Ode, Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood by William Wordsworth.
The poem addresses death. Speaking of the poem, Wordsworth said,
"But it was not so much from the source of animal vivacity that my difficulty came, as from a sense of the indomitableness of the spirit within me. I used to brood over the stories of Enoch and Elijah, and almost persuade myself that, whatever might become of others, I should be translated in something of the same way to heaven. With a feeling congenial to this, I was often unable to think of external things as having external existence, and I communed with all that I saw as something not apart from, but inherent in, my own immaterial nature.
As usual, Linda will be our reader. In the preface to the poem, Wordsworth said:
The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.
The opening line, which is often quoted, dominates the theme of the poem. The father teaches the child about mortality, but the child teaches the father about immortality. The father teaches the child to prepare for mortal life; the child teaches the father to prepare for immortality and eternal life. Not only is there a temporal reality, but there is also a spiritual reality. “Natural piety” is a unique phrase. It suggests that our longing for God and heaven and our premortal life is natural, that reverence for God and for the infinite is natural, that the feelings of the Holy Ghost are natural and not artificial and self-imposed.
The poem is written in eleven stanzas.
Stanza I
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.
One can only envy Wordsworth’s’ precocity and childhood memories. Before coming to earth, we lived with God, the father of our spirits in heaven. At birth a veil is drawn over our minds causing us to forget our former home. To Wordsworth those memories do not immediately disappear. They more or less are systematically taught out of him.
Stanza II.
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.
There is beauty in nature, but the former light or former glory has gone. To Wordsworth, the earth too was created near the throne of God but with the fall it lost its former glory. In other words, the earth was moved out of its former celestial sphere and placed in a terrestrial sphere with borrowed light from the sun.
