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The Full Text of “My Heart Leaps Up”
1My heart leaps up when I behold
2 A rainbow in the sky:
3So was it when my life began;
4So is it now I am a man;
5So be it when I shall grow old,
6 Or let me die!
7The Child is father of the Man;
8And I could wish my days to be
9Bound each to each by natural piety.
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“My Heart Leaps Up” Introduction
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"My Heart Leaps Up" is a short lyric poem by the Romantic poet William Wordsworth. It was written on March 26, 1802 (while Wordsworth was living at Dove Cottage in the scenic Lake District of northern England, according to the diary his sister Dorothy kept of their day-to-day lives), and later published in 1807 as part of Wordsworth's Poems, in Two Volumes. Like many of his poems from this period, "My Heart Leaps Up" was inspired by nature, as the speakers describes the feeling of joy upon seeing a simple rainbow. The poem also appreciates the importance of carrying child-like enthusiasm and wonder throughout life, an idea that Wordsworth returns throughout much of his work.
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“My Heart Leaps Up” Summary
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My heart skips a beat whenever I see a rainbow in the sky. This has happened to me for as long as I can remember—it happened when I was a child and it still happens to me now as an adult. If I no longer feel the same joy upon seeing a rainbow when I am an old man, I'd rather not live anymore. Childhood teaches people the simple lessons they should carry with them for the rest of their lives. I want to feel a childlike sense of wonder upon seeing the natural world every day of my life.
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“My Heart Leaps Up” Themes
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The Importance of Childhood Wonder
"My Heart Leaps Up" describes the pure delight the speaker feels upon seeing a rainbow. This joy prompts the speaker to reflect on the passing of time and the significance of childhood. It is in childhood, the poem argues, that people first feel a sense of powerful awe and wonder at the natural world around them. In turn, adults should strive to maintain the pure, enthusiastic reactions to the natural world they felt as children. Such unbridled appreciation for nature, the poem argues, makes life worth living.
The poem begins in the present tense: the speaker says his heart "leaps up" when he sees a rainbow. This reaction to the sight of the rainbow is not a new or unknown feeling, however. Rather, the speaker has had the same reaction to seeing a rainbow for as long as he can remember. The joy the speaker feels is the same joy he felt as a child, which the poem marks by switching to the past tense in line 3 ("So was it when my life began"). The speaker takes comfort in realizing that he hasn't lost his childlike sense of pure, unfiltered wonder upon noticing the beauty of nature.
The rainbow thus makes the speaker feel connected not only to nature, but also to his past self. This sense of continuity from childhood to adulthood, in turn, gives the speaker hope for a happy old age. Just as he has felt joy upon seeing a rainbow from childhood through adulthood, he claims that he will continue to feel that same joy in his old age, signified by the switch to the future tense in line 5 ("So be it when I shall grow old").
Furthermore, the speaker claims that it is through the experience of childhood that he learned to feel the joy he does at the natural world. Turning the idea of parenting on its head, the speaker suggests that childhood teaches people how to appreciate the simple wonders of the natural world. While adults tend to have more knowledge, experience, skills than children, children are closer to nature and do not regulate their reactions to it. If thunder makes a child feel afraid, that child might cry or hide. Similarly, the rare, colorful sight of a rainbow might give a child an unexpected thrill. A child's innocent, almost religious enthusiasm for nature is what the speaker means by "natural piety" in the final line. The speaker does not want to become jaded or immune to the powers of nature over time, but instead hopes to maintain the child-like enthusiasm for the natural world.
The speaker hopes to keep his childlike appreciation of nature so much that, in line 6, he claims he'd rather die without it, suggesting that to lose enthusiasm for the natural world would be to lose what makes life worth living in the first place. The wisdom of childhood is not one that can be learned through years of experience, the poem argues, but is instead the innocence to notice the natural world and let it move you.
