Commentary

If Tintern Abbey is Wordsworths first great statementabout the action of childhood memories of nature upon the adultmind, the Intimations of Immortality ode is his mature masterpieceon the subject. The poem, whose full title is Ode: Intimationsof Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, makes explicitWordsworths belief that life on earth is a dim shadow of an earlier,purer existence, dimly recalled in childhood and then forgottenin the process of growing up. (In the fifth stanza, he writes, Ourbirth is but a sleep and a forgetting.../Not in entire forgetfulness,/ And not in utter nakedness, /But trailing clouds of glory do wecome / From God, who is our home....)

While one might disagree with the poems metaphysicalhypotheses, there is no arguing with the genius of language at workin this Ode. Wordsworth consciously sets his speakers mind at oddswith the atmosphere of joyous nature all around him, a rare moveby a poet whose consciousness is so habitually in unity with nature. Understandingthat his grief stems from his inability to experience the May morningas he would have in childhood, the speaker attempts to enter willfullyinto a state of cheerfulness; but he is able to find real happinessonly when he realizes that the philosophic mind has given himthe ability to understand nature in deeper, more human termsasa source of metaphor and guidance for human life. This is very muchthe same pattern as Tintern Abbeys, but whereas in the earlierpoem Wordsworth made himself joyful, and referred to the musicof humanity only briefly, in the later poem he explicitly proposesthat this music is the remedy for his mature grief.

The structure of the Immortality Ode is also unique inWordsworths work; unlike his characteristically fluid, naturallyspoken monologues, the Ode is written in a lilting, songlike cadencewith frequent shifts in rhyme scheme and rhythm. Further, ratherthan progressively exploring a single idea from start to finish,the Ode jumps from idea to idea, always sticking close to the centralscene, but frequently making surprising moves, as when the speakerbegins to address the Mighty Prophet in the eighth stanzaonlyto reveal midway through his address that the mighty prophet isa six-year-old boy.

Wordsworths linguistic strategies are extraordinarilysophisticated and complex in this Ode, as the poems use of metaphorand image shifts from the register of lost childhood to the registerof the philosophic mind. When the speaker is grieving, the maintactic of the poem is to offer joyous, pastoral nature images, frequentlypersonifiedthe lambs dancing as to the tabor, the moon lookingabout her in the sky. But when the poet attains the philosophicmind and his fullest realization about memory and imagination, hebegins to employ far more subtle descriptions of nature that, ratherthan jauntily imposing humanity upon natural objects, simply drawhuman characteristics out of their natural presences, referringback to human qualities from earlier in the poem.

So, in the final stanza, the brooks fret down theirchannels, just as the childs mother fretted him with kisses earlierin the poem; they trip lightly just as the speaker tripped lightlyas a child; the Day is new-born, innocent, and bright, just as achild would be; the clouds gather round the setting sun and takea sober coloring, just as mourners at a funeral (recalling thechilds playing with some fragment from a mourning or a funeralearlier in the poem) might gather soberly around a grave. The effectis to illustrate how, in the process of imaginative creativity possibleto the mature mind, the shapes of humanity can be found in natureand vice-versa. (Recall the music of humanity in Tintern Abbey.)A flower can summon thoughts too deep for tears because a flowercan embody the shape of human life, and it is the mind of maturitycombined with the memory of childhood that enables the poet to makethat vital and moving connection.

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Ode: Intimations of Immortality - SparkNotes