Intimations of Immortality

Question 1

Context

Answer 1

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.

Question 2

The Soul’s Immortality

Answer 2

• 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.

Question 3

Childhood wonder and the pain of growing up

Answer 3

• 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.”

Question 4

The Consoldations of Memory

Answer 4

• 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.

Question 5

Beauty and divinity of nature

Answer 5

• 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.

Question 6

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.

Answer 6

• 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.
• 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.

Question 7

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;

Answer 7

• The second stanza starts to show readers how this poem will develop:
• Each stanza builds on the one before it, but it’s also a self-contained thought.
  And each stanza uses different flavors of meter and rhyme to shape that thought.
  It’s as though the speaker is holding up his central, complex question—why does our beautiful childhood vision disappear?—and examining it from many angles.
  Here, he begins by presenting little “snapshots” of the beauty of nature in short, straightforward lines of iambic trimeter. That is, he uses lines of three iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, like this:

The Rain- | bow comes | and goes,
And love- | ly is | the Rose,

There’s something matter-of-fact about these short lines. Rainbows indeed shimmer, fading in and out as one watches them; roses are indeed just plain “lovely.”

Question 8

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,

Answer 8

• In the first two stanzas, the speaker looked back: first into his childhood, when everything seemed to shine, and then into his adult experiences of nature’s beauty (and nature’s loss of that former shine). This stanza changes the scene: now, it’s “Now,” and the speaker is writing from the midst of a beautiful spring.

Everything around him, on this gorgeous May morning, seems happy just to be alive:

• The birds aren’t just singing, but singing a “joyous song,” and the newborn lambs are hopping around as if they’re dancing to a “tabor,” a little drum.
  The lively imagery here suggests that the spring itself has its own kind of music, a beautiful melody that every living thing dances to.
  Every living thing, that is, but the speaker. All “alone,” he has a “thought of grief”—the very “grief” over his lost childhood vision that he’s been examining over the course of the past two stanzas. It’s not just his inability to see “celestial light” in nature that’s making him sad here: it’s his awareness that he’s set apart from the beauty of the spring day by his sadness.
• Those dramatic trumpets are a wake-up call. To grieve amongst all this natural beauty, the speaker suggests, would be to “wrong” (or insult) the spring itself. He can’t just give himself up to mourning his beautiful childhood visions forever. He still has to be a part of life, even if he’s lost something deeply precious to him—and one of life’s most distinctive qualities is that it goes on.

Question 9

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,

Answer 9

• The first things he notices as he returns his attention to the day are the “echoes” that make their way through the surrounding mountains, and the “winds” that seem to blow towards him from the “fields of sleep.”
  “Echoes,” of course, are repetitions of a sound that has already ended: audible memories.
  And the breeze from those “fields of sleep” might be a gust from the dreamlike world the speaker remembers from his youth.
  Thus, even if he’s accepted that “the glory and the freshness of a dream” has vanished from this landscape for him, he’s still haunted by the thought of that glory.
  But he starts to get swept up in the beauty around him, too. The whole world starts to seem like a single living creature to him:
• He feels that “all the earth is gay,” or full of energetic joy.
  The “land” and the “sea” alike are delighted, and “every Beast” is celebrating the spring.
  The speaker’s intense personification here suggests that, to him, the world seems not just beautiful, but conscious of its own beauty. The whole globe seems animated by a single shared life force. The “heart of May” is beating in everything.
• At last, the speaker makes a direct apostrophe to the first fellow human he’s encountered in this landscape, a “happy Shepherd-boy” whose “shouts” of laughter or delight might be creating those “echoes” he hears. The speaker eggs him on: “let me hear thy shouts,” he cries. It’s as if he’s getting involved in the shared joy of the world around him, not exactly as a full participant, but as a spectator, cheering from the sidelines.

Question 10

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?

