![]() ![]() So we come into this world not as tabula rasa, but “trailing clouds of glory”. When he picked up, he came up with an explanation, drawing on the belief in the pre-existence of the soul (not orthodox Christian teaching and the one out of which he tried to extricate himself later). This is where Wordsworth paused writing for two years. These individual sights – a tree, a field, a pansy flower remind the poet that “the visionary gleam” which used to surround them, is for him gone. “But there’s a Tree, of many, one/A single Field which I have looked upon”, he says in the lines which apparently made William Blake weep, but don’t move that much. He feels the happiness of spring time around him and he thinks it would be churlish to be sad when surrounded by it. He felt sad at some point for an unspecified reason, but then released his pain through poetry and he is strong again, asking nature and children around him to express their joy. The world hasn’t changed: “The Rainbow comes and goes/And lovely is the Rose”, writes Wordsworth in lines which I find awfully prosaic, but maybe that’s the point: the world, with all its beauties, has just become so ordinary for the adult. It begins with wistful recollection of how in his childhood all the natural objects seemed to him to be “apparelled in celestial light”. But I’ll trudge on, nevertheless.Īnother difference between the first and the later editions of the poem is that Wordsworth replaced the original epigraph from Virgil with self-citation of the last three lines of “ My Heart Leaps Up“. I must admit that this poem like nothing else makes me realize that I have a huge Wordsworth blind spot, because I can’t see all the beautiful and interesting things that other people see in it. The poem in the first edition was called simply “Ode”, but in the later edition Wordsworth added the long subtitle “On Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”, probably thinking that just like in case of “Tintern Abbey” the title “Ode” is not distinctive enough. Isaac Rosenberg… on William Wordsworth –… The Burning Bush and… on Mina Loy – “The Fe… ![]() Mina Loy – “The Feminist Manifesto” (the end).Mina Loy – “Songs to Joannes” (excerpts).Yeats – “The Stolen Child”, “Down by the Salley Gardens”, “The Rose of the World” Yeats – “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”, “The Sorrow of Love”, “When You Are Old”, “Who Goes with Fergus?” Yeats – “The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland”, “Adam’s Curse” Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood By William Wordsworth The child is father of the man And I could wish my days to be Bound each to each by natural piety. ![]()
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