Ode Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood by William Wo…

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27 Gennaio 2019

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27 Gennaio 2019

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William Wordsworth was born in 1770 in Cockermouth, close to the Lake District, whose landscapes inspired many of his poems.

IN THE ERA OF INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION, that is:
Destruction of nature
Increasing population
Keeping away from nature
Longing for nature

Wordsworth is interested in The Three Primary Themes

Nature,

Individualism

Imagination

The biography of William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth
(1770-1850)

born in Cockermouth, England

grew up in a rustic society

philosophical sympathies with

the effect of revolutionaries.

progenitor of Romantic Period

autobiographical poem

William Wordsworth’s Works

The Evening Walks (1793)

The Lyrical Ballads (1798) with Samuel Taylor Colerdge

Tintern Abbey

The Prelude

Poems Dedicated to National

Independence and Liberty (1802- 1816)

The Excursion (1814)

Peter Bell (1819)

Memorials of a Tour on the Continent (1822)

DESCRIPTION OF THE POEM
About the poem…

– The speaker explains how humans change over time.

– When we are a child………

connected with nature,

– but as we get old ……

forget nature & interested in responsibilities of adulthood,.

– Nature stays as recollections of childhood in our memory

STANZA 1:
There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore; –
Turn wheresoe’er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

STANZA 2:
The Rainbow comes and goes,
And lovely is the Rose,
The Moon doth with delight
Look round her when the heavens are bare;
Waters on a starry night
Are beautiful and fair;
The sunshine is a glorious birth;
But yet I know, where’er I go,
That there hath past away a glory from the earth

STANZA 3:
Now, while the birds thus sing a joyous song,
And while the young lambs bound
As to the tabor’s sound,
To me alone there came a thought of grief:
A timely utterance gave that thought relief,
And I again am strong:
The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep;
No more shall grief of mine the season wrong;
I hear the Echoes through the mountains throng,
The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep,
And all the earth is gay;
Land and sea
Give themselves up to jollity,
And with the heart of May
Doth every Beast keep holiday; –
Thou Child of Joy,
Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy
Shepherd-boy!

STANZA 4:
Ye blessed Creatures, I have heard the call
Ye to each other make; I see
The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee;
My heart is at your festival,
My head hath its coronal,
The fulness of your bliss, I feel – I feel it all.
Oh evil day! if I were sullen
While the Earth herself is adorning,
This sweet May-morning,
And the Children are culling
On every side,
In a thousand valleys far and wide,
Fresh flowers; while the sun shines warm,
And the Babe leaps up on his Mother’s arm: –
I hear, I hear, with joy I hear!
– But there’s a Tree, of many, one,
A single Field which I have looked upon,
Both of them speak of something that is gone:
The Pansy at my feet
Doth the same tale repeat:
Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?

STANZA 5:
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But He beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature’s Priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.

STANZA 6:
Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own;
Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind,
And, even with something of a Mother’s mind,
And no unworthy aim,
The homely Nurse doth all she can
To make her Foster-child, her Inmate Man,
Forget the glories he hath known,
And that imperial palace whence he came.

STANZA 7:
Behold the Child among his new-born blisses,
A six years’ Darling of a pigmy size!
See, where ‘mid work of his own hand he lies,
Fretted by sallies of his mother’s kisses,
With light upon him from his father’s eyes!
See, at his feet, some little plan or chart,
Some fragment from his dream of human life,
Shaped by himself with newly-learned art;
A wedding or a festival,
A mourning or a funeral;
And this hath now his heart,
And unto this he frames his song:
Then will he fit his tongue
To dialogues of business, love, or strife;
But it will not be long
Ere this be thrown aside,
And with new joy and pride
The little Actor cons another part;
Filling from time to time his “humorous stage”
With all the Persons, down to palsied Age,
That Life brings with her in her equipage;
As if his whole vocation
Were endless imitation.