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The Beauty and Comfort of Nature
A rainbow is a rare, fleeting, and often unexpected gift from nature. Seeing one can feel both exhilarating and comforting—exhilarating for its rarity and comforting for its beauty and implication of hope and wonder (in that rainbows appear after storms and signal a return to brighter days). "My Heart Leaps Up" suggests that nature ought to be appreciated for each of these qualities: the spontaneous beauty it can bring into people's lives, as well as its comforting implication of hope.
It is easy to become jaded with everyday life, moving in and out of the same rooms, walking the same streets, seeing the same people. It is a bit more difficult to get used to something as sudden, beautiful, and momentary as a rainbow. They simply don't show up every day! At the same time, though, rainbows happen over and again even if one can never know when they will happen to see another.
The speaker of "My Heart Leaps Up" captures this tension between exhilaration and comfort. His heart "leaps up" when he sees a rainbow, as if he is seeing one for the first time. This reaction of joy and shock is not new, however, but the same reaction he has always had when seeing a rainbow. The beauty of the rainbow is not just a momentary feeling of delight, but also a familiar, comforting feeling at once again beholding the beauty and hopeful wonder of nature.
"Natural" in the poem's final line not only refers to the natural world in general, but also describes the sort of appreciation the speaker hopes to have for nature. That is, it is a seemingly unrehearsed or effortless appreciation. The speaker's heart leaping up at seeing the rainbow is "natural" in that he doesn't think about it, but merely feels it. It is an effortless, almost instinctual reaction.
At the same time, the speaker wants his appreciation for nature to be something like "piety." Piety is anything but spontaneous or instinctual. Rather, "piety" implies serious religious devotion, often marked by repeated and disciplined acts like daily prayer or worship. By wishing for "natural piety," then, speaker wishes to feel an appreciation for nature that is both spontaneous and practiced.
It is in nature, the poem argues, where one can find a sense of both wonder and comfort at the same time. That he still feels the same joy when he sees a rainbow as an adult that he felt as a child reassures the speaker that he is indeed still living and feeling. His life will go on as it has gone before. Nature helps to remind the speaker that despite the many changes life brings, there is something continuous and larger than himself to appreciate.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “My Heart Leaps Up”
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Lines 1-2
My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:The first two lines of "My Heart Leaps Up" establish the event that prompts the rest of the poem: the speaker relates how his heart "leaps up" when he sees a rainbow. Rather than simply say outright that seeing a rainbow makes the speaker feel happy or joyful, he uses personification to describe his reaction. Hearts, while one of the most essential parts of the human body, do not themselves "leap." By animating his heart, however, the speaker is able to portray the sudden bliss the sight of a rainbow causes him to feel. It also introduces a sense of playfulness and innocence—qualities often associated with childhood—from the very start of the poem.
The heart's leaping also suggests that the speaker's joyful reaction is not planned, but rather is spontaneous, unbridled, and perhaps even inevitable. That is, the speaker cannot help but be happy upon seeing a rainbow, because his heart seems to respond of its own accord.
In turn, the inevitability of the speaker's reaction to the rainbow is reinforced by the musicality of the poem's language. These opening lines employ assonance and consonance to links the words together. Note how the many long /ee/ sounds, when spoken aloud, stretch the mouth as in a smile, while the plosive /b/ and /p/ sounds add a bouncy rhythm to these lines:
My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:This repetition of similar sounds gives the poem the impression that the words inevitably belong together, reinforcing the naturalness, or honesty, of the poet's response to the rainbow. The poem also employs enjambment between these first two lines. The reader easily glides past the first line break into the second line to find out what, in particular, makes the poet's heart leap so.
Additionally, the first line establishes the meter of the poem as iambic tetrameter. This just means that each line contains four iambs, poetic feet with an unstressed-stressed, da DUM, beat pattern:
My heart leaps up when I behold
The second foot of the first line might also be scanned as a spondee, or two stressed beats in a row—"leaps up," which emphasizes the joyous bounce of this movement. The meter is broken slightly in the second line, however, as it only has a set of three stressed and unstressed syllables (making it a line of iambic trimeter):
A rainbow in the sky:
This break in the meter evokes the poet's heart skipping a beat.
