wordsworth ode intimations of immortality

He sees the boy playing with some imitated fragment of adult life, “some little plan or chart,” imitating “a wedding or a festival” or “a mourning or a funeral.” The speaker imagines that all human life is a similar imitation. In the seventh stanza, the speaker beholds a six-year-old boy and imagines his life, and the love his mother and father feel for him. In the sixth stanza, the speaker says that the pleasures unique to earth conspire to help the man forget the “glories” whence he came. “Heaven,” he says, “lies about us in our infancy!” As children, we still retain some memory of that place, which causes our experience of the earth to be suffused with its magic-but as the baby passes through boyhood and young adulthood and into manhood, he sees that magic die. In the fifth stanza, he proclaims that human life is merely “a sleep and a forgetting”-that human beings dwell in a purer, more glorious realm before they enter the earth. He asks what has happened to “the visionary gleam”: “Where is it now, the glory and the dream?” Nevertheless, a tree and a field that he looks upon make him think of “something that is gone,” and a pansy at his feet does the same. He says that it would be wrong to feel sad on such a beautiful May morning, while children play and laugh among the flowers. In the fourth stanza, he addresses nature’s creatures, and says that his heart participates in their joyful festival.

He exhorts a shepherd boy to shout and play around him. He declares that his grief will no longer wrong the joy of the season, and that all the earth is happy. In the third stanza, the speaker says that, while listening to the birds sing in springtime and watching the young lambs leap and play, he was stricken with a thought of grief but the sound of nearby waterfalls, the echoes of the mountains, and the gusting of the winds restored him to strength. Nonetheless the speaker feels that a glory has passed away from the earth. In the first stanza, the speaker says wistfully that there was a time when all of nature seemed dreamlike to him, “apparelled in celestial light,” and that that time is past “the things I have seen I can see no more.” In the second stanza, he says that he still sees the rainbow, and that the rose is still lovely the moon looks around the sky with delight, and starlight and sunshine are each beautiful.

Wordsworth ode intimations of immortality