WILLIAM WORDSWORTH (1770-1850)

A Short Biographical Sketch

“WILLIAM WORDSWORTH (1770-1850) was the son of John Wordsworth and Anne Cookson, and was born
at Cockermouth. His boyhood was spent among the wild hills of his beloved Lake District. He lost his
mother when he was eight and his father when he was thirteen, but relatives helped to educate
Wordsworth and his brothers and their sister Dorothy. His schooldays at Hawkshead are vividly described
in The Prelude. In 1787 he went to St. John’s College, Cambridge where he read a great deal, but
paid little attention to the prescribed courses of study.
In 1798 Lyrical Ballads was published, and in the following year he returned to the Lake District. From then
until 1805 his greatest work was done. He had discovered the true purpose of his life; his marriage with
Mary Hutchinson in 1802 brought him joy, his belief in Nature was ‘the nurse, the guide, the guardian of
[his] heart, and soul of all [his] moral being was unimpaired’.
The great 1807 volume of poetry was the golden harvest of these fruitful years. The loss at sea of his
brother John in 1805 was a deep grief, and his poetry lost much of its spontaneous joy after this. Nor was it
John’s death alone and the decay of Coleridge that saddened him; the glories of his visionary powers were
waning and he felt that he had exchanged youth for middle age. He turned to Duty and the memories of
“the dream” to prop his remaining years. Throughout the rest of his long life he met with increasing
evidence of the esteem in which he was held. The abuse that had greeted the Lyrical Ballads was
exchanged for honours, pensions and the Laureateship. He died in 1850 and was buried at Grasmere. After
his death The Prelude was published. He had finished it as early as 1805 but deliberately held it back for
posthumous publication, knowing the publicity that must attend this autobiographical epic. Though a most
unequal poet, Wordsworth is one of our greatest. His greatness lies principally in his power of expressing
the awe and rapture that a sensitive man experiences when confronted by the grandeur of natural beauty.
William Wordsworth : The Poet
Wordsworth was the first poet who raised simple, bare and naked words to the level of poetry. He did not
depend upon any poetic cliche, mythology- or any other stereotyped rhetoric. What distinguished
Wordsworth from all other poets, is not only his attitude towards Nature, or his language but also his views
on the role of a poet as an individual and his special concern for the ‘still sad music of humanity’.
Wordsworth’s claim to the title of a great poet, as many critics believe, rests upon the work of a single
decade: his poetic genius showed at its best in what he wrote between 1798 and 1808. The Lyrical Ballads,
(which Coleridge and Wordsworth conceived together), the Lucy poems, some of his great Sonnets and
The Immortality Ode all belong to this period. Tintern Abbey which was the last poem of the first volume of
The Lyrical Ballads and which, it is believed, contains the central theme of all his major works, was written
in 1798, the year which marks the shaping of the great soul of a poet in the making.
Wordsworth is a man speaking to men in a language which rejects all poetic ornaments and mechanical
devices. In The Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth for his part was ‘to give the charm of novelty to things of every
day and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by directing it to the loveliness and the wonders
of the world before us.’ He attempts to give charm and novelty to things of everyday life by ‘awakening the
mind’s attention from the lethargy of custom.
Wordsworth is a poet speaking to men and his main concern is man and his mind. But he regrets that
man’s basic or inherited tendency is to lose the paradise naturally gifted to him. Wordsworth regains this
paradise in Nature, and is therefore regarded as a poet of Nature and a worshipper of Nature. But
Wordsworth’s basic preoccupation is not with the paradise he regains, but with man, who is gradually
losing his paradise, or the ‘still sad music of humanity’(Tintern Abbey).
