When he dictated this long note to Isabella Fenwick, at the age of seventy-two or seventy-three, Wordsworth was troubled by objections that his apparent claim for the preexistence of the soul violated the Christian belief that the soul, although it survives after death, does not exist before the birth of an individual. His claim in the note is that he refers to the preexistence of the soul not in order to set out a religious doctrine but only so as to deal 'as a Poet' with a common human experience: that the passing of youth involves the loss of a freshness and radiance investing everything one sees. Coleridge's 'Dejection: An Ode,' which he wrote (in its earliest version) after he had heard the first four stanzas of Wordsworth's poem, employs a similar figurative technique for a comparable, though more devastating, experience of loss.
The original published text of this poem (in 1807) had as its title only 'Ode,' and then as epigraph 'Paulo maiora canamus' (Latin for 'Let us sing of somewhat higher things') from Virgil's Eclogue 4.
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308 / WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
Ode
Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood
The Child is Father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.1
1
There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
5 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.
2
io 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
15 Are beautiful and fair; The sunshine is a glorious birth;
But yet I know, where'er I go,
That there hath past away a glory from the earth. 3
Now, while the birds thus sing a joyous song,
20 And while the young Iambs bound
As to the tabor's2 sound,
To me alone there came a thought of grief:
A timely utterance3 gave that thought relief,
And I again am strong:
25 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,4
And all the earth is gay;
30 Land and sea Give themselves up to jollity,
And with the heart of May
Doth every Beast keep holiday;?
Thou Child of Joy,
35 Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy
Shepherd-boy!
