1. The concluding lines of Wordsworth's 'My all. heart leaps up' (p. 306). 4. Of the many suggested interpretations, the sim
2. A small drum often used to beat time for danc-plest is 'from the fields where they were sleeping.' ing. Wordsworth often associated a rising wind with the
3. Perhaps 'My heart leaps up,' perhaps 'Reso-revival of spirit and of poetic inspiration (see, e.g., lution and Independence,' perhaps not a poem at the opening passage of The Prelude, p. 324).
.
ODE: INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY / 309
4
Ye blessed Creatures, I have heard the call
Ye to each other make; I see
The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee;
My heart is at your festival,
40 My head hath its coronal,5 The fulness of your bliss, I feel?I feel it all.
Oh evil day! if I were sullen
While Earth herself is adorning,
This sweet May-morning,
45 And the Children are culling
On every side,
In a thousand valleys far and wide,
Fresh flowers; while the sun shines warm,
And the Babe leaps up on his Mother's arm:?
50 I hear, I hear, with joy I hear! ?But there's a Tree, of many, one,
A single Field which I have looked upon,
Both of them speak of something that is gone:
The Pansy at my feet
55 Doth the same tale repeat: Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream? 5
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,6
60 Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
65 From God, who is our home: Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But He beholds the light, and whence it flows,
70 He sees it in his joy; The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature's Priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
75 At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.
6
Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own;
Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind,
And, even with something of a Mother's mind,
so And no unworthy aim, The homely7 Nurse doth all she can
5. Circlet of wildflowers, with which the shepherd 6. The sun, as metaphor for the soul. boys trimmed their hats in May. 7. In the old sense: simple and friendly.