Wordsworth’s basic conviction is that man by alienating himself from Nature is unconsciously orphaning
himself. Away from the parent Nature there is no rest for his mind or peace for his soul. Nature, to him
with all its loveliness, is a living presence which co-exists in the mind of man and the soul which is in unison
with Nature is blessed by her peace. He sincerely believes that the natural piety which binds all men
together is best sustained with a simple communion with Nature. Wordsworth’s attitude towards Nature is
different from that of other Romantic poets. In them we find that the poet’s joy or melancholy is
transferred to natural objects or rather, a selection is made of natural objects in which a sympathetic
analogy can be traced and then these objects are endowed with the appropriate mood. For Wordsworth,
however. Nature has her own life, a sense sublime, which also dwells in the mind of man. Mind and Nature
always act and react upon each other. It is a continuous process, consisting mainly of three phases, the
“glad animal moments’ of childhood, the “passions’ and ‘appetites’ of youth, and lastly that serene and
blessed mood in which mind and nature achieve complete harmony and “we are laid asleep in body and
become a living soul,”(Tintern Abbey). Nature thus plays an active role in shaping the soul of man. So, in
Wordsworth, we find that the great union of Mind and Nature is consummated by a process of association
which links up at every stage of his life, experience and the experiencing self, leading from sensation to
feeling, from feeling to thought and then creating a union of all these faculties when the mighty world of
eye and ear ceases to exist; and the same sublime sense which dwells in Nature becomes coexistent with
the mind of man, and though the same impulse animates all objects and all thought, the mind rises above
the objects it contemplates to the creation of a moral being, a soul.
Wordsworth’s concern for mankind’s slow march to doom with the growth of industrialization and neglect
of Nature can be felt in The World is Too Much with Us. This shows that the poet Wordsworth is a man
speaking to men and although he finds a temple for himself, his main worry was the fate of mankind which
was gradually drifting from that temple.

Ode : Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood

Sources:- SOL, Litchart, Nibble pop video(very import. & make complete notes of summary)
A serious study of the poem confirms that it can be structurally divided into three parts: (i) the first four
stanzas which high light the fact that “there hath passed a glory from the earth.” And the last two line of
these stanzas question:
Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?
Stanzas V - V11 constitute the second part which gives the explanation in the form of the doctrine of
reminiscence. Stanzas 1X – X1 is the third part which tries to vindicate the value of life from which the
vision is fled. Though these three parts of the poem are not blended together, as the second part of the
poem being a kind of interpolation has no link to the opening and closing Sections but the poem has a
unity. As Maurice Bowra put it: “ The three parts of the Ode deal in turn with a crisis, an explanation, and a
consolation, and in all the three Wordsworth speaks of what is most important and most original in his
poetry.”
The Ode is a piece of spiritual biography of Wordsworth. It is a reminiscent of his past when he lived in
‘glory and the freshness’ of his senses, the senses finally fed on the ‘principle of joy. ’ The poem confirms
two important things: (a) Wordsworth’s lamentation about the loss of ‘visionary gleam’ or ‘the glory and
the dream and (b) His belief in the compensating discovery of new and sober power, springing out of the
harsh realities of life, inhumanity and cruelty of man towards man. The poem is difficult because it tends to
focus on ‘immortality’ which means “negation of death” and celebration of the victories of life.

The Immortality Ode: A Detailed Analysis

The poem begins with a declaration in the form of an epigram. The declaration says that the ‘Child’ is the
father of’ Man” and the entire poem is an elaboration of this statement. Both the words ‘The Child and the
‘Man’ begin with capital letters since they represent different states of the soul in the evolutionary growth
of life. The declaration that the ‘Child’ is the father of Man leads him into a wish for a natural piety’ which
should make his entire life a continuum, cementing each moment with the other, not allowing his days to
be isolated events of joys or grief’s, of listlessness or mad endeavors. The poet does not want the harsh
realities of life should disrupt the flow of childhood blossoming into a man as a person grows. The music
and power of natural piety should condense the entire process of growth into one celestial experience.
This is possible only when the natural piety which a child possesses remains, undiluted, unwrinkled and
unalloyed. The first line of this epigram states a gospel and the next two lines contain a wish that essence
of the gospel should flow throughout his life fusing one moment with the other without any fracture. A
truth is announced and wish is prayed for. The entire poem is an answer to this prayer. That is why the
epigram is given within inverted commas.

