A Reading of Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode
Roger Pierce
(A full text of the poem follows the essay.)
Much of what we hear about the environment these days is designed to stir up anxiety and guilt—which are, of course, sensible responses to the danger we have let ourselves in for. We are told to take care of the world so that it will continue taking care of us, and are given complex strategies for unraveling the harm we have done.
The teaching of the Old Testament prophets is instructive: faced with brutal empires threatening the destruction of Israel, men like Jeremiah warned that an intelligent response was possible only if strategies were grounded in an attitude of reverence, and of gratitude for what Israel had inherited. Like the Israelites, we are faced with enormously powerful, unpredictable forces—and we too, in trying to manipulate our salvation, have drawn ever more trouble down on our heads. The ingenuity that has gotten us into our ecological predicament doesn't seem to be getting us out: technology, atmospheric chemistry, Antarctic laboratories: these can show us our mistakes and point to practical changes, but they are not likely to evoke the humility and the generosity that would be a better grounding for our responses to a catastrophic situation. As George Dennison said in The Lives of Children, “. . . failure of mind is, at bottom. a failure of love. The conditions which nullify caring as the vital breath of being in the world are ruinous to thought and render competence in humane affairs quite unattainable . . . .”
Taking "nature" in a broad sense to include the whole web of circumstance in which we are embedded, our disrespect reveals itself in a wide spectrum of activities. To take one small example: biomedical ethics, in order to communicate with its physician peers, approaches such awesome themes as birth and death with the dry, argumentative, fact-oriented color of scientific medicine. The great myths shrivel. I don't mean that debate over abortion, reproductive technology, assisted suicide, or care of the aged is irrelevant or trivial, but if it opened itself more frankly to imagery, narrative, and verbal music, it might unclog the springs of value from which ethics ultimately flows.
Two hundred years ago, William Wordsworth wrote a poem that has become a lasting favorite: Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, a meditation on the possibilities and limitations of consciousness vis-a-vis the natural world. Where we talk (as in the paragraphs above) of environment, habitat, or ecology, the poem speaks of celestial light, glory, radiance, the eternal silence. Lest this seem just a piece of Romantic moonshine that is hopelessly out of touch with our severe concerns, I'd like to sketch out Wordsworth's careful line of thought and cite some of his delicate rhymes, rhythms, and imagery as he considers one heartfelt response to nature that is available to us.
Wordsworth grew up in the countryside, and from an early age was intensely responsive to his surroundings. As he matured into a poet, he drew his inspiration and much of his subject matter from natural forms and events. But the intensity of his attachment to them fell off as he grew older. Not only his poetic profession but his joy in life seemed under siege.
Glory
The Ode begins by remembering childhood as a time of intense delight at simply being alive in the world:
There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Appareled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
The narrating poet goes on to speak of the happiness of children as they respond, like animals and plants, to the springtime. He does not mean that they live in a state of unbroken bliss or that they are miniature saints, but that their consciousness is grounded in a kind of awed surprise. The poem's word "dream" is a description of it. "Innocence" is another.
The primary image generating the poem portrays the human soul as the sun ("our life's Star") which, as it rises in this world, is simultaneously setting in a prior spiritual world. At birth, and for a time afterwards, we are in both realms, as if the golden clouds of our earthly sunrise were catching the sunset glow of the soul's simultaneous departure from the other:
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!
Wordsworth himself indicated, years after writing the Ode, that the immortality spoken of in the poem is not an article of dogmatic faith about existence before or after life on earth, but is the verbal equivalent of an observed and personally experienced psychological depth. Consciousness is open at subliminal levels to a flow of élan vital that links the child with its environment in a strong bond of attraction. With a whiff of irony, the poet points to the child as a paragon of wisdom:
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 forever by the eternal mind,—
. . . . .
Thou, over whom thy Immortality
Broods like the Day, a Master o'er a Slave . . . .
The child's response to the objects in its immediate environment is at a relatively uncomplicated level of consciousness where "immortality" can shine through.
The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.
