“Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” by William Wordsworth is often ranked as one of the poet’s best works, sometimes referred to as the “Great Ode”. With its purely Romantic themes, the poem incorporates Wordsworth’s views on nature, mortality, spirituality, and existence, which have found both admiration and criticism in the works of his contemporaries.
The narrator begins by expressing some kind of sorrow for the lost feelings of “celestial light” and heavenly joy that nature used to evoke in him. He admits that he does not see the things he used to any more, nor derive the pleasures he used to be able to get. This is the introduction of the subject of childhood and growth in the poem. The poet believes that the world has “lost its glory”, and though he sees the jollity of nature around him, it evokes not joy, but only grief in him. He cannot share the happiness, because he remembers the “Tree of Life” and the “Garden of Eden” he was once able to see, but is not able to any more. It is now that the author realizes that he has lost some divine capability, some heavenliness of his previous life (Sarker). Thus, to Wordsworth, childhood is the period when a person has a true vision of life and a strong spiritual bond to nature. In stanza VIII the poet declares that a child’s soul is immensely knowledgeable and godly in a way, even though the exterior does not show this greatness. Wordsworth calls a child the only one who can see the real truth, a prophet, and declares that “The Child is father of the Man” (Bloom).
By contrasting this divine seeing and understanding that a child’s soul is capable of with the state of mind of a grown-up, the poet concludes that, in the process of growth and psychological development, a human loses some important ability. He mourns for this lost ability he, too, once had. Wordsworth states that the darkness of material values eventually overshadows the heavenly “light”, and when a person reaches manhood, he or she is no longer able to see it and forgets “the glories he hath known”. Instead of acting as his nature tells him, like it was in the time of his childhood, the adult man becomes as actor, who performs in accordance with the expectations of society. In this way, the ode contains the idea that the growth of an individual is always accompanied by the loss of some essential natural abilities.
This idea is related to another important theme in the poem – that of pre-existence and immortality of soul. The poet declares that the soul has a divine origin and is brought to the world with an ability to see the godly light, the ability that is gradually lost. Wordsworth follows Plato’s and Plotinus’ theory of pre-existence and transmigration of the soul. He believes it dwells somewhere far from earth (“elsewhere its setting”) and “cometh from afar” (Sarker). …