Summary
Once upon a time, I saw all of nature, even the most ordinary parts of it, as if it were shining with heavenly
light—as luminous, beautiful, and novel as a dream. But it's not like that for me anymore. Wherever I look
now, in the nighttime or the daytime, I can't see the things I used to see. Rainbows appear and disappear;
roses are beautiful; the moon looks around with joy in a clear sky; waters reflecting the stars are deeply
lovely; and every sunrise is a gorgeous new beginning. And yet I'm aware that, no matter where I wander,
some shining light has left this world. Today, while I listened to the spring birds happily singing, and
watched the new lambs hopping around as if they were dancing to the beat of a drum, I was struck by a
mournful thought. I soon expressed that thought, which made me feel better, and now I've regained my
strength. Up on the mountains, the waterfalls make noises like the sound of trumpets; I'll stop doing the
lovely spring a disservice by being sad. I can hear the mountains echoing, the winds seem to come straight
out of the land of dreams, and the whole world is happy. The land and the ocean alike are jolly, and every
living creature shares the joy of May. You, you happy child: yell joyously, and let me hear you yelling, you
gleeful young shepherd! You lucky, holy living things, I've heard you calling to one another; I can see
heaven itself laughing with you as you celebrate. My heart rejoices with you, and my head feels crowned
with your happiness: I feel your delight completely. Itwould be a terrible thing indeed if I were to sulk while
the world dresses herself up so beautifully on this gorgeous May morning, and while children everywhere
are picking flowers in thousands of valleys all across the world, and while the sun shines and little babies
bounce in their mothers' arms. I hear all this celebration with delight! But: there's a single tree out of all
the trees in the world, a single field I once saw: both of them remind me that something has gone missing
for me. The little
flower I see at my feet tells me the same thing. Where has that transcendent illumination I once saw gone?
Where's that luminous dreamlike vision now? When we're born, it's as if we fall asleep and forget where
we
came from: our souls, which are born with us, rising like little suns, came to earth from a different, far-off
world. We don't come to this world having totally forgotten where we came from, and we don't come here
as blank slates: we bring clouds of holy light in our wake when we come to the earth from our original
home with God. When we're babies, we see heaven all around us! But as children grow up, the jail-like
shadows of
habit and familiarity begin to draw in around them. For a while, though, they can still see the light of
heaven, and where it comes from, and feel its joy. Even as a young man grows up and moves farther and
farther away from his origin in heaven, he's still a kind of holy man of nature's religion, and he's
accompanied by his heavenly visions. But at last, when he becomes an adult, that special light fades away,
and everything just looks mundane and normal. The earth is full of its own kind of delights, and has its own
natural longings. Like a well-intentioned adoptive mother, the caring earth does her best to make humans
—who are at once her children and her prisoners—forget the beauties they once could see and the heaven
they came from.
Look at the little kid among his newfound pleasures—an adorable little guy, only six years old and teeny-
tiny. Look where he sits among his playthings, with his face covered in his mom's kisses and his dad's
adoring gaze fixed on him. Look at the game he's planning out there on the floor—some scrap of his
childish understanding of life that he's playing out with his new skills. He's playing pretend, acting out
weddings and parties, sorrows and funerals, now getting caught up in one and then singing of another.
