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 interest to me because of the im yearss 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 tail fin is the beginning of his own answers to that question. Contrary to popular enlightenment ideas, Wordsworth suggests that rather than turn over more knowledgeable with age, man if fact is born with vision pure and as he ages, that vision dies away and he left empty. This stanza is reign by the Christian ideas of being made in Gods image. However, man does not remain in that image. His birth is but a sleep and a forgetting, and as his life progresses he moves farther and farther from the glorious ideal he had in childhood. Throughout much of his poetry, Wordsworth asserts that in childhood, ane can see but is u naware of that ability, whereas in adulthood, one cannot see and is painfully aware of his situation. It is only through conscious vista and reflection that man can begin to find a nation similar to his original one. The question, then, is why children, who take nature for granted, are abandoned the opportunity to connect 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 sense 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 bright memories, man is able achieve the philosophical state of mind, and in the hold back to love nature even more than he did in youth.