Ode intimations of immortality poetry foundation

Lecture Notes 5

- 4 Poems by Wordsworth -

Poem 1: “Composed Upon Westminster Bridge”

Notes:

Although the Romantic poets hated city life, this description of t he city of London is a positive one. Notice the simile: “The city now doth, like a garment, wear the beauty of the morning.” The poet is describing the beauty of London on an early morning as he looks across the skyline. The buildings seem majestic, the air is smokeless, and the whole scene is one of splendor to the poet. The river (Thames River runs through the center of London) glides at its own will because the daily routine of business has not begun yet; barges and ships have not started their daily pollution of the river. This entire experience is an up-lifting one to the poet, again because it’s early morning and the hustle and bustle of big city life have not started. Note that this poem is in the sonnet format.

Poem:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45514/composed-upon-westminster-bridge-september-3-1802 (Links to an external site.)

Link to poem analysis:

https://www.gradesaver.com/wordsworths-poetical-works/study-guide/summary-composed-upon-westminster-bridge (Links to an external site.)

Poem 2: “The World is Too Much With Us”

Lecture Notes:

This Wordsworth poem is also in the sonnet format and takes on a more pessimistic view as compared to the previous poem. The poet sees man as having misplaced values. Man is too concerned about things that don’t really matter and has neglected the beauties that nature has to offer. Man seems to be more concerned with “getting and spending”. The Romantics felt that the past was superior to the present because man was closer to nature in the past. The poet refers to Proteus (an old man of the sea who could change shapes) and Triton (a sea god who blew a conch shell). These references to the mythological past indicate that the poet wishes for a time better than the present, a time like the past when man regarded nature as the ideal.

Link to poem:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45564/the-world-is-too-much-with-us (Links to an external site.)

Link to analysis of poem:

https://www.gradesaver.com/wordsworths-poetical-works/study-guide/summary-the-world-is-too-much-with-us (Links to an external site.)

Poem 3: “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey”

Link to poem:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45527/lines-composed-a-few-miles-above-tintern-abbey-on-revisiting-the-banks-of-the-wye-during-a-tour-july-13-1798 (Links to an external site.)

Link to analysis of poem:

http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/wordsworth/section1.html (Links to an external site.)

Poem 4: “Ode on Intimations of Immortality”

Lecture notes:

In the first stanza, the speaker says that there was a time when all of nature seemed dreamlike to him, “appareled 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 3rd 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 sounds 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 4th 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?”

In the 5th 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 6th stanza, the speaker says that the pleasures unique to earth conspire to help the man forget the “glories” whence he came.

In the 7th stanza, the speaker beholds a six year old boy and imagines his life and the love his mother and father feel for him. 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 8th stanza, the speaker addresses the child as though he were a mighty prophet of a lost truth, and asks him why, when he has access to the glories of his origins, and to the pure experience of nature, he still hurries toward an adult life of custom and “earthly freight.”

In the 9th stanza, the speaker experiences a surge of joy at the thought that his memories of childhood will always grant him a kind of access to that lost world of instinct, innocence, and exploration. In the 10th stanza, bolstered by this joy, he urges the birds to sing, and urges all creatures to participate in the “gladness of the May.” He says that though he has lost some part of the glory of nature and of experience, he will take comfort in “primal sympathy,” in memory, and in the fact that the years bring a mature consciousness—a “philosophic mind.”

In the final stanza, the speaker says that this mind—which stems from a consciousness of mortality, as opposed to the child’s feeling of immortality—enables him to love nature and natural beauty all the more, for each of nature’s objects can stir him to thought, and even the simplest flower flowing in the wind can raise in him “thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.”

If “Tintern Abbey” is Wordsworth’s first great statement about the action of childhood memories of nature upon the adult mind, the “Intimations of Immortality” ode is his mature masterpiece on the subject. The poem makes explicit the poet’s belief that life on earth is a dim shadow of an earlier, purer existence, dimly recalled in childhood and then forgotten in the process of growing up.

Link to poem:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45536/ode-intimations-of-immortality-from-recollections-of-early-childhood (Links to an external site.)

Additional notes and analysis of poem:

https://cummingsstudyguides.net/Guides5/Intimations.html (Links to an external site.)