Commentary
If “Tintern Abbey” is Wordsworth’s first great statement
about the action of childhood memories of nature upon the adult
mind, the “Intimations of Immortality” ode is his mature masterpiece
on the subject. The poem, whose full title is “Ode: Intimations
of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” makes explicit
Wordsworth’s belief that life on earth is a dim shadow of an earlier,
purer existence, dimly recalled in childhood and then forgotten
in the process of growing up. (In the fifth stanza, he writes, “Our
birth is but a sleep and a forgetting.../Not in entire forgetfulness,
/ And not in utter nakedness, /But trailing clouds of glory do we
come / From God, who is our home....”)
While one might disagree with the poem’s metaphysical
hypotheses, there is no arguing with the genius of language at work
in this Ode. Wordsworth consciously sets his speaker’s mind at odds
with the atmosphere of joyous nature all around him, a rare move
by a poet whose consciousness is so habitually in unity with nature. Understanding
that his grief stems from his inability to experience the May morning
as he would have in childhood, the speaker attempts to enter willfully
into a state of cheerfulness; but he is able to find real happiness
only when he realizes that “the philosophic mind” has given him
the ability to understand nature in deeper, more human terms—as
a source of metaphor and guidance for human life. This is very much
the same pattern as “Tintern Abbey” ’s, but whereas in the earlier
poem Wordsworth made himself joyful, and referred to the “music
of humanity” only briefly, in the later poem he explicitly proposes
that this music is the remedy for his mature grief.
The structure of the Immortality Ode is also unique in
Wordsworth’s work; unlike his characteristically fluid, naturally
spoken monologues, the Ode is written in a lilting, songlike cadence
with frequent shifts in rhyme scheme and rhythm. Further, rather
than progressively exploring a single idea from start to finish,
the Ode jumps from idea to idea, always sticking close to the central
scene, but frequently making surprising moves, as when the speaker
begins to address the “Mighty Prophet” in the eighth stanza—only
to reveal midway through his address that the mighty prophet is
a six-year-old boy.
Wordsworth’s linguistic strategies are extraordinarily
sophisticated and complex in this Ode, as the poem’s use of metaphor
and image shifts from the register of lost childhood to the register
of the philosophic mind. When the speaker is grieving, the main
tactic of the poem is to offer joyous, pastoral nature images, frequently
personified—the lambs dancing as to the tabor, the moon looking
about her in the sky. But when the poet attains the philosophic
mind and his fullest realization about memory and imagination, he
begins to employ far more subtle descriptions of nature that, rather
than jauntily imposing humanity upon natural objects, simply draw
human characteristics out of their natural presences, referring
back to human qualities from earlier in the poem.
So, in the final stanza, the brooks “fret” down their
channels, just as the child’s mother “fretted” him with kisses earlier
in the poem; they trip lightly just as the speaker “tripped lightly”
as a child; the Day is new-born, innocent, and bright, just as a
child would be; the clouds “gather round the setting sun” and “take
a sober coloring,” just as mourners at a funeral (recalling the
child’s playing with some fragment from “a mourning or a funeral”
earlier in the poem) might gather soberly around a grave. The effect
is to illustrate how, in the process of imaginative creativity possible
to the mature mind, the shapes of humanity can be found in nature
and vice-versa. (Recall the “music of humanity” in “Tintern Abbey.”)
A flower can summon thoughts too deep for tears because a flower
can embody the shape of human life, and it is the mind of maturity
combined with the memory of childhood that enables the poet to make
that vital and moving connection.
