Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood

By William Wordsworth

 

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.

Text of the Poem.

The child is father of the man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.
(Wordsworth, “My Heart Leaps Up”)

There wasa 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 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 past away a glory from the earth.

 

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;

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.

 

Ye blessèd 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 fulness 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!

—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?

 

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!

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.

 

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.

 

Behold the Child among his new-born blisses,

A six years’ Darling of a pigmy 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-learn{e}d 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;

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.

 

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 for ever 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;

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!

 

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:—

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:

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!

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.

 

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 to-day

Feel the gladness of the May!

What though the radiance which was once so bright

Be now for ever 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.

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.

I love the Brooks which down their channels fret,

Even more than when I tripped lightly as they;

The innocent brightness of a new-born 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.

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.

 

 

“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, 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 from 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, 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 have 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 every day 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, and 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.