STANZA 8:
Thou, whose exterior semblance doth belie
Thy Soul’s immensity;
Thou best Philosopher, who yet dost keep
Thy heritage, thou Eye among the blind,
That, deaf and silent, read’st the eternal deep,
Haunted for ever by the eternal mind, –
Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!
On whom those truths do rest,
Which we are toiling all our lives to find,
In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave;
Thou, over whom thy Immortality
Broods like the Day, a Master o’er a Slave,
A Presence which is not to be put by;
To whom the grave
Is but a lonely bed without the sense or sight
Of day or the warm light,
A place of thought where we in waiting lie;
Thou little Child, yet glorious in the might
Of heaven-born freedom on thy being’s height,
Why with such earnest pains dost thou provoke
The years to bring the inevitable yoke,
Thus blindly with thy blessedness at strife?
Full soon thy Soul shall have her earthly freight,
And custom lie upon thee with a weight,
Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!

STANZA 9:
O joy! that in our embers
Is something that doth live,
That nature yet remembers
What was so fugitive!
The thought of our past years in me doth breed
Perpetual benediction: not indeed
For that which is most worthy to be blest;
Delight and liberty, the simple creed
Of Childhood, whether busy or at rest,
With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast: –
Not for these I raise
The song of thanks and praise;
But for those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings;
Blank misgivings of a Creature
Moving about in worlds not realised,
High instincts before which our mortal Nature
Did tremble like a guilty Thing surprised:
But for those first affections,
Those shadowy recollections,
Which, be they what they may,

STANZA 10:
Then sing, ye Birds, sing, sing a joyous song!
And let the young Lambs bound
As to the tabor’s sound!
We in thought will join your throng,
Ye that pipe and ye that play,
Ye that through your hearts today
Feel the gladness of the May!
What though the radiance which was once so bright
Be now for ever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be;
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering;
In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind.

STANZA 11:
And O, ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves,
Forebode not any severing of our loves!
Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might;
I only have relinquished one delight
To live beneath your more habitual sway.
I love the Brooks which down their channels fret,
Even more than when I tripped lightly as they;
The innocent brightness of a new-born Day
Is lovely yet;
The Clouds that gather round the setting sun
Do take a sober colouring from an eye
That hath kept watch o’er man’s mortality;
Another race hath been, and other palms are won.
Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

– Beneficial influence of nature

“To me alone there came a thought of grief:

A timely utterance gave that thought relief,

And I again am strong “

– The power of human mind

–

“Ye blessed Creatures, I have heard the call

Ye to each other make; I see

The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee”

– The splendor of childhood

‘ Thou little Child, yet glorious in the might

Of heaven-born freedom on thy being’s height,’

– Religion

‘From God, who is our home

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!’

– Humanity

‘With all the Persons, down to palsied Age,

That Life brings with her in her equipage;

As if his whole vocation

Were endless imitation’

– Individualism

“We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind”

LANGUAGE USE

Internal Rhyme

“But yet I know, where’er I go” (line 17)

“Fallings from us, vanishings;”(line 147)

“Which, be they what theymay,” (line 155)

Anaphora

Repetitions at the beginning of word groups occurring one after the other.

“Ye that pipe and ye that play,
Ye that through your hearts to-day”

(lines 177-178)

Apostrophe

Addressing an abstraction or a thing,

present or absent, or addressing

an absent person or entity

“And O ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves,

Forebode not any severing of our loves! “

(lines 192-193)

Metaphor

Comparison between unlike things…
“The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep” (line 25) waterfalls = musicians

Synecdoche

Substitution of a part to stand for the whole,

or the whole to stand for a part

“thou eyeamong the blind”

(line 112)

“Eye” represents a child who guides adults

Symbols

Represent an idea
Light

in childhood: “celestial light”(line 4)

“Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.”

in maturity : “light of common day” (line 78)

“And fade into the light of common day.”

Implimentations in the class (school exercises)

Word Puzzle
Getting in the Mood
Teacher sets the scene of the second stanza (the scene of a lovely nature).
Students are asked to think about their childhood and a memory taking place in nature, and take notes.
At the end, they are asked to compare the nature in their childhood and the nature at the moment.