“Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” by William Wordsworth (1807)

Published in Poems in Two Volumes (1807) this explores similar themes of mortality, the loss of the visionary ecstasy of childhood, and the consolation that the philosophical mind offers the mature poet as apparent recompense for that loss. The poem suggests that, though he has lost the capacity to experience the sublime supernatural power of nature he did as a child, those experiences have enduring value for the adult as tantalizing indications that the soul is immortal. Composed nine years after “Tintern Abbey,” the Ode foregrounds the elegiac tone of the earlier poem and employs (while generalizing and developing) its temporal framework of “Then” and “Now.” This framework embraces the child’s rapturous communion with nature and the adult poet’s chastened, ambivalent perspective, emphasizing his loss of visionary perception as the inevitable result of aging. Structurally, thematically, and emotionally, the “Intimations” ode charts similar terrain as the earlier poem, vacillating between sadness and joy, hope and despair, and evidence of loss and gain, as the speaker struggles to find a stable point of reference to ground a continuity of identity, inspiration, and moral resolution amid the degenerating effects of time and the experience of human suffering.