(no subject)
Daniel Shelkofsky
12/9/04
2nd Period
“Intimations of Immortality”
The speaker begins by telling us that in his earlier days everything he saw, things which would now appear common, seemed “apparell’d in celestial light”. In other words, everything in the world seemed new and amazing, like something out of a dream. But as time has gone on, he has lost this youthful exuberance about the world and grown apathetic to the sights which used to so excite him.
He then continues by explaining some of the things in the world that he still finds beautiful. “Waters on a starry night are beautiful and fair; the sunshine is a glorious birth,” he writes, continuing that “where’re [he] goes… there hath pass’d a glory away from the earth.” This is something most adults can relate to. Although the world is still a beautiful, awe-inspiring place it fails to invoke the joy and passion in us that we felt as children.
Next the speaker intimates an occasion in which, despite hearing the singing of the birds in the trees and seeing the dancing of the sheep in the fields (as if to the beat of a drum), he felt a pang of grief at the troubles of this world. Realizing that he has nothing to be grievous about, the speaker resolves that, “no more shall grief of [his] the season wrong”. He has now heard the calling of nature and the joy of the animals and realizes that with all this beauty around him, it’s frivolous to be sad or depressed. He realizes the innate joy of the world saying, “and with the heart of May doth every beast keep holiday”. In other words, the other creatures of this world, unburdened by the pains of human existence, cannot help but be exuberant and sing for joy to the world.
Finally, he tells the “blessed creatures” of the world, our speaker has realized that it is a terrible thing to be sad when one is surrounded by such a beautiful world. “O evil day,” he writes, “if I were sullen while earth herself is adoring, this sweet May-morning… while the sun shines warm, and the babe leaps up on his mother’s arm.” But upon looking at a tree, a field, and a single pansy at his feet, it becomes clear to the speaker that something is still missing. That magic from childhood is still long lost. “Where is it now,” he writes, “the glory and the dream?”
The next stanza explains Wordsworth’s association with the Platonic concept of the transmigration of the soul. “The soul that rises with us… has elsewhere had its setting, and cometh from afar,” he writes, “not in entire forgetfulness, and not in utter nakedness but trailing clouds of glory do we come from God, who is our home.” This is exactly the kind of reincarnation theory the Greeks were working with back when Plato was alive. A slight memory of heaven is retained by us in our infancy, and this memory grows fainter and fainter as time goes on until, by reaching adulthood, we totally forget about it and “fade into the light of common day.”
The Earth, the speaker explains is full of beauties and pleasures all her own, and while they cannot compare to the beauty of heaven, they are still enough to keep us enticed while on the planet. After all, once we’ve passed our infancy, we don’t remember anything anyway. Mother Earth is referred to as “the homely nurse”, not in the sense that it is ugly on this planet, but that the beauties of this world cannot compare with those of the next.
The speaker brings up the image of a small child, surrounded by loving parents and made to be “shaped by himself with newly-learned art.” Weddings, funerals, festivals and mourning all shape the child until he sings his song about these earthly things, instead of the joy of God, which he has long forgotten. The child goes through life concerned with “dialogues of business, love, or strife” all of which occupy his attention at one point or another. He is but an actor on a stage, filling his performance with all the people he meets throughout his lifetime, right down to “palsied age“. It is as if his entire life’s work is the imitation of those adults who have come before him.
The speaker then begins addressing a philosopher, basically explaining his thoughts on why the excessive analysis of the world around us and what happens when we die is a definite bad thing. Struggling to find light in the darkness of the grave (our life in this world) is impossible, and by devoting his life to this struggle the philosopher is but a slave to the master of immortality. Why do children have to go down this path, he asks? Why must these pure beings, visions of immortality still in their heads, become weighed down with the burdens of the world?
Our only saving grace, contends the speaker, is that nature remembers the beauty of the heavens and that we as children remember it for a moment. He offers a song of thanks that, though we are so shrouded by the darkness of this world, our souls retain some knowledge of the world beyond this one and this allows us to connect with the joy of nature. The afterlife is compared to a great sea, from which newborn babies are constantly washing up on shore and though we have been so distracted by the foolishness of this world, “Our souls have sight of that immortal sea which brought us hither, can in a moment travel thither… and hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.”
The images of singing birds and lambs frolicking to the beat of a drum are recapitulated in the next stanza, wherein the speaker says that we must join with the other creatures of the earth and rejoice in nature’s beauty. Even though we may never recapture that childhood exuberance with all that is around us, “find strength in what remains behind; in the primal sympathy which having been must ever be.” In other words, be glad and give joy to the beauty of the earth.
The speaker concludes his piece by saying that beginnings in life are beautiful things, as we all know. “The innocent brightness of a new-born day is lovely,” he writes celebrating in the majesty that is the bright, shining world around us. However, death can be equally majestic. “Yet,” the speaker writes, “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.” The “eye” being referred to here is the sun. We get an image of a sunset, commonly associated with death and passing from this world to the next. The speaker finishes by saying that though life must eventually come to an end, he must give thanks to the “human heart by which we live”. It is through this heart that we experience the passion, joy, and fear of life. And for this reason, the speaker says, “the meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.”