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Lines 3-6
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
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Line 7
The Child is father of the Man;
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Lines 8-9
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.
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“My Heart Leaps Up” Symbols
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The Rainbow
A rainbow is traditionally a symbol of hope, and that is how it's being used in this poem. Rainbows are beautiful sights that show up after storms. As such, they signify the passing of a storm—symbolically, of turmoil and suffering—and the start of a calmer, lovelier period. The mention of the rainbow is also perhaps a subtle allusion to the story of Noah in the Book of Genesis, in which God sends a rainbow as a promise to never again destroy the earth with floods.
The rainbow in "My Heart Leaps Up" fills the speaker with a sense of hope and promise. It reassures him that what gave him joy and wonder as a child still gives him joy, in turn allowing him to feel connected to the natural world and connected to his future.
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“My Heart Leaps Up” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Enjambment
Enjambment occurs sparingly times in "My Heart Leaps Up." As a short poem, the enjambments serve both to dramatize and accentuate certain lines while adding a sense of cohesion to others, expanding phrases over the line breaks to create moments of hesitation while reading the poem.
The first case of enjambment in the poem occurs at the end of line 1, as the sentence continues through the line break: "when I behold / A rainbow in the sky." This enjambment inserts a moment of suspense into the poem by slightly delaying what it is that makes the speaker's heart leap up. By dedicating a whole line to the rainbow, the poet also emphasizes its importance. Just as a rainbow stands out singularly in the sky, the line stands on its own.
As the poem continues, the speaker again arguably employs enjambment between lines 5 and 6. Lines 3 to 5 preceding line 6 share a parallel structure that rhythmically and syntactically connects them as the speaker expresses how his feeling of joy at seeing a rainbow has persisted (and will continue to persist) throughout his life. Line 6 noticeably breaks the parallel structure but it continues the sentence begun in line 5. There is a comma, and as such a pause, at the end of this line, and some readers may thus experience it as end-stopped. Regardless, its meaning is enriched and fulfilled by the line that follows. The enjambment here helps to vary the rhythm of the poem further emphasizes the drama of line 6, in which the speaker claims to rather die than lose the wonder and joy he feels at seeing a rainbow.
The final clear enjambment of the poem occurs in its closing couplet, where the speaker breaks the sentence in half on the word "bound." This use of enjambment formally enacts the kind of continuation that the speaker wishes for his life: just as the speaker wants the days of his life to be connected or "bound" by his continued love of nature, the final lines of his poem are connected through enjambment. Though they are two distinct lines, they function as one unit of meaning. Similarly, the days of the speaker's life are discreet, singular units of time that are also bound or tied together to make up his life as a whole.
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Anaphora
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Allusion
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Personification
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Paradox
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Assonance
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Consonance
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“My Heart Leaps Up” Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Behold
- bound
- Piety
Behold-
A somewhat archaic word meaning to see or observe something. In the poem, the speaker beholds, or sees, a rainbow. The word has religious overtones as well. Something is "beheld" if it is truly wonderful, awesome, or significant.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “My Heart Leaps Up”
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Form
"My Heart Leaps Up" does not follow any particular poetic form, though it can be broken down into two sections. In the first two lines, the speaker relates how seeing a rainbow makes him feel joyful. The colon at the end of line 2 indicates that what follows will relate to the joy the speaker feels when he sees a rainbow.
Indeed, he goes on, in lines 3 to 6, to relate how he has felt this joy since his childhood, throughout his adulthood and how he will likely continue to feel it as he ages. This first "section" ends with the briefest line, line 6, of the poem, "Or let me die!" Line 6 is the most personal and emotional of all the lines, marked by its brevity and exclamation point. The line stands out to the reader, and logically divides the poem in two.
The final three lines of the poem stand apart, though they are included in the same stanza as the rest of the poem. The use of a semi-colon at the end of line 7 connects the generalized, philosophical statement "The Child is father of the Man" with the more personal closing couplet of the poem. The speaker fits his own experience into the philosophical schema he established and, in turn, might be encouraging the reader to do so as well.
