Summary of the poem "Immortality" by Robert Browning
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Answer:
Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’ is one of William Wordsworth’s best-known and best-loved poems. You can read ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ here before proceeding to the summary and analysis below.
Perhaps the best way to offer an analysis of this long poem is to go through it, section by section. So we’ll offer a sort of combined summary and analysis as we go.
First, let’s start with the poem’s epigraph. In 1802, Wordsworth wrote a short poem which became known as ‘The Rainbow’, which includes the lines:
The Child is Father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.
The paradox of the line ‘The Child is father of the Man’ is that our childhoods shape our adulthoods: the inversion of the usual idea of things (that an adult man is a father to his child) neatly embodies Romanticism’s desire to shake up the way we view ourselves, and to (an idea expressed before Romanticism, notably in Henry Vaughan’s fine poem ‘The Retreat’; but it was Wordsworth and the Romantics who made the idea a central part of their worldview). These three lines establish the tone for ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’: the poem is about the formative years of childhood and how they helped to make Wordsworth the man, and poet, he became. Wordsworth wrote ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ between March 1802 and March 1804; it was published in 1807. The three lines from ‘The Rainbow’ (‘My heart leaps up’) were only added as epigraph in 1815; the original epigraph in 1807 was from the Roman poet Virgil, and translates as ‘Let us sing a loftier strain’. In a note to the poem, Wordsworth wrote:
This was composed during my residence at Town-end, Grasmere. Two years at least passed between the writing of the four first stanzas and the remaining part. To the attentive and competent reader the whole sufficiently explains itself; but there may be no harm in adverting here to particular feelings or ‘experiences’ of my own mind on which the structure of the poem partly rests. Nothing was more difficult for me in childhood than to admit the notion of death as a state applicable to my own being.
Here is the text of ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ with our own notes, added by way of summary and analysis.
There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
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.
When he was a child, Wordsworth could detect the heavenly (‘celestial’) magic in the natural world around him: every meadow, grove, and stream seemed imbued with a divine, dreamlike magic. Now he’s an adult, Wordsworth has lost sight of the wonder he used to be able to detect in the world of nature.
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
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.
Wordsworth acknowledges that nature is as beautiful as it was when he was young; but the ‘glory’ the earth used to contain seems to have passed away.
Now, while the birds thus sing a joyous song,
And while the young lambs bound
As to the tabor’s sound,
To me alone there came a thought of grief:
A timely utterance gave that thought relief,
And I again am strong:
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,
And all the earth is gay;
Land and sea
Give themselves up to jollity,
And with the heart of May
Doth every Beast keep holiday;—
Thou Child of Joy,
Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy Shepherd-boy.
Wordsworth now acknowledges that the fault lies within him, rather than in any change that has come over the world. We are not in the realm of social or historical analysis here, but personal, subjective feeling. How many of us feel that the world has changed since we were a child, and that it has lost its way? It seems less magical; yet to younger generations, it is doubtless filled with the same wonder we once had for it. In response to Morrissey’s question, ‘Has the world changed or have I changed?’ we feel confident answering, in the case of Wordsworth, with a resounding ‘You have’.