Wordsworths Ode: Intimations of Immortality :: Wordsworth Ode immortality intimations Essays

Wordsworths Ode Intimations of ImmortalityThe fifth stanza of Wordsworths Ode Intimations of Immortality is especially interesting to me because of the images it presents. It is at this point in the poem that Wordsworth resumes his writing after a two-year hiatus. In the fourth stanza, he poses the question, Whither is fled the visionary gleam? Stanza five is the beginning of his own answers to that question. Contrary to universal enlightenment ideas, Wordsworth suggests that rather than become more knowledgeable with age, man if fact is born with vision splendid and as he ages, that vision dies away and he left empty. This stanza is dominated by the Christian ideas of being made in Gods image. However, man does not remain in that image. His birth is hardly a sleep and a forgetting, and as his life progresses he moves farther and farther from the glorious ideal he had in childhood. byout much of his poetry, Wordsworth asserts that in childhood, one can see but is un aware of that ability, whereas in adulthood, one cannot see and is painfully aware of his situation. It is only through conscious thought and animadversion that man can begin to square up a state similar to his original one. The question, then, is why children, who take nature for granted, are given the opportunity to combine so closely with it. It would appear that the fact that children do not realize what they have is the very reason for their having it. Thus, the losing of that knowledge with age allows man to feel the loss, and forces him to find a solution, just as Wordsworth has done. In stanza ten, he tells the reader that the true essence of humanity is the ability to feel pain and have memories of better times. Through these painful or happy memories, man is able achieve the philosophical state of mind, and in the end to love nature even more than he did in youth.