Wordsworth's "Intimation Ode"

  Of all the poetry William Wordsworth (1770-1850) wrote, three stand among the greatest of the 19th century: Tintern Abbey; Ode; Intimations of Immortality; and The Prelude. His Ode has garnered praise and admiration and might even be viewed as his crowning masterpiece. It is a beautiful and fascinating poem that contemplates what is lost as we “mature” from children to adults. Written in irregular Pindaric ode, it takes the reader through eleven stanzas of 204 lines. I have included a link to Michael Sheen’s fine reading of the poem for anyone who wants to also hear the poem read aloud. (If possible, view the poem in desktop mode to see an accurate shape of the text.)

Ode: Intimations of Immortality From Recollections of Early Childhood

          The Child is father of the Man;
          And I could wish my days to be
          Bound each to each by natural piety.

                                        1
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.

                                        2
            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.

                                        3
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!

                                        4
                 Ye blesséd 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.
         O evil day! if I were sullen
         While 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 look’d 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?

                                        5
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.

                                        6
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.

                                        7
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.

                                        8
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 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 of sight
Of day or the warm light,
A place of thoughts 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!

                                        9
          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 realized, 
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 endeavour,
               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.

                                        10
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 to-day
          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.

                                        11          
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 relinquish’d one delight
To live beneath your more habitual sway;
I love the brooks which down their channels fret
Even more than when I tripp’d 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.

By separating the Ode into three movements, one can interpreted it as an elegy about loss, despair and resurrected hope. The first part consists of stanza 1-4, the second of 5-8 and the third of 9-11. The initial stanza makes clear that Wordsworth is feeling a profound sense of loss. He looks around him, sees the world of nature but can no longer see the “celestial light” and “the glory and the freshness of a dream” that once was permeated that world. It is not that nature has lost its beauty. “The Rainbow,” “the Rose,” “The Moon,” the “Waters,” are still beautiful. But for him “there hath past away a glory from the earth.” The words, “past away” suggest death, and within his mind Wordsworth is suffering a kind of death: a spiritual one. In stanza 4, he regrets being “sullen / While Earth herself is adorning, / This sweet May-morning…” Nevertheless, he cannot shake the sadness that is gripping him, the mournful feeling of loss overcoming him. He laments his inability to now possess “the visionary gleam” and “the glory and the dream” that he once had.

The second movement of the poem, stanza 5-8, Wordsworth recounts the origin and evolution of his despair. He purports in stanza 5 that the soul pre-exists with God and “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting.” We emerge from the womb “trailing clouds of glory” and “Heaven lies about us in our infancy!” This metaphysical connection cannot be sustained in the physical world and the “Youth” who possesses the “vision splendid” grows into “the Man [who] perceives it die away.” In stanza 6, Mother “Earth” sees the despair that arises from the deprivation of this heavenly gift and does what she can to assuage that grief by helping him “Forget the glories he hath known, / And that imperial palace whence he came.” Wordsworth next imagines the young child playing games imitating adult life. This imitation only removes the child further from his unity with his heavenly origins and in stanza 8 Wordsworth asks the child, whom he now calls the “best philosopher” and “Mighty Prophet,” “Why with such earnest pains dost thou provoke / The years to bring the inevitable yoke.”

Just when all seems lost, the third movement (stanzas 9-11) of the poem answers the question raised in stanza 8. Stanzas 9 and 10 reveals how the diminished man, Through the faculty of memory Wordsworth realizes he can regain a sense of the divine, those “trailing clouds of glory” that become shrouded in the “Shades of the prison-house” and “At length… / fade into the light of common day” as the young child grows into an adult. He begins stanza 9 with “O joy! that in our embers / Is something that doth live, / That nature yet remembers / What was so fugitive!” And that “something” is the divine essence possess at birth and lost as he moved toward adult life. He discovers those “Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” in “The thought (memory) of his past years [that] in me doth breed / Perpetual benediction” which “Are yet the fountain light of all our day, / Are yet a master light of all our seeing.” Though he is far from his childhood and has lost the “visionary gleam” and “the power of the dream” the child still possessed, Wordsworth can attain “truths that wake,” and “… / Can in a moment travel thither, / And see the Children sport upon the shore, / And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.” The fulfillment of hope lies in what he remembers.