Later, he'll play games to do with the worlds of business, or love, or war. But not for long: soon he'll toss
those games aside, too, and proudly, like an actor, he'll take on another role, pretending in turn to go
through every experience
of human life, all the way up to old age. It's as if his entire purpose were to imitate all the different things
grown-ups do. You, little child, whose small body doesn't reveal the vastness of your soul; you, you wisest
of scholars, who still has a connection to heaven, and who can still see what adults are blind to, as you
silently look into the deep mysteries all around you, always shadowed by the presence of God: you
powerful truth-teller, you holy prophet! You can see everything that we adults spend our whole lives trying
to find—only to get lost in a darkness that is like death. But you, who are still so closely connected to your
soul's origins that immortality hovers over you like the sun, or like a master over a servant, a mighty
presence that can't be ignored; you little child, still glowing with the power that heaven shines down into
your soul: why on earth do you so play all these games about adulthood, rushing to grow up and lose all
that you have now? Why do you do all this unwitting harm to your sacred good fortune? Your soul will be
weighed down with everyday, earthly things soon enough—and habit will crush you like a heavy, icy frost,
getting deeper every day you're alive. Thank goodness that in the burned-down remnants of our former
childhood vision, some little spark still glows—and the beauty of nature allows us to remember those
fleeting moments of glory. Thinking back on my childhood makes me feel constantly blessed—and not just
for those good and worthy qualities, like fun and freedom, that mark out childhood days, or for childhood's
optimism and hope. No, it's not these feelings for which I sing my song of gratitude, but for the way I once
stubbornly questioned the everyday world; for the sense I had of certainties falling away and disappearing;
for the way that, as a child, I could still see beyond the everyday and walk in a world of mysteries. My
instinctive sense of holiness used to make my everyday certainties shake like a creature caught red-handed
trying to get away with something. I'm grateful for humanity's first feelings of love for the world, and for
our faint memories of that love; even if those memories are shadowy now, they're still a fountain of
luminous joy, and the guiding light by which we
can understand everything we see now. Those memories support us, care for us, and allow us to put all the
chaos of dayto-day life into perspective, making the years feel small in comparison to eternity. Once we've
perceived eternity in childhood, its truth stays with us and never goes away. Neither boredom nor striving,
neither grown-up nor child—not even everything that opposes joy can completely get rid of our first
memories of heaven. Thus, in peaceful moments, even when we're very far from our childhood seeing, we
can still catch a glimpse of the ocean of eternity that brought our souls here; we can travel there in an
instant, and watch children playing on that ocean's shores, and hear the eternal thunder of its waters. So
go ahead and sing happily, birds! And go ahead and hop around as if you're dancing to the music of drums,
lambs! Even we grown-ups will, in our minds, join in with all of you who sing and play, who are still truly
immersed in the joy of the spring. So what if the holy light I used to see in everything has been taken away
from me forever? Even though nothing will ever bring back the time when we adults could see the grass
and flowers shining with heavenly beauty, we won't mourn. Instead, we'll draw strength from everything
that we do have: from our fundamental connection to nature, which never really goes away; from the
consolations we discover when we endure pain; from our belief that death is not the end of the immortal
soul; and from the long years of our life, which have taught us to think like philosophers. And oh, you
springs, fields, hills, and forests: god forbid that we should ever stop loving each other! I still feel your
power in the deepest parts of my soul. All I've really given up is feeling that power all the time. I love the
coursing streams now even more
than I did when I danced as easily and joyfully as they do. The fresh shine of sunrise is still beautiful to me.
And the clouds at sunset look even more profound to me now that I understand death. I'm playing a
different game now than I was when I was a child, and hoping to win different rewards. Thanks to the deep
feelings all people steer their lives by—thanks to the heart's affections, its joys, and its fears—I can still
look at the most ordinary little flower there is and be profoundly moved.

Themes
THE SOUL'S IMMORTALITY
Wordsworth’s poem argues that the human soul is everlasting. The speaker believes that the soul actually
comes from heaven, where it exists before people are born, and that it will one day return there. The
speaker finds a deep sense of comfort and inspiration in this idea that the soul is eternal, having always
existed, and also immortal, going on after death. The speaker finds evidence for the soul’s immortality in
the way children see the world. Looking back on his own childhood, the speaker remembers that the world
used to look different, as if everything in nature were shining with its own “celestial light.” In the speaker’s
view, this is because young children have only just arrived from heaven, and thus bring heavenly
perceptions with them. That is, they can still see a sort of divine, heavenly presence in the physical world
that now surrounds them.
