts a shepherd boy to shout and play around him. In the fourth stanza, he addresses nature’s
creatures, and says that his heart participates in their joyful festival. He says that it would be wrong
to feel sad on such a beautiful May morning, while children play and laugh among the flowers.
Nevertheless, a tree and a field that he looks upon make him think of “something that is gone,” and
a pansy at his feet does the same. He asks what has happened to “the visionary gleam”: “Where is
it now, the glory and the dream?”
In the fifth stanza, he proclaims that human life is merely “a sleep and a forgetting”—that human
beings dwell in a purer, more glorious realm before they enter the earth. “Heaven,” he says, “lies
about us in our infancy!” As children, we still retain some memory of that place, which causes our
experience of the earth to be suffused with its magic—but as the baby passes through boyhood and
young adulthood and into manhood, he sees that magic die. In the sixth stanza, the speaker says
that the pleasures unique to earth conspire to help the man forget the “glories” whence he came.

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