This discovery of hope “leaps up” in stanzas 10 and 11. However, it is a hope quite difference from the unbounded joy he felt as a child. He hears the birds “sing a joyous song! and accepts he has lost “the radiance which was once so bright” he believes there is compensation that the philosophic mind can offer:

Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendor 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 suffer;
In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind.

He accepts that “nothing can bring back” the special, divine connection with nature the child experiences. Instead, Wordsworth finds a “Strength,” which he calls a “primal sympathy.” This instinctual sympathy for human beings in general and human suffering in particular replaces “the vision splendid,” which is that instinct of seeing and knowing the divine in nature when the child feels immortal. The final eight lines close the poem with a sense of transformation. The original despair over the loss of childhood insight becomes the adult insight, an ability to see what is lost as we age and to feel the profound sympathy for the inevitable human condition.  

The Duality of Robert Frost

In 1959 the publishers Holt, Rinehart and Winston hosted a dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in Manhattan celebrating Robert Frost’s 85th birthday. At the time, Frost was easily America’s most popular poet, and many readers considered him to be a poet of charming poems that danced rhythmically along in gracefully rhyming lines. “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” illustrates this view and is one his poems that most young students would have memorized and recited for their English classes.

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          Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells aa shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep, 
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

No one would deny the mellifluous quality of these lines. The poem has a compelling musical rhythm (meter) that makes it easy to memorize. Its images are physically soothing and visually serene: “The only other sound’s the sweep / Of easy wind and downy flake.” The little speech to his horse is playfully quaint and even amusing. The speaker’s act of “…stopping here / To watch his woods fill up with snow” then resuming his journey to fulfill those “promises,” can be interpreted as a brief respite during which he feels a beautiful tranquility. Perhaps he is even having a transcendent moment, something like Wordsworth’s experiences in his poems about nature. But some readers sense something darker in the poem, that the speaker is instead being pulled into an unknown, into an oblivion that will erase his existence. Afterall, he finds himself isolated from humanity and has interrupted his progress enough to confound his horse’s sense of how they should be proceeding. Though “The woods are lovely,” they are also “dark and deep” and extend beyond human perception and comprehension. They stretch into an unknown and pose what some readers saw as a dark terror that they also found in other poems by Frost. The Columbia English professor, critic and scholar, Lionel Trilling, when he spoke at Frost’s 85th birthday dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria, commented on this element in Frost’s poetry. He said: “I think of Robert Frost as a terrifying poet. Call him, if it makes things easier, a tragic poet, but it might be useful every now and then to step out from under the shelter of that literary word. The universe he conceives is a terrifying universe…Read the poem called “Design” and see if you sleep the better for it. Read Neither Out Far nor In Deep, which seems to me the most perfect poem of our time, and see if you are warmed by anything in it except the energy with which emptiness is perceived.” Trilling’s remarks stunned the audience attending the party, provoked letters of protest to the New York Times book critic J. Donald Adams and surprised but did not upset Frost. Reading “Design” confirms Trilling assertion:

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                    Design

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth--
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches' broth--
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.

What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-heal?
What had brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?--
If design govern in a thing so small.

This poem, which is a Petrarchan sonnet, has two parts, the octave (8 lines) and the sestet (6 lines). In the octave, the speaker describes an incident in which he comes upon the “white heal-all” flower and finds a spider holding in its grasp a dead moth. The speaker’s first response to what he sees can appear almost like a children’s story (Charlotte’s Web), with its “dimpled spider” a white flower, and a moth imagined as white “satin cloth.” Any such impression is obliterated with unequivocal force by line 4: “Assorted characters of death and blight.” The matter-of-fact wording leaves no doubt about the violence of the scene. In the next four lines (5-8), the speaker links the noun, “characters,” of the previous line to the verb phrase “Mixed ready to begin the morning right.” Why does he say, “begin the morning right”? What could be right about this image of insect carnage, of the dead moth wings as a “paper kite”?