The freshness and beauty that the speaker remembers seeing as a child strikes him as a sort of souvenir
from his soul’s earlier “home” in God. In other words, the way children perceive the world is an “intimation
of immortality,” a hint of what the speaker feels is the deepest truth there is: the human soul is not tied to
the mortal body, and instead has its own joyful existence in heaven before it comes to earth. It gets harder
and harder to feel that connection with the eternal as one gets older, the speaker sighs: life is a process of
moving further and further from one’s heavenly origins, moving “daily farther from the East.” But even this
image, which alludes to the movement of the sun, suggests that after the soul“sets” in death, it will “rise”
in heavenly glory again. The memory of his “celestial” childhood vision gives him a “faith that looks through
death,” a belief that the soul doesn’t just come from heaven, but returns there—regardless of how final
death might seem.
CHILDHOOD WONDER AND THE PAIN OF GROWING UP
The poem’s speaker remembers that, when he was a child, the natural world was full of spectacular beauty
and wonder. Sure, nature still looks “lovely” to him as an adult, but as a child, he remembers, he could see
heavenly light shining in even the most common of plants. He has to work pretty hard not to be “sullen”
about losing the ability to see the world this way, but maintains that it’s simply the cost of growing up. The
further people get from childhood, the speaker argues, the more used to the world they get, and the less
they can perceive the world’s intense, spiritual beauty. The poem presents this as a sad loss, but also as
part of the natural order of things. When he was a child, the speaker remembers, he saw the natural world
as a place of immense wonder. Once upon a time, even ordinary grass shone with “splendour”; indeed, all
of nature seemed to glow with “celestial light,” illuminated with divine, supernatural beauty. This beauty,
the speaker suggests, appears plainly to children both because they’re not yet used to the world, and
because their souls have recently arrived from heaven: they’re still seeing the everyday world through the
lens of their earlier heavenly existence. But as people grow up, get familiar with the world, and move
farther and farther away from their heavenly origins, this kind of vision fades. The routines and habits of
daily life set in, and the world goes from looking enchanted to looking “common.” This is a painful loss! As
an adult, the speaker can’t help but feel like he’s missing something important: he can still appreciate
natural beauty, but the “visionary gleam” of childhood is gone forever. There’s no point in mourning this
loss too hard, though: it’s just a natural part of life. When the speaker turns away from his “grief” over the
lost “visionary gleam” of childhood, he suggests that such grief “wrong[s]” the beauty of the spring day
around him. Even if the loss of that “gleam” hurts, it’s as natural as the changing seasons, and to resist it
would be an insult to the rder of the world. Everyone, the speaker says, slowly gets used to the day-to-day
of human life until “custom” (familiarity or habit) makes the world seem ordinary. There’s no way to avoid
this: it’s just part of the journey of human life.
THE CONSOLATIONS OF MEMORY
The poem’s speaker feels he’s lost a lot by growing up: when he was a child, nature seemed to shine with
“celestial light” for him, but as an adult, that luminosity is just a memory. At the same time, he finds that
such memories offer some consolation. While he mourns the beauty he could once see, he finds “strength
in what remains behind”: his memories of how he saw the world in childhood, and his adult “philosophic
mind” that allows him to reflect on those memories. Growing up and getting used to the wonder of the
world, the poem suggests, is a sad but unavoidable part of being alive. But remembering that wonder from
an adult perspective is the foundation of mature wisdom, hope, and faith. Children, this speaker believes,
instinctively see the world as a place full of heavenly beauty and wonder. While adults lose their ability to
see the world this way, they never forget their memories of that kind of vision. The natural world reminds
the speaker of what he used to be able to see there; a particular “Tree” and “a single Field” still speak to
him of the heavenly beauty he saw shining in those specific places, once upon a time. But the speaker’s
memories of childhood aren’t just melancholy reminders of what once was: they’re also a “master light,” a
guiding beacon of hope and faith. In other words, remembering the beauty and wonder he saw as a child
makes him believe that his soul came from heaven—and will one day return there. Sometimes his
memories can even take him right back to the verge of the wonder he’s lost, so that he gets a reassuring
glimpse of “the immortal sea”—that is, the endless and beautiful afterlife—he believes his soul will one
day return to. Heavenly childhood vision might be fleeting, the speaker suggests, but one’s memories of
that beautiful way of seeing
can form the foundations of an adult faith in the soul’s immortality. While the world doesn’t shine quite so
bright anymore, the speaker’s recollection of its former “celestial light” mean that even “the meanest
flower that blows” can still give him hope of an eternal life.
