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An Essay on Glorification of Childhood in Immortality Ode: ‘Immortality Ode’ by William Wordsworth deals with the immortal memoirs of childhood. The gentle melancholy on the past days leaves a pleasing pain of nostalgia in our heart. On running after the lines, we reach somewhere in past; holding the hands of memories, we go back to the innocence and each mind would say ‘we had a nice time’ In this poem, there was a time in speaker’s child hood when to him every ordinary object of nature appeared clad in heavenly luxe. In the period of childhood the feeling of spirituality and divinity is pretty high.
As man grows in years in feelings of spirituality disappears gradually and man is lost in materialism. “As length the man perceives a dies away And fade into the light of the common day” The poet regrets that those glorious imprints are not so fresh and same existing beauty in the object of Nature. During his childhood all the beauties of the nature the meadow, the woods, the streams, thrilled him with joy and they all seemed to be enveloped in ethereal beauty. But now at his advanced age he misses it. All the things are same and as beautiful as ever but the charm has lost to the poet.
Though he hears the voice of nature which invites him to join the feast, the over ruling sadness through which he sees that the particular tree and the field are now like the seasons have all gone, presents him with a sense of lost. “I hear, I hear, with joy I hear… …speak of something that is gone” There is a certain abruptness in the opening of the stanza. Here the poet abruptly turns into the philosophy of reminiscence. This abruption is because of the four years of interval he had taken to come back to this poem. He says the child has a more exalted vision than man.
The baby brings with a heavenly glory that would totally fade away for the time being. In childhood we are nearest to the heaven and in manhood farthest away. Even the earth herself does her best to make him forget the glories of heaven. The child keeps a communion with the celestial light. Here he is considered as a mighty Prophet-“Mighty poet! Seer blest! /On whom those truths do rest”-whose glorification and association with the divine spirit is purely grounded in Platonism which says that the human soul before it comes to the earth lived in glorious heaven of ideas and that it loses the memory of heaven when it is born on earth.
The poem is psychologically composed. Here Wordsworth tells us that God is our home and we had come from this home. We all, in the form of the child bring with us the heavenly glory. This glory gets fainter and fainter in the boyhood. It gets still more fainted in our youth and it finally altogether fade away in the manhood. “Shades the prison house begin to close Upon the growing boy” The child retains something of his heavenly heritage. Hence he is the best philosopher the Eye among the Blind, the seer, and the prophet. The sense of immortality is present in the child and in the lives manner. It broods over him like a spiritual influence.
How strange it is that the same child gives up this heavenly bliss amid freedom and blindly enters into the struggle for existence. It gives joy to Wordsworth that in our ashes there still exists some spark of heavenly flame and that we still remember the experience of childhood. The poet is a blest when he meditates on his past years because he is conscious of the existence of spiritual things. The vision of spiritual things helps us to realize that the years we spend on the earth are only moments in the vast space of eternity. “Though inland far we be, Our souls have sight of that immortal sea Which brought us hither,
Can in a moment travel thither” The poet feels that his joy is as genuine as that of other created things he blended with sorrow. And as his joy is accomplished by a philosophical note, it is a joy of a higher quality. Though far from loving the Objects of Nature, the poet feels their sovereign power over his heart. He has relinquished only one delight namely the glory and the dream of boyhood, but he has lived in a constant communion with nature, to him the brooks, the dawn, the sunset are as beautiful as ever and even the obscurest in nature has the power to move the poet to his inmost depths. To me the meanest flowers that blow can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears” The poem represents two stages in Wordsworth’s attitude towards nature. In the IV stanza the poet feels a sense of lost for nature. It seems to him that nature has lost glory for him. The mood is represented in the following four lines: “The Pansy at my feet Doth the same tale repeat; Wither is fled the visionary gleam? Wither is it now, the glory and the dream? ” The presentation of child life in the ‘Ode’ is psychologically true though its philosophical aspect may not be admitted by many readers.
The imitative instinct in child life is presented by the poet in the VII stanza of the poem. The child is interested in a variety of things connected with human life. It was pointed out that the poet had presented an idealistic picture of childhood which could not be warranted by facts of experience. The speaker examines this criticism and in the concluding part of the poem he brought some modifications in the theory that the life of the child was one of the glories which advance human beings could not enjoy. He made concessions for old age and the philosophic mind that comes to them.
Though the old recollections of spirituality, which a child enjoys, cannot be enjoyed by a grown up persons, yet they need not be sorry for all that, because in advanced age we can have advantage which are denied to child in his infancy, the philosophic aspect of human life which cannot be found in the period of childhood. The poem, whose full title is “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” makes explicit Wordsworth’s belief that life on earth is a dim shadow of an earlier, purer existence, dimly recalled in childhood and then forgotten in the process of growing up.
In the whole poem, we observe that how the speaker glorify his childhood. The ‘Ode’ summarizes briefly the essence of the speaker’s philosophy. Earthly interests drive us farther and farther from the divine home from which we have come. But in calm moments we have a vision of the source of beauty and power, from which we have come. The child has more of the glimpses of the divine home than the adult man. The child is thus wiser than man; and we should therefore endeavor to continue to partake in child’s simple joys and delights.