Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood

The speaker in Wordsworth’s “Ode” believes childhood is the stage of life when humans are closest to the divine: before practical concerns of adult life weaken and break their mystical sense of connection with everything in nature. To children, “meadow, grove, and stream. / The earth, and every common sight” (Lines 1-2) appear covered with “celestial [heavenly] light” (Line 4). This sensation is not a product of religious education, but the result of pure wonder and awe at the richness and beauty of nature, which has “[t]he glory and the freshness of a dream” (Line 5). The speaker mourns his own loss of that spiritual quality, but he recognizes and cherishes it in the children around him, like the “happy Shepherd-boy” (Line 35), whose joyful shouts join other natural sounds made by the birds, the waterfall, the wind in a celebration of the natural world’s splendor.

In the eighth stanza, the speaker praises the child for their “[s]oul’s immensity” (Line 109) and calls them the “best Philosopher” (Line 110) and “Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!” (Line 114). In other words, the speaker perceives this spiritual quality of childhood as greater than the rational or oracular wisdom of even the wisest adults. The adults have lost the child’s sensation of “[i]mmortality” (Line 118), their indifference to death, and the child’s intuitive wonder and joy.