Answer 10

• In the beginning of the fourth stanza, the speaker tries to fully feel the joy of the May morning that surrounds him. But now, at the end of that stanza, there’s another “But.”
• Yes, the speaker says, the world in general is celebrating the lovely new life of spring. But there’s one “Tree” and one “Field” in particular that catch his eye, and seem to “speak” to him, reminding him of “something that is gone.” In other words, the speaker’s attention gets pulled away from big, general ideas about springtime and renewal to personal, specific memories—memories of seeing that special “Tree” and that special “Field” through the lens of childhood “glory.” His capitalization here make the Tree and Field feel even more distinct, as if they’re named individuals.
• His rhyme scheme here evokes how insistent—and how elusive—his memories feel. Take a look at the way the rhymes move in lines 51-53:These three rhymes in a row call a lot of attention to themselves—just as the Tree and the Field call to the speaker. But there’s also something just a little off here. “One” is a slant rhyme with “upon” and “gone,” not a perfect rhyme. That slight difference speaks to the difference the speaker feels as he looks on that Tree and that Field now. He can remember exactly how beautiful and powerful his visions of these lovely things once was: but something is just different, these days. Something has been lost.
• These moments of aporia take the speaker right back to the longing he reflected on at the beginning of the poem. The beauty of the spring just can’t tear him away from wondering where his inspired childhood vision disappeared to.
  Those questions also mark the end of the first section of the poem. Wordsworth wrote these first four stanzas in 1802. The rest of the poem records a process of thought that took him years; the remaining seven stanzas weren’t completed until 1804. The rest of the poem will be a long, meditative answer to the questions he struggles with here.

Question 11

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,

Answer 11

• The first four stanzas of the poem have explored the speaker’s experiences: his memories of childhood’s shining visions, and his present-day longing for those visions even in the midst of a beautiful spring. The fifth stanza sharply changes tack. Where the previous stanzas recorded impressions and asked questions, here the speaker begins with a bold philosophical statement: an explanation of where that glorious childhood vision comes from.
• The human soul, the speaker says, doesn’t appear out of nowhere. It’s eternal. And before it’s incarnated on this planet, it lives in “God, who is our home.” In other words, souls leave an immortal life with God in heaven to come down to earth. And when they first get here, they still have memories of the heavenly eternity from which they came—memories that change the way they see the everyday world.
• In fact, they don’t just have memories. They come to earth “trailing clouds of glory.” This mysterious moment of imagery is also a paradox: a “cloud” of shining “glory” feels like a contradiction in terms. But it’s a strikingly beautiful one. The reader might imagine white-gold clouds streaming like the tail of a meteor behind the descending soul.

Question 12

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,

Answer 12

• Children, the speaker has just finished saying, see the world in the light of heaven. But that kind of seeing doesn’t last long. As soon as a person is born, they start moving “farther from the east”—that is, they start to grow up, and every day takes them a little further away from the sunlit eternity they came from. The longer a person lives, it follows, the more the “shades of the prison-house”—that is, the metaphorical shadowy “prison” of routine and habit—close in and block out the “clouds of glory” souls bring with them to earth.
• But the “growing Boy” and the “Youth” (or teenager) retain some heavenly seeing, for a while. It’s only the unfortunate “Man” who must finally suffer as his vision “fade[s] into the light of common day.”
  The many rich metaphors in this passage help the reader to feel the real emotional weight of this change:
• To this speaker, the “Youth” who can still perceive some divine light is “Nature’s Priest,” a holy man in a church made out of the whole world.
  And the adult feeling that life is routine and ordinary isn’t just a disappointment: it’s a “prison-house,” a place where convicts are locked away from the light. There’s perhaps even a sense of guilt in this metaphor, as if growing up is somehow a crime against heavenly truth.

Question 13

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

Answer 13

• The speaker presents adulthood as a time of loss and sorrow—and almost a crime against the beauty of his childhood visions—but he’s resigned to this inevitable change. It’s heartbreaking to lose one’s heavenly way of seeing, he says, but it’s the natural way of things.
• That idea of a natural, inevitable, and even gentle loss turns up in this stanza in the form of a personified Earth. “Earth,” in this speaker’s imagination, tries to make up for all that people lose when they come to live with her; she’s a kindly adoptive mother, caring for “her foster child,” humanity. It’s Earth’s job, the speaker seems to say, to distract people from their memories of heaven, and Earth longs to welcome them with “pleasures of her own.”

Question 14

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,

Answer 14

• The parallelism here suggests that the seemingly opposite events the little boy acts out—joy on the one hand, grief on the other—are really just two sides of the same coin. To this innocent child, all the experiences he’ll go through in life are part of the same fun game, interesting scenes to play out in anticipation. Thinking back on the previous stanza, the reader might get the impression that this kind of game is how “Earth” starts to get people’s attention, drawing them away from their memories of heaven.
• He’s asking readers to look at a little “Child” as he plays on the floor. This kid is the picture of sweetness, absolutely lovable: he’s a “six years’ Darling,” and he’s the apple of his parents’ eyes.
• In fact, perhaps there’s even an echo of earlier ideas about the Earth as a “mother” and God as a divine light here: this little boy is “fretted” (which could mean either annoyed or completely covered) with his mother’s endless kisses, and his father’s adoring gaze shines “light” upon him. Even this everyday family situation has echoes of the bigger, grander themes the speaker has been looking at.