THE BEAUTY AND DIVINITY OF NATURE
The poem suggests that, even after people lose the shining childhood vision that allows them to see all of
nature illuminated with divine light, nature can still bring people close to the divine. Nature, to this
speaker, isn’t just a beautiful and consoling place, but a mirror of heaven itself. One doesn’t need to be a
visionary child to find hope, comfort, and inspiration in the natural world—nor to get a taste of a heavenly
future there. For the speaker, nature overflows with obvious beauty: “Waters on a starry night / Are
beautiful and fair,” he says plainly, and “lovely is the Rose”—these are just the facts! Nature isn’t merely
lovely either; it’s aware of its loveliness. The “Moon” looks around with “delight” at the clear skies, and the
birds “sing a joyous song,” inviting humans to share in their happiness. The “heavens” themselves “laugh”
as nature rejoices in its own loveliness, the speaker says: all that conscious beauty and delight is a
reflection of the divine–that is, of a loving and joyful God. In turn, the speaker imagines heaven as a natural
landscape, as an “immortal sea,” “clouds of glory,” and the “east” where the sun rises. The sea’s eternal
vastness, the ethereal glow of clouds, and the “glorious birth” of the sunrise all evoke heaven’s endless joy.
Since nature and the divine are mirror images of each other, when the speaker basks in the loveliness of
the “Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves,” he can feel a connection with heaven, even after he’s lost his
childhood ability to see nature
shining with “celestial light.” Because it hints at the eternal joys of heaven, this poem argues, nature has
the ability to connect even jaded adults with the divine. Even the “meanest flower that blows” (that is, the
lowliest, commonest little blossom) can inspire the speaker with profound thoughts of heavenly eternity—
thoughts like the ones that make up this very poem.
Symbols
SPRING
Spring symbolizes everything the speaker celebrates in this poem: new life, resurrection, and immortality.
Of course, this speaker is far from the first person to see spring this way: the idea that spring is a symbolic
time for resurrections, revelations, and redemptions is so old that it turns up in holidays from Easter to
Passover to Ramadan. As the speaker enjoys the May morning around him, everything he sees suggests
beautiful new life. All the living creatures he encounters—lambs, birds, flowers, babies—are young, lovely,
and joyful. They remind him that new life returns every year after the long "death" of winter—and suggest
to him that the human soul is also like the spring, rising again into "glory" after death. These springy
images might carry an even deeper symbolic meaning for Wordsworth, who developed a deepening
Christian faith during the years he was working on this poem. Those "lambs," for instance, might evoke
Christ himself, sometimes known as the sacrificial "lamb of God," who dies only to be reborn into eternal
life.
LIGHT
Light is this poem's most powerful and complex symbol, standing for holiness, deep understanding,
guidance, truth, and joy. To this speaker, the "celestial light" he remembers seeing in the natural world as a
child is an image of the very deepest truth: that every human soul is immortal, part of a heavenly eternity.
Children see the world in that light, the speaker argues, because they're newly arrived from heaven; the
glow they see in nature is a souvenir they bring to earth from paradise. Alas, as people grow up, that light
fades, and everyone gets left in the dark "shades" of habit instead. But that light is still a powerful
reminder of God's "glorious" beauty and benevolence. Even though the speaker only has memories of the
light he saw in childhood to go by now, he still imagines it as the "master light" that guides him, helping
him to have faith that he'll return to "God, who is our home" one day. To see the world in this beautiful
light is both to have a deep knowledge of the way the universe works, and to feel blessed by that
knowledge.
FORM
This poem is, as its title suggests, an ode—an irregularly-shaped poem that honors a particular subject.