This piety is natural in at least two senses: it is spontaneous (not learned from the culture), and it is a response to the phenomenal world—or we might say a response through the phenomenal world to something behind or beneath it, a generative, sustaining force. We don't have to believe in such a force to earn the dividend the poem is offering: whether a reader's religious predilections incline toward taking "immortality" in a literal or in a literary sense, natural piety aptly describes the state of consciousness that is called for by our contemporary environmental crisis.
We end up in a tangle and miss the serious import of the poem if we insist on a clear distinction between what the child perceives and what it projects onto its surroundings. Because both nature and the child are" appareled in celestial light, " the child spontaneously recognizes the beauty of the world.
But if natural piety is the core impulse for which and from which we live, at least as children, the poet's sad and doubtful "I could wish" points toward his near-despair that the “clouds of glory” inevitably fade as we grow older:
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 Ode divides into three major sections. The first (stanzas I—IV), observing the vigorous springtime joy of children and nature, returns again and again to the poet's disappointment in his adult inability to participate in the "festival" shared by child and nature. By writing poetry about his problem he overcomes his depression, but he fails to regain his childhood bliss:
Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?
Earthly Freight
The Ode's second section (stanzas V—VIII) traces the progressive veiling of nature's inner light as one matures. A major change is a growing awareness of death. The child is a
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 ...
By the end of the Ode's second major section, one might conclude that in the poet's view human happiness steadily declines as life goes on, and that a bitter
stoicism is all our compensation for the loss of childhood's immersion in the radiance of nature.
Strength
Our light may gradually be buried under cares and distractions, but is not quite extinguished. As the third section of the Ode (stanzas IX—XI) searches out a reconciling compensation, it makes a surprising shift. Although
Delight and liberty, the simple creed
Of childhood . . .
may be "that which is most worthy to be blest," the poet's "song of thanks and praise" (the Ode itself) celebrates instead the remnants of childhood exhilaration which, subsisting into maturity, make us uncomfortable by challenging our adult concerns:
O joy! that in our embers
Is something that doth live,
That nature yet remembers
What was so fugitive
These embers are "questionings," "misgivings" and
High instincts before which our mortal Nature
Did tremble like a guilty Thing surprised ...
Despite the remorse they stir up in us, these flickering gleams from our personal past remain the core of our vitality, the light by which we see our way, the source of our ethics. They are, for all their dimness, the "fountain-light" —the sunshine—of our day on earth, and they can, at least occasionally, give us a more realistic perspective. They
have power to make
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal Silence . . . .
The Ode ends on a note of optimism by weaving together three compensations for the loss of childhood radiance. All three flow into consciousness from levels where nature and human nature are, in adulthood, still linked to each other and therefore to the source to which children spontaneously respond. one is the "strength" to face our mortality and learn from our suffering. The second is "thought," the transmuting of delight and liberty into understanding. Strength and thought together give us the third compensation, the power to see through our own venality and triviality and to recapture, in a transmuted form, our bond with nature:
I love the brooks which down their channels fret
Even more than when I tripped lightly as they.
To replace the delight and liberty of childhood, we can search out strength, thought, and love, which are, together, the form of natural piety appropriate to maturity.
The final lines of the Ode integrate the poet's sense of terrible loss with these three reconciling gifts:
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.
A Song of Thanks and Praise
Wordsworth's Ode reflects Jesus' teaching that little children are, in some sense, already citizens of the Kingdom of God, and that we adults should emulate this band of pigmy seers in our midst. Though we can never go upstream to the wellspring of delight and liberty where we lived as children, we can find where the current runs strongest for us now, and with the thoughtful, affectionate courage appropriate to maturity can dedicate ourselves to the impulses that best reflect these noble origins. This may seem more narrowly private and more spiritually focused than our practical environmental concerns call for, but an ongoing—and thoroughgoing—realignment of the deeper layers of our life motives may be one of the most realistic actions we can take.
*****
Ode
Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood
William Wordsworth
The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.
I
There was a 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.
II
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.
III
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!
IV
Ye blessed 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 the 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?
V
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.
VI
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.
VII
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-learned 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.
VIII
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;
To whom the grave
Is but a lonely bed without the sense or sight
Of day or the warm light,
A place of thought where we in waiting lie;
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!
IX
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 endeavor,
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.
X
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 today
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.
XI
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.