Page 297 - DENG405_BRITISH_POETRY

British Poetry

Notes In the seventh stanza, the speaker beholds a six-year-old boy and imagines his life, and the love his
mother and father feel for him. He sees the boy playing with some imitated fragment of adult life,
“some little plan or chart,” imitating “a wedding or a festival” or “a mourning or a funeral.” The
speaker imagines that all human life is a similar imitation. In the eighth stanza, the speaker addresses
the child as though he were a mighty prophet of a lost truth, and rhetorically asks him why, when
he has access to the glories of his origins, and to the pure experience of nature, he still hurries
toward an adult life of custom and “earthly freight.”
In the ninth stanza, the speaker experiences a surge of joy at the thought that his memories of
childhood will always grant him a kind of access to that lost world of instinct, innocence , and
exploration. In the tenth stanza, bolstered by this joy, he urges the birds to sing, and urges all
creatures to participate in “the gladness of the May.” He says that though he has lost some part of
the glory of nature and of experience, he will take solace in “primal sympathy,” in memory, and in
the fact that the years bring a mature consciousness—”a philosophic mind.” In the final stanza, the
speaker says that this mind—which stems from a consciousness of mortality, as opposed to the
child’s feeling of immortality—enables him to love nature and natural beauty all the more, for each
of nature’s objects can stir him to thought, and even the simplest flower blowing in the wind can
raise in him “thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.”

27.2 Summary

• The poem is elegiac in that it is about the regret of loss.
• “The world is too much with us,” Wordsworth believes that the loss stems from being too
caught up in material possessions.
• The poem, whose full title is “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early
Childhood,”
• While one might disagree with the poem’s metaphysical hypotheses, there is no arguing with
the genius of language at work in this Ode.
• The speaker begins by declaring that there was a time when nature seemed mystical to him,
like a dream, “Apparelled in celestial light.”

27.3 Keywords

Doth : Archaic third person singular present of.
Coronal : Relating to the crown or corona of something.
Gleam : Shine brightly, especially with reflected light.
Forebode : Act as an advance warning of something bad.
Meadow : An area of grassland, especially one used for hay.

27.4 Review Questions
1. Who wrote Ode on Intimations of Immortality from recollections ode?
2. Why Ode Intimations of Immortality frist the romantic tradition?
3. Why is the meaning of childhood, pre-existence and memory in William Wordsworth?

Answers: Self Assessment
1. (c) 2. (a) 3. (c)
4. (d) 5. (a)

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