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Meter
"My Heart Leaps Up" mostly follows iambic tetrameter. This means its lines are made up of four iambs, poetic feet with an unstressed-stressed beat pattern. Take in the poem's opening line:
My heart leaps up when I behold
It's possible to scan the second foot here as a spondee ("leaps up"), which adds emphasis to the heart's action but doesn't disrupt the overall flow of the poem.
That said, while the majority of the lines follow this meter, the poem does not perfectly abide by iambic tetrameter. There are a few deliberate exceptions that work to emphasize certain lines and deepen their impact. Lines 2, 6, and 9 each break meter slightly. The poet still uses iambs, but line 2 only uses three of them, making it iambic trimeter:
A rainbow in the sky
The change in meter here works to set the rainbow aside from the surrounding lines, giving the reader a chance to breathe on either side of the line before moving on with the rest of the poem. It is almost as if the reader is given a chance to stop and gaze up at the rainbow in the sky. The line also suggests the act of the speaker's heart effectively skipping a beat.
Line 6 also has fewer than four sets of iambs, making it iambic diameter:
Or let me die!
This line follows the enjambment at the end of line 5 and breaks the parallel structure of the preceding three lines (lines 3-5), all of which share the same iambic tetrameter as the opening line of the poem. By breaking meter, the line stands out and feels abrupt. The reader senses the speaker's emotion in wishing to die rather than lose his childlike wonder for nature. The reader almost wants to hear more syllables but is denied them, just as death would deny the speaker any more life.
The final line, by contrast, includes one extra iamb, making it iambic pentameter (a set of 5 iambs). This terminal expansion adds closure, rounding out the syllables lacking in line 6 and suggesting that the "natural piety" the speaker desires for himself is a gift that keeps on giving.
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Rhyme Scheme
"My Heart Leaps Up" uses rhyme throughout to help organize and unify its lines. The rhyme scheme of the poem is:
ABCCABCDD
Looking at the pattern of these end rhymes, the final couplet stands out on its own as the only lines in the poem that share the rhyming /ee/ sound: "be" and "piety." No other lines end with this rhyme, and yet the /ee/ sound is not new to the poem. The first line reverberates with the same sound through assonance with the words "leaps" and "behold." Just as the poet wishes his days to feel connected from childhood into adulthood, so the poem enacts a kind of connection between the first line and the last, helping to reinforce that connections are possible and beneficial.
The two shortest lines of the poems (lines 2 and 4) also share the same end rhyme with "sky" and "die." Both lines stand out to the reader because of their brevity, and both are emotional—perhaps the most emotional of the entire poem. Their shared rhyme further connects them. Without the feeling of joy brought on by the rainbow (the "sky"), the speaker would rather die. He cannot have one without the other. To lose the joy of seeing the rainbow would be to die or lose life itself.
Another meaningful end rhyme occurs between lines 3, 4, and 7, which all end in the /an/ sound. In a poem concerned with the connection sustained between childhood and adulthood, it is significant that the word "began" and "man" rhyme poignantly at the end of these lines. The poet seems to be building in a kind of insurance (or self-assurance) that the enthusiasm for nature he felt at the beginning of his life will continue on into manhood.
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“My Heart Leaps Up” Speaker
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The speaker of "My Heart Leaps Up" is anonymous, but describes himself as an adult man, just like Wordsworth was at the time of composing the poem in 1802 when he was in his early thirties. Though it is not stated explicitly, it is safe to presume the speaker of the poem articulates Wordsworth's own feelings.
The speaker speaks candidly in the first-person throughout most of the poem, and the use of the first-person pronoun emphasizes the personal nature of the speaker's thoughts. What he describes is particular to his own experience, but, at the same time, is in no way unusual. Almost everyone manages to see a rainbow in his or her lifetime, and the speaker's experience is one he knows will be understood by many. This is marked by the poet's brief switch from the first-person to more generalized nouns ("Child" and "Man") in line 7.
