Summary
In the first stanza, the speaker says wistfully that there
was a time when all of nature seemed dreamlike to him, “apparelled
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 third 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 sound
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 fourth 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 fifth 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 sixth
stanza, the speaker says that the pleasures unique to earth conspire
to help the man forget the “glories” whence he came.
In the seventh 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 eighth stanza, the
speaker addresses the child as though he were a mighty prophet of
a lost truth, and rhetorically 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 ninth 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 tenth 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 solace
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 blowing in the wind can raise in him “thoughts that do often
lie too deep for tears.”
Form
Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode, as it is often called, is
written in eleven variable ode stanzas with variable rhyme schemes,
in iambic lines with anything from two to five stressed syllables.
The rhymes occasionally alternate lines, occasionally fall in couplets,
and occasionally occur within a single line (as in “But yet I know, where’er
I go” in the second stanza).
