Ode Intimations of Immortality by William Wordsworth Essay

Ode Intimations of Immortality by William Wordsworth In Ode: Intimations of Immortality, William Wordsworth explores the moral development of man and the irreconcilable conflicts between innocence and experience, and youthfulness and maturity that develop. As the youth matures he moves farther away from the divinity of God and begins to be corruption by mankind. What Wordsworth wishes for is a return to his childhood innocence but with his new maturity and insight. This would allow him to experience divinity in its fullest sense: he would re-experience the celestial radiance of childhood as well as the reality of his present existence. Wordsworth wants to have the better of the two conflicting worlds: childhood and maturity, divinity†¦show more content†¦Not until he becomes a man does he realized this and by this time it is too late, for he has already lost most of his childhood spirit and gleam. The child is divine because he remembers the glory of Heaven, and as the child grows into a man he fades into the light of common day(1482). The childs virtue that he used to have has slowly dissipated with age and experience. The adult looking back at his childhood can no longer see nature and his surroundings as he did when he was a child; his perception has evolved with his maturation. The speaker rationalizes his development but does not understand it fully, he recognizes his loss of sight but is unable to do anything about it. His blindness is inevitable. The fourth stanza concludes with the climax of the Ode. Whither is fled the visionary gleam? Where is it now, the glory and the dream? The first four stanzas express the joy of childhood and reveal the sense loss he feels when he can no longer experience the celestial light, while the remaining seven stanzas attempt to reconcile the speakers loss with two conflicting responses. The first response beginning in the fifth stanza the speaker declares, our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting(1482). This coincides with Wordsworths belief that our life on earth is a dim shadow of an earlier, purer existence, dimly recalled in childhood and then forgotten in the processShow MoreRelatedAnalysis Of The Poem The Ode On Intimations Of Immortality From Early Childhood By William Wordsworth1773 Words   |  8 Pageswhile hoping for a scream back. That s what Ode on Intimations of Immortality From Early Childhood by William Wordsworth is, Wordsworth s desperate attempt to scream into the void the best he could. But, what is he trying to say? The title is the first indication of the meaning of the poem. Since Wordsworth calls it an ode, he is saying that the intimations of immortality from early childhood are what he will be addressing in this poem. 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