“Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” Introduction

• William Wordsworth first published "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood" in his 1807 collection Poems, in Two Volumes. Often considered one of Wordsworth's greatest masterpieces, this poem explores some of the themes that haunted Wordsworth across his whole career: childhood, memory, nature, and the human soul. The poem's speaker remembers that, when he was a child, he saw the whole world shining with heavenly beauty, and wonders where that beauty has gone now he's an adult. While he can never get that kind of vision back, he concludes, he can still build his faith upon his memories of it; the way the world looks to children, he argues, is a hint that every human soul comes from heaven, and will return there one day.

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“Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” Summary

• Once upon a time, I saw all of nature, even the most ordinary parts of it, as if it were shining with heavenly light—as luminous, beautiful, and novel as a dream. But it's not like that for me anymore. Wherever I look now, in the nighttime or the daytime, I can't see the things I used to see.

  Rainbows appear and disappear; roses are beautiful; the moon looks around with joy in a clear sky; waters reflecting the stars are deeply lovely; and every sunrise is a gorgeous new beginning. And yet I'm aware that, no matter where I wander, some shining light has left this world.

  Today, while I listened to the spring birds happily singing, and watched the new lambs hopping around as if they were dancing to the beat of a drum, I was struck by a mournful thought. I soon expressed that thought, which made me feel better, and now I've regained my strength. Up on the mountains, the waterfalls make noises like the sound of trumpets; I'll stop doing the lovely spring a disservice by being sad. I can hear the mountains echoing, the winds seem to come straight out of the land of dreams, and the whole world is happy. The land and the ocean alike are jolly, and every living creature shares the joy of May. You, you happy child: yell joyously, and let me hear you yelling, you gleeful young shepherd!

  You lucky, holy living things, I've heard you calling to one another; I can see heaven itself laughing with you as you celebrate. My heart rejoices with you, and my head feels crowned with your happiness: I feel your delight completely. It would be a terrible thing indeed if I were to sulk while the world dresses herself up so beautifully on this gorgeous May morning, and while children everywhere are picking flowers in thousands of valleys all across the world, and while the sun shines and little babies bounce in their mothers' arms. I hear all this celebration with delight! But: there's a single tree out of all the trees in the world, a single field I once saw: both of them remind me that something has gone missing for me. The little flower I see at my feet tells me the same thing. Where has that transcendent illumination I once saw gone? Where's that luminous dreamlike vision now?

  When we're born, it's as if we fall asleep and forget where we came from: our souls, which are born with us, rising like little suns, came to earth from a different, far-off world. We don't come to this world having totally forgotten where we came from, and we don't come here as blank slates: we bring clouds of holy light in our wake when we come to the earth from our original home with God. When we're babies, we see heaven all around us! But as children grow up, the jail-like shadows of habit and familiarity begin to draw in around them. For a while, though, they can still see the light of heaven, and where it comes from, and feel its joy. Even as a young man grows up and moves farther and farther away from his origin in heaven, he's still a kind of holy man of nature's religion, and he's accompanied by his heavenly visions. But at last, when he becomes an adult, that special light fades away, and everything just looks mundane and normal.

  The earth is full of its own kind of delights, and has its own natural longings. Like a well-intentioned adoptive mother, the caring earth does her best to make humans—who are at once her children and her prisoners—forget the beauties they once could see and the heaven they came from.

  Look at the little kid among his newfound pleasures—an adorable little guy, only six years old and teeny-tiny. Look where he sits among his playthings, with his face covered in his mom's kisses and his dad's adoring gaze fixed on him. Look at the game he's planning out there on the floor—some scrap of his childish understanding of life that he's playing out with his new skills. He's playing pretend, acting out weddings and parties, sorrows and funerals, now getting caught up in one and then singing of another. Later, he'll play games to do with the worlds of business, or love, or war. But not for long: soon he'll toss those games aside, too, and proudly, like an actor, he'll take on another role, pretending in turn to go through every experience of human life, all the way up to old age. It's as if his entire purpose were to imitate all the different things grown-ups do.

  You, little child, whose small body doesn't reveal the vastness of your soul; you, you wisest of scholars, who still has a connection to heaven, and who can still see what adults are blind to, as you silently look into the deep mysteries all around you, always shadowed by the presence of God: you powerful truth-teller, you holy prophet! You can see everything that we adults spend our whole lives trying to find—only to get lost in a darkness that is like death. But you, who are still so closely connected to your soul's origins that immortality hovers over you like the sun, or like a master over a servant, a mighty presence that can't be ignored; you little child, still glowing with the power that heaven shines down into your soul: why on earth do you so play all these games about adulthood, rushing to grow up and lose all that you have now? Why do you do all this unwitting harm to your sacred good fortune? Your soul will be weighed down with everyday, earthly things soon enough—and habit will crush you like a heavy, icy frost, getting deeper every day you're alive.