Question 15

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”

Answer 15

• As soon as the little boy picks up one game, he tosses it aside for a new one. As he plays, he’s trying out every single episode of human life ahead of time.
• The speaker draws his metaphors here from the theater. The little boy is an “Actor,” and he’s populating his “stage” with all the roles a person plays in their life. The idea that the world is a theater and people are actors alludes to the famous “seven ages of man” speech in Shakespeare’s As You Like It:
• In this speech, the melancholy (and rather cynical) nobleman Jaques imagines that “all the world’s a stage,” and lays out the “roles” people play over time, from the innocent baby to the decrepit senior.
  If we live to old age, Jaques gloomily concludes, we only end up “sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”
  This allusion suggests that the speaker finds this child’s game both touching and a little sad. Playing out the game of life all the way “down to palsied Age” means that this tiny kid is coming into contact with the painful reality that all human life leads to old age (if we’re lucky) and death (no matter what). And the child is meeting this truth long before he has the capacity to really understand what that means. To him, it’s all a game.

Question 16

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

Answer 16

• All these impressive titles return to the poem’s central ideas about the power of childhood vision. Everything the speaker says about this child here touches on the child’s ability to see, to perceive, and to contact the inborn wisdom he’s brought to earth from his immortal soul’s recent time in heaven.
• This might feel familiar to readers who’ve read the first chapters of the biblical book of Genesis (or one of the many, many books that retell that story, like Paradise Lost or His Dark Materials). It’s a version of the Eden story, in which the first humans eat the forbidden fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, become self-conscious, anger God, and get cast out of Paradise.
• Growing up, the speaker suggests, is just this kind of “fall from grace.” Gaining adult understandings of the world means losing one’s more primal (and truthful) contact with the divine. It’s the child’s very innocence that makes him a powerful “Seer.”

Question 17

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?

Answer 17

• The implication here is that part of childhood’s glorious vision is being innocent about that vision. In other words, the child doesn’t even know that he has a special power to see and understand divine light.
• Sight has been an important symbol all through this poem, representing the instinctive childhood understanding of the divine that the speaker longs for so intensely. Here, the speaker delves even deeper into that symbolism. While the child is in one way an “Eye among the blind” in his ability to see this light, he’s also “blindly” blundering away from that ability in his impatience to be a grown-up.
• The polyptoton here suggests that childhood is a tragically ironic time: the child can see the light of God, but can’t see that he can see! His innocence both allows him to contact the divine and means that he doesn’t know he’s going to lose that contact.

Question 18

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—

Answer 18

• The speaker has been lost in sorrowful thought about the way that children lose their shining vision before they even know they have it. In this stanza, his mood seems sharply to change: “O joy!” he begins.
• His joy comes from the thought that, even though everyone loses their divine vision as they grow, they can still remember it. He describes this kind of memory in richly metaphorical language, imagining the adult soul as the “embers” of childhood’s glorious fire: the flames might have died down, he suggests, but there’s still a glow somewhere deep inside.
• Those embers stay alive with the help of a personified “Nature”—which here can mean both human nature and the natural world. This line might remind readers of that special “Tree” and “Field” back in lines 51-52, parts of nature which do seem to “remember” some special experience that the speaker shared with them.
• But it might also suggest that there’s something about the soul’s “nature” that preserves childhood memories. Here, the soul’s “nature” and external “Nature” seem to be intimately connected, sharing the common goal of helping adults to remember their youthful visions. The personification here makes that point even clearer: Nature, like the soul, seems to have its own thoughts and intentions.
• With Nature’s assistance, the speaker is able to look back on his childhood memories with intense gratitude, blessing them with “perpetual benediction.” But he’s not thinking of the kinds of memories the reader might expect:
• It’s not the simple pleasures of childhood he has in mind, not the “delight and liberty” of being a fun-loving little kid with no responsibilities.
  It’s not even childhood optimism, the “new-fledged hope” of youthful dreams and ambitions.
  These pleasures are certainly wonderful and “worthy to be blest,” he observes—but the memories that give him real “joy” are a different kind.
  He’ll spend the rest of this stanza exploring the nature of those sacred memories.