The sestet proposes an answer through a series of questions. The speaker asks why the flower is white, what brought the spider to that flower and finally what “steered” the moth to that flower. Is what the speaker sees something governed by a malign supernatural power who orchestrates appalling violence or is it simply another indifferent process of nature’s cycle of life and death?

“Design” can convince a reader that Frost believed the universe was truly a place that inspired the terror in Frost’s poetry that Lionel Trilling spoke of in his speech at Frost’s 85th birthday. The world is an alien, hostile place where predators wait to ambush prey. Another poem flexing this point of view is “Stars”:

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                   Stars

How countlessly they congregate
  O'er our tumultuous snow,
Which flows in shapes as tall as tree
  When wintry winds do blow!--

As if with keenness for our fate,
  Our faltering few steps on 
To white rest, and a place of rest
  Invisible at dawn,--

And yet with neither love nor hate,
  Those stars like some snow-white
Minerva's snow-white marble eyes
  Without the gift of sight.

The poem begins on a winter’s night, with snow blown deep and tall, while above the speaker stars “congregate” as if intentionally gathering for some purpose. The second stanza suggests why the speaker feels the stars are shining down on us: “As if with keenness for our fate,” as if to light his way till the dawn arrives. This guiding light of supernatural power is snatched away by the third stanza which concludes the poem and abandons human beings in an indifferent universe. The stars have no more interest in humanity than a cold, white statue of the Roman goddess wisdom, Minerva whose blind eyes shed only more darkness.

No great poet is simply one sided and Frost is no exception. His poetry also reveals the influence of the romantic poets Wordsworth, Keats, and Emerson and the creative intimations of mystic vision. An early poem by Frost illustrating this vision is “Going for Water.”

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      Going for Water

The well was dry beside the door,
  And so we went with pail and can
Across the fields behind the house
  To seek the brook if still it ran;

Not loth to have excuse to go,
  Because the autumn eve was fair
(Though chill), because the fields were ours,
  And by the brook our woods were there.

We ran as if to meet the moon
  That slowly dawned behind the trees,
The barren boughs without the leaves,
  Without the birds, without the breeze.

But once within the wood, we paused
  Like gnomes that hid us from the moon,
Ready to run to hiding new
  With laughter when she found us soon.

Each laid on other a staying hand
  To listen ere we dared to look,
And in the hush we joined to make
  We heard, we knew we heard the brook.

A note as from a single place,
  A slender tinkling fall that made
Now drops that floated on the pool
  Like peals, and now a silver blade.

In the first two stanzas, the speaker and his companion notice their water well is dry and head out with a can and pail to collect water from a nearby brook. After this literal, though rhyming, description, the next four stanzas become an adventure, a journey metaphorical and spiritual. In stanza 3, the young pair enter the woods running “as if to meet the moon” through denuded and bird barren trees. In their innocence they imagine they are gnomes hiding from the moon. They join hands, listen and in a hush hear the brook. In the last stanza, a transcendent moment descends upon the children: they hear a “note,” and see drops that floated on the pool / Like pearls, and now a silver blade.” The chore of fetching water becomes a mystic visionary experience absorbed through the vehicle of nature.

Reading Robert Frost’s poetry sometimes inclines us toward the visionary experience such as we find in the poems of William Wordsworth or Ralph Waldo Emerson. Other times, Frost finds himself immersed within an indifferent universe and his verse reflects his bleak interpretation. This fascinating duality informs so much of his work that the reader can be at a loss to pin down where Frost stands philosophically. And it’s that ambiguity, along with his extraordinary lyricism that make his poems always compelling.