  Thank goodness that in the burned-down remnants of our former childhood vision, some little spark still glows—and the beauty of nature allows us to remember those fleeting moments of glory. Thinking back on my childhood makes me feel constantly blessed—and not just for those good and worthy qualities, like fun and freedom, that mark out childhood days, or for childhood's optimism and hope. No, it's not these feelings for which I sing my song of gratitude, but for the way I once stubbornly questioned the everyday world; for the sense I had of certainties falling away and disappearing; for the way that, as a child, I could still see beyond the everyday and walk in a world of mysteries. My instinctive sense of holiness used to make my everyday certainties shake like a creature caught red-handed trying to get away with something. I'm grateful for humanity's first feelings of love for the world, and for our faint memories of that love; even if those memories are shadowy now, they're still a fountain of luminous joy, and the guiding light by which we can understand everything we see now. Those memories support us, care for us, and allow us to put all the chaos of day-to-day life into perspective, making the years feel small in comparison to eternity. Once we've perceived eternity in childhood, its truth stays with us and never goes away. Neither boredom nor striving, neither grown-up nor child—not even everything that opposes joy can completely get rid of our first memories of heaven. Thus, in peaceful moments, even when we're very far from our childhood seeing, we can still catch a glimpse of the ocean of eternity that brought our souls here; we can travel there in an instant, and watch children playing on that ocean's shores, and hear the eternal thunder of its waters.

  So go ahead and sing happily, birds! And go ahead and hop around as if you're dancing to the music of drums, lambs! Even we grown-ups will, in our minds, join in with all of you who sing and play, who are still truly immersed in the joy of the spring. So what if the holy light I used to see in everything has been taken away from me forever? Even though nothing will ever bring back the time when we adults could see the grass and flowers shining with heavenly beauty, we won't mourn. Instead, we'll draw strength from everything that we do have: from our fundamental connection to nature, which never really goes away; from the consolations we discover when we endure pain; from our belief that death is not the end of the immortal soul; and from the long years of our life, which have taught us to think like philosophers.

  And oh, you springs, fields, hills, and forests: god forbid that we should ever stop loving each other! I still feel your power in the deepest parts of my soul. All I've really given up is feeling that power all the time. I love the coursing streams now even more than I did when I danced as easily and joyfully as they do. The fresh shine of sunrise is still beautiful to me. And the clouds at sunset look even more profound to me now that I understand death. I'm playing a different game now than I was when I was a child, and hoping to win different rewards. Thanks to the deep feelings all people steer their lives by—thanks to the heart's affections, its joys, and its fears—I can still look at the most ordinary little flower there is and be profoundly moved.

“Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” Themes

• 

  The Soul's Immortality

  Wordsworth’s poem argues that the human soul is everlasting. The speaker believes that the soul actually comes from heaven, where it exists before people are born, and that it will one day return there. The speaker finds a deep sense of comfort and inspiration in this idea that the soul is eternal, having always existed, and also immortal, going on after death.

  The speaker finds evidence for the soul’s immortality in the way children see the world. Looking back on his own childhood, the speaker remembers that the world used to look different, as if everything in nature were shining with its own “celestial light.” In the speaker’s view, this is because young children have only just arrived from heaven, and thus bring heavenly perceptions with them. That is, they can still see a sort of divine, heavenly presence in the physical world that now surrounds them.

  The freshness and beauty that the speaker remembers seeing as a child strikes him as a sort of souvenir from his soul’s earlier “home” in God. In other words, the way children perceive the world is an “intimation of immortality,” a hint of what the speaker feels is the deepest truth there is: the human soul is not tied to the mortal body, and instead has its own joyful existence in heaven before it comes to earth.

  It gets harder and harder to feel that connection with the eternal as one gets older, the speaker sighs: life is a process of moving further and further from one’s heavenly origins, moving “daily farther from the East.” But even this image, which alludes to the movement of the sun, suggests that after the soul“sets” in death, it will “rise” in heavenly glory again. The memory of his “celestial” childhood vision gives him a “faith that looks through death,” a belief that the soul doesn’t just come from heaven, but returns there—regardless of how final death might seem.

  • See where this theme is active in the poem.
• 

  Childhood Wonder and the Pain of Growing Up

  The poem’s speaker remembers that, when he was a child, the natural world was full of spectacular beauty and wonder. Sure, nature still looks “lovely” to him as an adult, but as a child, he remembers, he could see heavenly light shining in even the most common of plants. He has to work pretty hard not to be “sullen” about losing the ability to see the world this way, but maintains that it’s simply the cost of growing up. The further people get from childhood, the speaker argues, the more used to the world they get, and the less they can perceive the world’s intense, spiritual beauty. The poem presents this as a sad loss, but also as part of the natural order of things.

  When he was a child, the speaker remembers, he saw the natural world as a place of immense wonder. Once upon a time, even ordinary grass shone with “splendour”; indeed, all of nature seemed to glow with “celestial light,” illuminated with divine, supernatural beauty. This beauty, the speaker suggests, appears plainly to children both because they’re not yet used to the world, and because their souls have recently arrived from heaven: they’re still seeing the everyday world through the lens of their earlier heavenly existence.