Question 19

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!

Answer 19

• Once someone understood those “truths,” the speaker goes on, they’ll never leave them:
• Neither “listlessness, nor mad endeavour”—that is, neither lazing around nor frantically working—can completely overwrite the deep insight one gains from childhood memory.
  Not even “all that is at enmity with joy”—the forces of evil and misery themselves—can take that “fountain light” away.
  This is a major revolution in the speaker’s thought. The first eight stanzas of the poem were all about the tragic, irretrievable loss of childhood vision. Now, the speaker stands up to make a claim for the power of that vision—even after it’s gone. Merely remembering childhood visions of glory and mystery is enough to support people through “all our day.”
• And in fact, there’s something profound, moving, and important about losing childhood vision. The speaker’s guiding light here isn’t his childhood vision itself: it’s his memory of it. In other words: he has to let that vision go in order to understand what it really means, and value it for what it really was.

Question 20

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!

Answer 20

• In stanza 9, the speaker came to a richer and more mature understanding of his sorrows. Losing childhood vision, he found, is inevitable and painful—but remembering childhood vision connects
• Just as before, the speaker knows that he’s not in exactly the same position as the joyful young creatures around him: he can only join them “in thought,” not with his whole being. But he’s also not alone. It’s not just he who will join those creatures in his mind, but “we”: every single grown-up reading this poem is invited to “feel the gladness of the May” along with him.
• In other words: this speaker’s thoughts have made him feel at home in the world, accompanied by all the other human souls who have gone through exactly the same loss that he’s suffered.
• In accepting (and appreciating) the ways in which his life has changed as he’s gotten older—and in learning to put his faith in his memories of the “immortal sea” of eternity—the speaker has found a new, richer, deeper way to experience adult life.adults with profound truths about life (and the eternal afterlife).
• Equipped with this new wisdom, he returns yet again to exactly where he was at the beginning of the poem: in the countryside, on a fresh May morning. Once more, he turns to the joyful, dancing creatures around him and eggs them on—but this time, his heart’s really in it; at last, he’s caught up in the world, at ease with the way things are.

[- Just as before, the speaker knows that he’s not in exactly the same position as the joyful young creatures around him: he can only join them “in thought,” not with his whole being. But he’s also not alone. It’s not just he who will join those creatures in his mind, but “we”: every single grown-up reading this poem is invited to “feel the gladness of the May” along with him.

• In other words: this speaker’s thoughts have made him feel at home in the world, accompanied by all the other human souls who have gone through exactly the same loss that he’s suffered.
• In accepting (and appreciating) the ways in which his life has changed as he’s gotten older—and in learning to put his faith in his memories of the “immortal sea” of eternity—the speaker has found a new, richer, deeper way to experience adult life.

Question 21

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.

Answer 21

• At last, the speaker begins his final stanza, using apostrophe by directly addressing the landscape itself. Often, in this poem, he’s spoken for everyone, in grand philosophical statements about the nature of all human life. At the end of the poem, though, he gets intensely personal.
• All through the poem, the speaker has lamented his lost visions. But here, he hopes that his connection to the places he saw those visions—the natural world—will never truly be “sever[ed].” Deep down, he says, he still feels all the glory of nature; he’s only really given up always seeing that glory, living under its “more habitual sway” (or more constant power).
• And the love he feels for nature seems to be mutual. It’s not his love that he hopes won’t be cut off, but “our loves,” a sense of deep connection in which the “Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves” love him right back. There’s an echo here of all the times he’s personified nature before, imagining it as a conscious force that shares the “gladness of the May.”
• This is a subtly different angle on the problem the speaker has been grappling with. Before, he explored the idea that, in childhood, people saw nature through the “clouds of glory” they brought with them from heaven. Here, he seems to suggest that some of that glory lives inside the landscape, ready to reveal itself even to weary adult eyes—just not as readily as it reveals itself to children.

Question 22

Spring

Answer 22

• 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.

Question 23

Light

Answer 23

• 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.

Question 24

Form

Answer 24

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.

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.

Question 25

Meter

Answer 25

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.

Question 26

Speaker

Answer 26

• 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.

Question 27

Setting

Answer 27

• 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.”

Question 28

Literary context

Answer 28

• 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.

Question 29

Historical context

Answer 29

• 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