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Intimations of Immortality from
Recollections of Early Childhood (an Ode)
by William
Wordsworth (1770–1850)
The
Child is Father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.
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.
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 pass'd away
a glory from the earth.
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!
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.
O evil day! if I were sullen
While 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?
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.
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.
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-learnèd 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.
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!
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 realized,
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,
Are yet the fountain-light
of all our day,
Are yet a master-light of all our seeing;
Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make
Our
noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal Silence: truths that wake,
To perish never:
Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour,
Nor Man nor Boy,
Nor all that is at enmity with joy,
Can utterly abolish or destroy!
Hence
in a season of calm weather
Though inland far we be,
Our souls have sight
of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither,
Can
in a moment travel thither,
And see the children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.
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
to-day
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.
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 relinquish'd one delight
To live beneath your more
habitual sway.
I love the brooks which down their channels fret,
Even more than when I tripp'd 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.
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