  But as people grow up, get familiar with the world, and move farther and farther away from their heavenly origins, this kind of vision fades. The routines and habits of daily life set in, and the world goes from looking enchanted to looking “common.”

  This is a painful loss! As an adult, the speaker can’t help but feel like he’s missing something important: he can still appreciate natural beauty, but the “visionary gleam” of childhood is gone forever.

  There’s no point in mourning this loss too hard, though: it’s just a natural part of life. When the speaker turns away from his “grief” over the lost “visionary gleam” of childhood, he suggests that such grief “wrong[s]” the beauty of the spring day around him. Even if the loss of that “gleam” hurts, it’s as natural as the changing seasons, and to resist it would be an insult to the order of the world. Everyone, the speaker says, slowly gets used to the day-to-day of human life until “custom” (familiarity or habit) makes the world seem ordinary. There’s no way to avoid this: it’s just part of the journey of human life.

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• 

  The Consolations of Memory

  The poem’s speaker feels he’s lost a lot by growing up: when he was a child, nature seemed to shine with “celestial light” for him, but as an adult, that luminosity is just a memory. At the same time, he finds that such memories offer some consolation. While he mourns the beauty he could once see, he finds “strength in what remains behind”: his memories of how he saw the world in childhood, and his adult “philosophic mind” that allows him to reflect on those memories.

  Growing up and getting used to the wonder of the world, the poem suggests, is a sad but unavoidable part of being alive. But remembering that wonder from an adult perspective is the foundation of mature wisdom, hope, and faith.

  Children, this speaker believes, instinctively see the world as a place full of heavenly beauty and wonder. While adults lose their ability to see the world this way, they never forget their memories of that kind of vision. The natural world reminds the speaker of what he used to be able to see there; a particular “Tree” and “a single Field” still speak to him of the heavenly beauty he saw shining in those specific places, once upon a time.

  But the speaker’s memories of childhood aren’t just melancholy reminders of what once was: they’re also a “master light,” a guiding beacon of hope and faith. In other words, remembering the beauty and wonder he saw as a child makes him believe that his soul came from heaven—and will one day return there. Sometimes his memories can even take him right back to the verge of the wonder he’s lost, so that he gets a reassuring glimpse of “the immortal sea”—that is, the endless and beautiful afterlife—he believes his soul will one day return to.

  Heavenly childhood vision might be fleeting, the speaker suggests, but one’s memories of that beautiful way of seeing can form the foundations of an adult faith in the soul’s immortality. While the world doesn’t shine quite so bright anymore, the speaker’s recollection of its former “celestial light” mean that even “the meanest flower that blows” can still give him hope of an eternal life.

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• 

  The Beauty and Divinity of Nature

  The poem suggests that, even after people lose the shining childhood vision that allows them to see all of nature illuminated with divine light, nature can still bring people close to the divine. Nature, to this speaker, isn’t just a beautiful and consoling place, but a mirror of heaven itself. One doesn’t need to be a visionary child to find hope, comfort, and inspiration in the natural world—nor to get a taste of a heavenly future there.

  For the speaker, nature overflows with obvious beauty: “Waters on a starry night / Are beautiful and fair,” he says plainly, and “lovely is the Rose”—these are just the facts! Nature isn’t merely lovely either; it’s aware of its loveliness. The “Moon” looks around with “delight” at the clear skies, and the birds “sing a joyous song,” inviting humans to share in their happiness. The “heavens” themselves “laugh” as nature rejoices in its own loveliness, the speaker says: all that conscious beauty and delight is a reflection of the divine–that is, of a loving and joyful God.

  In turn, the speaker imagines heaven as a natural landscape, as an “immortal sea,” “clouds of glory,” and the “east” where the sun rises. The sea’s eternal vastness, the ethereal glow of clouds, and the “glorious birth” of the sunrise all evoke heaven’s endless joy.

  Since nature and the divine are mirror images of each other, when the speaker basks in the loveliness of the “Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves,” he can feel a connection with heaven, even after he’s lost his childhood ability to see nature shining with “celestial light.”

  Because it hints at the eternal joys of heaven, this poem argues, nature has the ability to connect even jaded adults with the divine. Even the “meanest flower that blows” (that is, the lowliest, commonest little blossom) can inspire the speaker with profound thoughts of heavenly eternity—thoughts like the ones that make up this very poem.

  • See where this theme is active in the poem.

Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”

• Lines 1-9

  There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
         The earth, and every common sight,
                            To me did seem
                        Apparelled in celestial light,
              The glory and the freshness of a dream.
  It is not now as it hath been of yore—
                        Turn wheresoe'er I may,
                            By night or day,
  The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

  The Immortality Ode begins with a look back.

  Wordsworth prefaces his Ode with a few lines from his earlier poem "My Heart Leaps Up"—lines that deal with the idea that the things people experience in childhood shape their lives as adults. The speaker of that poem—who, like the speaker here, is likely Wordsworth himself—goes on to hope that his whole life can reflect the "natural piety" he felt in childhood (that is, a sort of instinctive, inborn religious awe). That feeling is exactly what his Immortality Ode is about to explore.

