Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood

Back in March, I featured here an article I had written on a truly human way of learning things, an article which quoted the final couplet of our poem today: “To me the meanest flower that blows can give / Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.” So Debra and I decided it might be the right time to read Poetry Aloud one of the most important and, I think, moving poems of the Romantic age in England, the so-called “Intimations Ode,” whose full title I’ve given above, by William Wordsworth.

A couple of words here to help you out before you listen. Wordsworth remembers with great clarity some of the feelings he had when he was a child and he encountered the beautiful things of this world, the sun, the “splendor in the grass,” the birds, the farm animals, the sky and the wind, the loving looks of mother and father. But when you grow old, you sense that the glory of it has passed away. Has it? The freshness has — but is there something greater, by way of recompense? We come from God, who is our home; but is our life then only a straying farther and farther away from that home? Wordsworth does not believe so — but he won’t indulge any false sentiment, either.

This poem brings together childhood and maturity more powerfully than any that I know, and ends in a hope, I’d say a deeply religious hope, that cannot be put into words. Listen, and consider, and be of good cheer.

“Children at Play,” Marmaduke William Flower. Public Domain.

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