Other famous odes from the Romantic era sung the praises of nightingales, winds, and autumn. The
subject here isn't as tangible as any of those things, though. Instead, this poem celebrates "intimations of
immortality," or hints of eternal life—an altogether more mysterious and slippery idea. A complex subject
demands a complex form. This ode is built from eleven stanzas, all with varied rhyme schemes, patterns of
meter, and lengths. Each of these stanzas deals with a different angle on Wordsworth's central questions
about childhood, memory, and the soul, and each builds on the stanza that camebefore it.
• For instance, stanza 7 is all about the way that little children play pretend, acting out every stage
of adult life.
• Those vivid, concrete observations lead into the more abstract philosophical question the speaker
asks in stanza 8: why on earth are children so eager to grow up, when growing up means they'll lose
their intense connection with the divine?
The free-form shape here thus helps the poem to feel like a record of developing thoughts—which, in fact,
it was! Wordsworth wrote the first four stanzas of this poem—stanzas that end in some big questions—in
1802. The rest of the poem emerged slowly as he thought deeply about what the answers to those
questions might be. He didn't complete the remaining seven stanzas until 1804. This poem's thoughtful,
evolving shape reflects how seriously Wordsworth took the questions he's asking here—and how
profoundly he loved the complex beauties this ode praises.
LITERARY CONTEXT
William Wordsworth (1770-1850) drafted the Immortality Ode over many years. He wrote the first four
stanzas in 1802, slowly added to them, and published a first version of the complete poem in his 1807
collection Poems, in Two Volumes. He'd go on to revise and reprint this poem many times. Many scholars
see this poem as Wordsworth's masterpiece and final word, the highest expression of his philosophy. This
poem isn't just an exploration of everything dear to Wordsworth, but also a core sample straight from the
heart of English Romanticism. The ideas this poem deals with—the human soul, the transcendent beauty
of nature, the importance of deep feeling—are hallmarks of the Romantic period. In this early-19th-
century movement, artists and thinkers reacted against Enlightenment ideals of clarity, elegance, and
reason, embracing mystery, emotion, and earthy poetic forms like the ballad instead. But not every poet
readers now think of as a Romantic dealt with these ideas in the same way. For instance, when
Wordsworth shared the first few verses of this poem with his friend and collaborator Coleridge, Coleridge
found enough to disagree with in its philosophy that he wrote a whole poem in reply: "Dejection: an Ode,"
which argues that the ability to appreciate the beauty of the world is a more complex emotional knot to
untie than Wordsworth's poem allows for. Much-discussed and much-quoted, the Immortality Ode is still
widely regarded as one of the most powerful and important poems in English literature.
HISTORICAL CONTEXT
While Wordsworth was slowly becoming a devout Christian during the years when he was working on this
poem, the religious beliefs that he describes here—that nature is holy and the soul is eternal—go a little
outside the standard Christian framework. Instead, they have a lot to do with a nondenominational
spiritual belief that became popular in the early 19th century: pantheism. Pantheism is the belief that God
is in everything, and everything is in God. To a pantheist, nature isn't just beautiful because God made it, or
because it reflects the divine, but because it's an actual manifestation of God. This school of thought was
never so much a full-blown religious movement as a philosophy, but it was one that many poets and
thinkers of the Romantic era felt deeply. Many 19th-century Western thinkers in particular saw pantheism
as an antidote to institutionalized Christian dogma, which they felt had become oppressive and legalistic;
see William Blake for just one fiery critique of Christian authoritarianism. Pantheism allowed for deep
spiritual feelings without Christian cultural baggage. Pantheism and Romanticism both responded to
sweeping 19th-century cultural changes like the Industrial Revolution. As the economic landscape of
Europe became more and more mechanized and populations began to shift from the countryside to the
city, many thinkers feared that people had begun to see nature as a mere resource, a wilderness to be
mastered and stripped of its wealth. Reading nature as one of the faces of God, pantheism resisted a
purely mechanical, rational, and exploitative worldview. The philosophy that Wordsworth espouses in this
poem splits the difference between a more traditional Christian idea of God as a transcendent creator and
a pantheistic idea of God-in-everything. To this poem's speaker, God can appear to be in everything—but
only to children, whose souls have been hanging out with God in heaven more recently than adults' have.