  "There was a time," this poem's speaker begins, when the whole world seemed to shine for him. Back in his childhood, everything in nature appeared to be "[a]pparelled in celestial light"—that is, dressed up in a glow that seemed to come from heaven itself. The language here is like something from a fairy tale: it's as if the speaker is saying, "Once upon a time, I lived in a magical land."

  But this land was the "common," normal, everyday world. What was different before wasn't the world itself, but how it "seem[ed]" to the speaker. Then, everything had "the glory and the freshness of a dream." To really understand this line, the reader might want to reflect on a wonderful dream they had: think how vivid and memorable a good dream feels, how bright its images are, and how deeply connected you can feel to the pictures your dreams show you. The shining "glory" and "freshness" of that kind of dream was once this speaker's whole world.

  Also take note of the word "glory": it's going to be very important, repeating all through this long poem. The word "glory" suggests, not just that the world once seemed to shine with light for the speaker, but that there was something magnificent, awe-inspiring, and holy about that light.

  But then, something changed. Now, when the speaker looks around him, that "glory" is gone: the things he once saw he "now can see no more." What changed? He grew up.

  This heartbreaking loss will be the central dilemma of this poem. Where, the speaker will wonder, does the special shine of childhood vision come from—and why does it vanish? How can adults resign themselves to life without that "glory"?

  The speaker will explore these profound and deeply-felt questions in the form of an ode. Odes don't use a standardized meter or rhyme scheme. Instead, the speaker will allow his verse to grow organically around his ideas and his emotions.

  The reader can already see that happening in the rhyme scheme here:

  • As the speaker describes his childhood visions in lines 1-5, the rhymes fall into a steady, musical ABABA pattern (that is, alternating lines rhyme).
  • But when he describes how things have changed for him in his adult life (lines 6-9), the pattern changes, and his CDDC rhymes seem to "turn" back and forth with him as he looks sadly around for any glimpse of the "glory" he's lost.

• Lines 10-18

                        The Rainbow comes and goes,
                        And lovely is the Rose,
                        The Moon doth with delight
         Look round her when the heavens are bare,
                        Waters on a starry night
                        Are beautiful and fair;
         The sunshine is a glorious birth;
         But yet I know, where'er I go,
  That there hath passed away a glory from the earth.

  

  

  

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• Lines 19-26

  Now, while the birds thus sing a joyous song,
         And while the young lambs bound
                        As to the tabor's sound,
  To me alone there came a thought of grief:
  A timely utterance gave that thought relief,
                        And I again am strong:
  The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep;
  No more shall grief of mine the season wrong;

  

  

  

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• Lines 27-35

  I hear the Echoes through the mountains throng,
         The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep,
                        And all the earth is gay;
                             Land and sea
                  Give themselves up to jollity,
                        And with the heart of May
                   Doth every Beast keep holiday—
                        Thou Child of Joy,
  Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy Shepherd-boy!

  

  

  

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• Lines 36-50

  Ye blessed creatures, I have heard the call
        Ye to each other make; I see
  The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee;
        My heart is at your festival,
              My head hath its coronal,
  The fullness of your bliss, I feel—I feel it all.
                        Oh evil day! if I were sullen
                        While Earth herself is adorning,
                           This sweet May morning,
                        And the Children are culling
                           On every side,
  In a thousand valleys far and wide,
                        Fresh flowers; while the sun shines warm,
  And the Babe leaps up on his Mother's arm—
                        I hear, I hear, with joy I hear!

  

  

  

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• Lines 51-57

                        —But there's a Tree, of many, one,
  A single Field which I have looked upon,
  Both of them speak of something that is gone:
                        The Pansy at my feet
                        Doth the same tale repeat:
  Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
  Where is it now, the glory and the dream?

  

  

  

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• Lines 58-66

  Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
  The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
                        Hath had elsewhere its setting,
                           And cometh from afar:
                        Not in entire forgetfulness,
                        And not in utter nakedness,
  But trailing clouds of glory do we come
                        From God, who is our home:
  Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

  

  

  

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• Lines 67-77

  Shades of the prison-house begin to close
                        Upon the growing Boy
  But he
  Beholds the light, and whence it flows,
                        He sees it in his joy;
  The Youth, who daily farther from the east
                        Must travel, still is Nature's Priest,
                        And by the vision splendid
                        Is on his way attended;
  At length the Man perceives it die away,
  And fade into the light of common day.

  

  

  

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• Lines 78-85

  Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own;
  Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind,
                        And, even with something of a Mother's mind,
                        And no unworthy aim,
  The homely Nurse doth all she can
  To make her foster child, her Inmate Man,
                        Forget the glories he hath known,
  And that imperial palace whence he came.

