Critical Analysis: ODE: Intimations of Immorality from recollections of early

childhood

Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’ by William

Wordsworth is a beautiful and complex poem in which the speaker discusses
emotions associated with time and aging. The mood of the poem varies greatly
from one section to the next. At some points, the speaker is joyously celebrating
the life around him, at other times, he’s mourning what he lost and cannot find
again. The tone mimics the mood in most cases. Wordsworth helps it along
through his choice of language and the arrangement of syntax.
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

Setting of the poem:

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.

Epigraph
An epigraph, in literature, is a phrase, quote, or any short piece of text that comes
before a longer document (a poem, story, book, etc

The child is father of the man;

And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety

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.

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!
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 | de |light

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

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

Rhyme Scheme
The poem is composed of 206 lines. There are eleven stanzas inside the poem,
each varying from one another. The poem is a free verse. Because there is no
specific rhyme scheme and poetic meter. Although its first part follows the ABAB
rhyme scheme with iambic pentameter but as the poem further proceeds, the
rhyming and rhythmic patterns become inconsistent. Such inconsistency is due to
the change of the mode from different moments in the poem

Literary Devices
Wordsworth makes use of several poetic techniques in ‘Ode: Intimations of
Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’. These include alliteration,
caesura, metaphor, personification, anaphora, and enjambment. Alliteration is the
repetition of consonant sounds at the beginning of multiple words in a series. For
example, the sound of /s/ in, "Then sing, ye birds, sing, sing a joyous song"(Stanza
10, 1st line). The first, alliteration, occurs when words are used in succession, or
at least appear close together, and begin with the same letter. For example,
“Shouts,” “shouts,” and “Shepherd” in the last line of stanza three or “hath” and
“heart” in line eleven of the seventh stanza.
Another important technique commonly used in poetry is enjambment. It occurs
when a line is cut off before its natural stopping point. Enjambment forces a
reader down to the next line, and the next, quickly. One has to move forward in
order to comfortably resolve a phrase or sentence. There are examples
throughout the poem, such as in stanza one with the transition between lines
three and four
Assonance is the repetition of vowel or diphthong sounds in one or more words
found close together. There are numerous examples of assonance in this poem, a
few of them are; the sound of /I/ in, "In years that bring the philosophic
mind"(stanza 10, last line)
Symbolism is used to convey the hidden meaning to the writer or listener. It
suggests more than the literal meaning. William Wordsworth has also used
symbolism to convey his message to his readers. For instance, Shades (stanza5,
line 10) is a symbol for darkness and evil, and "Farther from the east"(stanza 5,
line 14) is a symbol for life because the sun rises in the east and sets in the west
which is the end of a day, just like the youth turns into old age.
Another important technique in this poem is personification. It occurs when a
poet imbues a non-human creature or object with human characteristics. There
are numerous examples in the second and third stanzas when the speaker is
delving deep into the workings of the natural world. But, one of the most
interesting examples is in stanza six were the speaker addresses earth as a
“Mother” and “Nurse” determined to strip humankind of its knowledge of the
“Heaven” it originated from

Themes
This is a large poem. So, it carries a variety of themes. Since the poem is about the
topic of immortality, the first and obvious theme is the soul's immortality. The
speaker has a firm belief in the immortality of the human soul. It means the soul
exists long before when one is born and when one dies, one's soul returns back to
its eternal place. When the poet reflects on his perception of nature in his
childhood, he finds it different and more charming because, in his childhood, his
soul has newly arrived from heaven. Therefore, according to him, his childhood
had experienced the heavenly pleasure of nature.
The second theme of this poem is the painful growth that takes the heavenly
pleasures away. The memories of childhood are considered to be more
enchanting than the memories of adulthood. Surely the charm is still there for an
adult but a child finds everything more colourful than a grown-up. As soon as the
speaker grew up, he could not find "celestial" joy in the beauty of Nature.
The third yet concluding theme of this ode is the divinity of Nature that is linked
to a person's memory. The poet wants to suggest that surely, one cannot relish
the childish divinity of Nature when one grows up. But he can still keep the
divinity of Nature alive by remembering the exact joy he used to claim when he
looked at the grass luminated through the sun when he was a child.

Summary:
Ode; Intimations of Immortality" is a long and rather complicated poem about
Wordsworth's connection to nature and his struggle to understand humanity's
failure to recognize the value of the natural world. The poem is elegiac in that it is
about the regret of loss. Wordsworth is saddened by the fact that time has
stripped away much of nature's glory, depriving him of the wild spontaneity he
exhibited as a child.
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.
Nonetheless the speaker feels that a glory has passed away from the earth.

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. He declares that his grief
will no longer wrong the joy of the season, and that all the earth is happy. He
exhorts a shepherd boy to shout and play around him. In the fourth stanza, he
addresses nature’s creatures, and says that his heart participates in their joyful
festival. He says that it would be wrong to feel sad on such a beautiful May
morning, while children play and laugh among the flowers. 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 asks what has happened to “the visionary
gleam”: “Where is it now, the glory and the dream?”
As seen in "The world is too much with us," Wordsworth believes that the loss
stems from being too caught up in material possessions. As we grow up, we spend
more and more time trying to figure out how to attain wealth, all the while
becoming more and more distanced from nature. The poem is characterized by a
strange sense of duality. Even though the world around the speaker is beautiful,
peaceful, and serene, he is sad and angry because of what he (and humanity) has
lost. Because nature is a kind of religion to Wordsworth, he knows that it is wrong
to be depressed in nature's midst and pulls himself out of his depression for as
long as he can.
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. “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 sixth stanza,
the speaker says that the pleasures unique to earth conspire to help the man
forget the “glories” whence he came.
In the seventh stanza especially, Wordsworth examines the transitory state of
childhood. He is pained to see a child's close proximity to nature being replaced
by a foolish acting game in which the child pretends to be an adult before he
actually is. Instead, Wordsworth wants the child to hold onto the glory of nature
that only a person in the flush of youth can appreciate.
In the ninth, tenth and eleventh stanzas Wordsworth manages to reconcile the
emotions and questions he has explored throughout the poem. He realizes that
even though he has lost his awareness of the glory of nature, he had it once, and
can still remember it. The memory of nature's glory will have to be enough to
sustain him, and he ultimately decides that it is. Anything that we have, for
however short a time, can never be taken away completely, because it will forever
be held in our memory.