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“My Heart Leaps Up” Setting
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While the poem itself does not have any particular setting, it was likely prompted by one of the many long walks Wordsworth took with his sister Dorothy through the Lake District region of northern England. Dorothy's well-kept journal of their daily life while living there reveals that Wordsworth wrote the poem on March 26, 1802. She writes: "While I was getting into bed, he wrote The Rainbow." Whether the two had seen a rainbow or not that day, she does not record. Earlier in her journals, however, she does make mention of rainbows her and William saw together.
Mostly, the poem is set in the poet's own mind, where he thinks on his life from childhood, to the present, and onwards into the future.
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Literary and Historical Context of “My Heart Leaps Up”
Literary Context
As a Romantic poet, William Wordsworth was part of a group of writers who pushed back against the Enlightenment ideals related to science and strict rationality that had become common by the end of the 18th century. This group of writers most famously included Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Percy Shelley, and William Blake. The Romantic poets sought out a kind of poetry that used "the real language of men," as Wordsworth put it in his Preface to the Lyrical Ballads. Wordsworth felt that poetry should elevate and reflect upon everyday life and experience. For these poets, one of the most poem-worthy subjects was a person's connection to nature.
In addition to their radical ideas about human beings' connection to the natural world, the Romantics also explored a curiosity with childhood in their poetry. Ideas about childhood had been changing from the middle of the 18th century, when people began to reject more Puritan, religious beliefs that children are born sinful, cruel, and corrupted. While earlier books for children focused on forming (or, perhaps more accurately, reforming or molding) children's character in order to save them from sin and teach them moral behavior, later writers and thinkers started to reject the notion that children were inherently sinful. Rather, childhood began to be seen as an innocent state that was only corrupted later by experience and the ills of society. Philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in particular, helped to shape Romantic-era ideas about childhood when On Education was published in 1762.
Wordsworth returns to ideas about childhood in other, more complicated poems, where he suggests that all life is merely a repetition of what people learn first in childhood, even if they didn't realize it at the time. In his Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, he writes: "our continued influxes of feeling are modified and directed by our thoughts, which are indeed the representatives of all our past feelings."
Within his own work, Wordsworth used the final three lines of "My Heart Leaps Up" as an epigram to his longer and more complex poem, "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood." Like "My Heart Leaps Up," the "Ode" similarly muses on the innocent, pure connection to nature and beauty that the poet felt as a child. Rather than despair that something of his child-like innocence is lost, Wordsworth again takes solace in the memory of childhood and uses the remembrance of his past enthusiasm to encourage him to find beauty in the world as a grown man.
Historical Context
"My Heart Leaps Up" was published in 1807, during Europe's first Industrial Revolution. New manufacturing processes—including increased mechanization of work and the use of steam power—led to vast economic and social changes. The rise of factories led to larger urban populations, and with increasingly overcrowded cities came widespread housing, health, and sanitation issues.
As a Romantic poet, Wordsworth often turned to nature to find solace from the ever-industrialized, modern world he saw bustling around him. As industrialization began to change the landscape of northern England with the addition of factories and railroads, Wordsworth grew increasingly worried that people were moving farther and farther away from nature. His writing fits in with that of other Romantic poets who turned their noses up at increasingly urban modern life.
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More “My Heart Leaps Up” Resources
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External Resources
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The Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth — Dorothy kept a detailed diary of the days she spent living with her brother William in Dove cottage. Some entries reveal the context and inspiration for many of the poems in Wordsworth's 1807 collection.
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Preface to the Lyrical Ballads — Read Wordsworth's famous essay in which he defends and clarifies his ideas about poetry and articulates some ideals of the Romantic movement.
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Preface to the Lyrical Ballads Analysis — Get LitChart's analysis of Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, so you can fully understand it.
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Childhood and Romanticism — Article from the British Library expanding upon Romantic ideas about childhood.
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The Poem Out Loud — Listen to a recording of "My Heart Leaps Up."
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LitCharts on Other Poems by William Wordsworth
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