  

  

  

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• Lines 86-99

  Behold the Child among his new-born blisses,
  A six years' Darling of a pygmy size!
  See, where 'mid work of his own hand he lies,
  Fretted by sallies of his mother's kisses,
  With light upon him from his father's eyes!
  See, at his feet, some little plan or chart,
  Some fragment from his dream of human life,
  Shaped by himself with newly-learned art;
                        A wedding or a festival,
                        A mourning or a funeral;
                           And this hath now his heart,
                        And unto this he frames his song;
                           Then will he fit his tongue
  To dialogues of business, love, or strife;

  

  

  

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• Lines 100-108

                        But it will not be long
                        Ere this be thrown aside,
                        And with new joy and pride
  The little Actor cons another part;
  Filling from time to time his "humorous stage"
  With all the Persons, down to palsied Age,
  That Life brings with her in her equipage;
                        As if his whole vocation
                        Were endless imitation.

  

  

  

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• Lines 109-121

  Thou, whose exterior semblance doth belie
                        Thy Soul's immensity;
  Thou best Philosopher, who yet dost keep
  Thy heritage, thou Eye among the blind,
  That, deaf and silent, read'st the eternal deep,
  Haunted forever by the eternal mind—
                        Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!
                        On whom those truths do rest,
  Which we are toiling all our lives to find,
  In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave;
  Thou, over whom thy Immortality
  Broods like the Day, a Master o'er a Slave,
  A Presence which is not to be put by;

  

  

  

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• Lines 122-129

  Thou little Child, yet glorious in the might
  Of heaven-born freedom on thy being's height,
  Why with such earnest pains dost thou provoke
  The years to bring the inevitable yoke,
  Thus blindly with thy blessedness at strife?
  Full soon thy Soul shall have her earthly freight,
  And custom lie upon thee with a weight,
  Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!

  

  

  

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• Lines 130-139

                        O joy! that in our embers
                        Is something that doth live,
                        That Nature yet remembers
  What was so fugitive!
  The thought of our past years in me doth breed
  Perpetual benediction: not indeed
  For that which is most worthy to be blest;
  Delight and liberty, the simple creed
  Of Childhood, whether busy or at rest,
  With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast—

  

  

  

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• Lines 140-148

                        Not for these I raise
                        The song of thanks and praise;
                  But for those obstinate questionings
                  Of sense and outward things,
                  Fallings from us, vanishings;
                  Blank misgivings of a Creature
  Moving about in worlds not realised,
  High instincts before which our mortal Nature
  Did tremble like a guilty Thing surprised;

  

  

  

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• Lines 149-161

                        But for those first affections,
                        Those shadowy recollections,
                  Which, be they what they may,
  Are yet the fountain light of all our day,
  Are yet a master light of all our seeing;
                  Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make
  Our noisy years seem moments in the being
  Of the eternal Silence: truths that wake,
                  To perish never;
  Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour,
                        Nor Man nor Boy,
  Nor all that is at enmity with joy,
  Can utterly abolish or destroy!

  

  

  

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• Lines 162-168

                  Hence in 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 mighty waters rolling evermore.

  

  

  

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• Lines 169-175

  Then sing, ye Birds, sing, sing a joyous song!
                        And let the young Lambs bound
                        As to the tabor's sound!
  We in thought will join your throng,
                        Ye that pipe and ye that play,
                        Ye that through your hearts today
                        Feel the gladness of the May!

  

  

  

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• Lines 176-187

  What though the radiance which was once so bright
  Be now forever taken from my sight,
                  Though nothing can bring back the hour
  Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
                        We will grieve not, rather find
                        Strength in what remains behind;
                        In the primal sympathy
                        Which having been must ever be;
                        In the soothing thoughts that spring
                        Out of human suffering;
                        In the faith that looks through death,
  In years that bring the philosophic mind.

  

  

  

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• Lines 188-192

  And O, ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves,
  Forebode not any severing of our loves!
  Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might;
  I only have relinquished one delight
  To live beneath your more habitual sway.

  

  

  

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• Lines 193-200

  I love the Brooks which down their channels fret,
  Even more than when I tripped lightly as they;
  The innocent brightness of a newborn Day
                        Is lovely yet;
  The Clouds that gather round the setting sun
  Do take a sober colouring from an eye
  That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality;
  Another race hath been, and other palms are won.

  

  

  

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• Lines 201-204

  Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
  Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
  To me the meanest flower that blows can give
  Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

  

  

  

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“Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” Symbols

• 

  Spring

  Spring symbolizes everything the speaker celebrates in this poem: new life, resurrection, and immortality. Of course, this speaker is far from the first person to see spring this way: the idea that spring is a symbolic time for resurrections, revelations, and redemptions is so old that it turns up in holidays from Easter to Passover to Ramadan.

  As the speaker enjoys the May morning around him, everything he sees suggests beautiful new life. All the living creatures he encounters—lambs, birds, flowers, babies—are young, lovely, and joyful. They remind him that new life returns every year after the long "death" of winter—and suggest to him that the human soul is also like the spring, rising again into "glory" after death.

  These springy images might carry an even deeper symbolic meaning for Wordsworth, who developed a deepening Christian faith during the years he was working on this poem. Those "lambs," for instance, might evoke Christ himself, sometimes known as the sacrificial "lamb of God," who dies only to be reborn into eternal life.

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• 

  Light

  Light is this poem's most powerful and complex symbol, standing for holiness, deep understanding, guidance, truth, and joy.

  To this speaker, the "celestial light" he remembers seeing in the natural world as a child is an image of the very deepest truth: that every human soul is immortal, part of a heavenly eternity. Children see the world in that light, the speaker argues, because they're newly arrived from heaven; the glow they see in nature is a souvenir they bring to earth from paradise. Alas, as people grow up, that light fades, and everyone gets left in the dark "shades" of habit instead.

  But that light is still a powerful reminder of God's "glorious" beauty and benevolence. Even though the speaker only has memories of the light he saw in childhood to go by now, he still imagines it as the "master light" that guides him, helping him to have faith that he'll return to "God, who is our home" one day.

  To see the world in this beautiful light is both to have a deep knowledge of the way the universe works, and to feel blessed by that knowledge.

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“Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language

• Assonance

  Moments of assonance help to give the poem its poignant music. (We've only highlighted a selection of assonant moments here; there's much more to find!)

  For instance, listen to the vowel sounds in the poem's final lines:

  Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
  To me the meanest flower that blows can give
  Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

  The plaintive long /ee/ sound that threads through these final lines evokes the speaker's emotion and insight as he communes with a flower. That /ee/ links "me," the speaker, to that "mean[]" (or lowly) flower—and also to his "fears," his "tears," and his "deep[est]" insights.

  The sounds thus reflect what's going on here: the speaker is feeling an intense connection with even this most ordinary little bit of nature, seeing himself in it—and thus coming into contact with a profound truth about life. Through this flower, he can feel that nature, the "human heart," and eternity are all mysteriously linked.

  A tiny spark of assonance does similar work earlier on in the poem, too:

  Not in entire forgetfulness,
  And not in utter nakedness,
  But trailing clouds of glory do we come
  From God, who is our home:

  There are just a couple of echoing vowels here: the /ay/ of "nakedness" and "trailing," and the /uh/ of "come" and "from." But those subtle repetitions helps to create the effect that the speaker is launching into the heavens in these lines. First, he leaps from the humility of "utter nakedness" to the splendor of "trailing clouds of glory"; then, he suggests the ease and simplicity with which souls "come / From God."

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• Apostrophe

  

  

  

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• Consonance

  

  

  

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• Caesura

  

  

  

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• Imagery

  

  

  

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• Personification

  

  

  

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• Repetition

  

  

  

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• Metaphor

  

  

  

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• Aporia

  

  

  

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• Allusion

  

  

  

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• Parallelism

  

  

  

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“Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” 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.

• Grove
• Apparelled
• Celestial
• Glory
• Of Yore
• Whereso'er
• Doth
• Fair
• Where'er
• Tabor
• Utterance
• Cataracts
• Steep
• Wrong
• Throng
• Jollity
• Blessed
• Jubilee
• Coronal
• Adorning
• Culling
• Visionary
• Shades
• Whence
• Attended
• Yearnings
• Homely
• Nurse
• Inmate
• Imperial
• Pygmy
• Fretted
• Sallies
• Frames
• Ere
• Cons
• Humorous Stage
• Persons
• Palsied
• Equipage
• Vocation
• Semblance
• Belie
• Earnest Pains
• Yoke
• Earthly Freight
• Embers
• Fugitive
• Perpetual Benediction
• Creed
• Obstinate
• Misgivings
• Listlessness
• Mad Endeavour
• Enmity
• Hither, Thither
• Sport
• Primal Sympathy
• Philosophic
• Forebode
• Relinquished
• Your More Habitual Sway
• Fret
• Tripped
• Sober
• The Meanest Flower that Blows

• A little cluster of trees.

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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”

• Form

  This poem is, as its title suggests, an ode—an irregularly-shaped poem that honors a particular subject. Other famous odes from the Romantic era sung the praises of nightingales, winds, and autumn. The subject here isn't as tangible as any of those things, though. Instead, this poem celebrates "intimations of immortality," or hints of eternal life—an altogether more mysterious and slippery idea.

  A complex subject demands a complex form. This ode is built from eleven stanzas, all with varied rhyme schemes, patterns of meter, and lengths. Each of these stanzas deals with a different angle on Wordsworth's central questions about childhood, memory, and the soul, and each builds on the stanza that came before it.

  • For instance, stanza 7 is all about the way that little children play pretend, acting out every stage of adult life.
  • Those vivid, concrete observations lead into the more abstract philosophical question the speaker asks in stanza 8: why on earth are children so eager to grow up, when growing up means they'll lose their intense connection with the divine?

  The free-form shape here thus helps the poem to feel like a record of developing thoughts—which, in fact, it was! Wordsworth wrote the first four stanzas of this poem—stanzas that end in some big questions—in 1802. The rest of the poem emerged slowly as he thought deeply about what the answers to those questions might be. He didn't complete the remaining seven stanzas until 1804. This poem's thoughtful, evolving shape reflects how seriously Wordsworth took the questions he's asking here—and how profoundly he loved the complex beauties this ode praises.

• Meter

  Like a lot of odes, the Immortality Ode plays with all different kinds of meter, shaping its rhythms to the emotions it describes rather than trying to fit those emotions into a single pattern. The most common foot is the iamb, a foot with an unstressed-stressed, or da-DUM, syllable pattern, but line length varies wildly; some lines have just two stresses, and others five!

  Moving from long lines to short lines, iambs to trochees, trimeter to hexameter, this poem refuses to be pinned down. The wide variation in the poem's rhythms helps readers to feel and think right alongside the speaker.

  For instance, consider the way that shorter and longer lines work together in the second stanza, in which the speaker describes how—even though he can still appreciate nature's beauty—he knows that he can no longer see the special shine on things he remembers from his childhood.

  The speaker starts this stanza with short lines of iambic trimeter—that is, lines of three iambs, like this:

  The Rain- | bow comes | and goes,
  And love- | ly is | the Rose,
  The Moon | doth with | delight

  But then, he breaks in with a longer line of iambic tetrameter (four iambs):

  Look round | her when | the heavens | are bare,

  (Note that the word "heavens" would be compressed into a single syllable in Wordsworth's accent: "heav'ns.")

  The changing shape of these lines mirror the speaker's experience. First, in short, self-contained lines, he contemplates one beautiful thing at a time: a shimmering rainbow, a single "Rose." Then, in a longer passage, he looks delightedly around at a whole night sky—just like the personified "Moon" he describes.

  At the end of this stanza, when he turns from these beautiful sights to sad thoughts, his lines stretch out even more:

  But yet | I know, | where'er | I go,
  That there | hath passed | away | a glor- | y from | the earth.

  That long line of iambic hexameter (six iambs) at the end of the stanza is markedly different from all the shorter descriptions around it. This movement from short impressions to this longer conclusion evokes exactly what the speaker is describing. While he's still capable of seeing the beauty in nature, his experiences of that beauty feel pretty brief and simple. It's his sense of lost "glory" that really takes up space in his mind and heart.

  Meter reflects meaning in this way all through the poem, helping the reader to sense the speaker's emotions through his pace and his rhythms.

• Rhyme Scheme

  The rhyme scheme of the Immortality Ode shapeshifts across the poem. Rather than sticking to a single pattern of rhyme, Wordsworth uses different rhyme schemes in every stanza, shaping his sounds to fit the ideas and feelings he explores.

  For instance, look at the way his rhymes work in the first stanza. The scheme runs like this:

  ABABACDDC

  Now, take a look at how those rhymes line up with what the speaker's talking about:

  • In the sing-song, back-and-forth ABABA section, he's describing how the world looked to him in childhood, when all of nature seemed to shine with "celestial light."
  • But when the new C rhyme enters, so does a new idea: that the speaker can't see things this way any more, now that he's grown up.
  • And as he describes looking desperately around for that lost beauty, the CDDC rhymes evoke what he's doing. Like his searching eyes, his rhymes swing from side to side, and end up right back where they started: no matter where he looks, he can't rediscover the beauty he used to see.

  This kind of sensitive, meaningful rhyme appears across the whole poem, right up to the end. Take a look at what happens in the poem's last eight lines, when the speaker discusses the consolations he finds in his adult way of seeing, the beauty he understands differently now that he has a grown-up perspective on the world. There, the rhymes run like this:

  ABBACDCD

  This pattern of rhyme mirrors the first stanza, repeating a similar scheme in reverse. That mirroring suggests that, while the speaker has lost his childhood vision, he's also found a new way to feel the world's beauty—one that's still lovely, balanced, and harmonious, just different.

“Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” Speaker

• The first-person speaker of this poem seems likely to be Wordsworth himself. "Intimations of Immortality" deals with themes that Wordsworth thought and wrote about all his life: memory, childhood, holiness, and natural beauty. This poem's epigraph is even a quotation from one of Wordsworth's earlier poems on similar ideas.

  No matter whether one reads the speaker as Wordsworth, he's certainly Wordsworthian: a poetic soul who feels as deeply as he thinks. A grown and thoughtful adult, he's still wistful for the blazing, glorious way he saw the world in childhood, when everything seemed "apparelled in celestial light." But he's also able to use his mature "philosophic mind" to reflect on how his childhood visions inform his adult belief in the soul's immortality.

  Both his childhood memories and his adult reflections are built on his intense feelings about natural beauty. This speaker is deeply in love with the glory of nature, seeing it not just as a source of comfort but a reflection of heaven itself. In this impassioned and sincere speaker's eyes, the whole world can be read as a prelude to a luminous eternity.

“Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” Setting

• This poem is set in a brilliant spring in the English countryside: a "sweet May morning" when the whole world seems full of fresh life. The joy the speaker sees in the leaping lambs, singing birds, and laughing children reminds him of his own childhood, when the world looked even more intensely beautiful to him than it does now.

  The natural world isn't just a pretty backdrop for the speaker's thoughts, but the origin of this whole poem. Seeing nature as a mirror of heaven itself, the speaker draws strength and consolation from the beauty, freshness, and new life of the spring. Even if the world doesn't look as wondrous to him now as it did when he was a child, his memories of seeing a divine light in nature can still remind him of his deep-down faith that the human soul both comes from and returns to a beautiful eternity with "God, who is our home."

Literary and Historical Context of “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”

Literary Context

William Wordsworth (1770-1850) drafted the Immortality Ode over many years. He wrote the first four stanzas in 1802, slowly added to them, and published a first version of the complete poem in his 1807 collection Poems, in Two Volumes. He'd go on to revise and reprint this poem many times. Many scholars see this poem as Wordsworth's masterpiece and final word, the highest expression of his philosophy.

This poem isn't just an exploration of everything dear to Wordsworth, but also a core sample straight from the heart of English Romanticism. The ideas this poem deals with—the human soul, the transcendent beauty of nature, the importance of deep feeling—are hallmarks of the Romantic period. In this early-19th-century movement, artists and thinkers reacted against Enlightenment ideals of clarity, elegance, and reason, embracing mystery, emotion, and earthy poetic forms like the ballad instead.

But not every poet readers now think of as a Romantic dealt with these ideas in the same way. For instance, when Wordsworth shared the first few verses of this poem with his friend and collaborator Coleridge, Coleridge found enough to disagree with in its philosophy that he wrote a whole poem in reply: "Dejection: an Ode," which argues that the ability to appreciate the beauty of the world is a more complex emotional knot to untie than Wordsworth's poem allows for.

Much-discussed and much-quoted, the Immortality Ode is still widely regarded as one of the most powerful and important poems in English literature.

Historical Context

While Wordsworth was slowly becoming a devout Christian during the years when he was working on this poem, the religious beliefs that he describes here—that nature is holy and the soul is eternal—go a little outside the standard Christian framework. Instead, they have a lot to do with a nondenominational spiritual belief that became popular in the early 19th century: pantheism.

Pantheism is the belief that God is in everything, and everything is in God. To a pantheist, nature isn't just beautiful because God made it, or because it reflects the divine, but because it's an actual manifestation of God. This school of thought was never so much a full-blown religious movement as a philosophy, but it was one that many poets and thinkers of the Romantic era felt deeply.

Many 19th-century Western thinkers in particular saw pantheism as an antidote to institutionalized Christian dogma, which they felt had become oppressive and legalistic; see William Blake for just one fiery critique of Christian authoritarianism. Pantheism allowed for deep spiritual feelings without Christian cultural baggage.

Pantheism and Romanticism both responded to sweeping 19th-century cultural changes like the Industrial Revolution. As the economic landscape of Europe became more and more mechanized and populations began to shift from the countryside to the city, many thinkers feared that people had begun to see nature as a mere resource, a wilderness to be mastered and stripped of its wealth. Reading nature as one of the faces of God, pantheism resisted a purely mechanical, rational, and exploitative worldview.

The philosophy that Wordsworth espouses in this poem splits the difference between a more traditional Christian idea of God as a transcendent creator and a pantheistic idea of God-in-everything. To this poem's speaker, God can appear to be in everything—but only to children, whose souls have been hanging out with God in heaven more recently than adults' have.

More “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” Resources

• External Resources

  • The Poem Aloud — Listen to the actor Toby Jones give a powerful reading of the poem.

  • The Poem in Wordsworth's Hand — See a draft of the poem in Wordsworth's own handwriting, and learn more about how he wrote it.

  • My Heart Leaps Up — Read an analysis of the poem that Wordsworth quotes as his epigraph here—his earlier (and much shorter and simpler) exploration of the same themes. Compare and contrast!

  • A Brief Biography — Read a short biography of Wordsworth, and find links to more of his poems.

  • A Lecture on Wordsworth — Listen to Professor Jonathan Bate, an important scholar of Romanticism, explaining why Wordsworth's poetry was so revolutionary.

• LitCharts on Other Poems by William Wordsworth

  • A Complaint

  • A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal

  • Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802

  • Expostulation and Reply

  • Extract from The Prelude (Boat Stealing)

  • It Is a Beauteous Evening, Calm and Free

  • I Travelled Among Unknown Men

  • I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

  • Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey

  • Lines Written in Early Spring

  • London, 1802

  • Mutability

  • My Heart Leaps Up

  • Nuns Fret Not at Their Convent’s Narrow Room

  • She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways

  • She was a Phantom of Delight

  • The Solitary Reaper

  • The Tables Turned

  • The World Is Too Much With Us

  • Three Years She Grew in Sun and Shower

  • To a Snowdrop

  • We Are Seven