Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood

"Ode to Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood" strongly suggests Wordsworth's ambivalence rather than embrace of nature. As we have discussed in class previously, Wordsworth scholars have long debated if Wordsworth can rightly be called a "nature poet," that is, a poet whose object of imaginative expression are the wonders and beauty of nature. I am of the opinion, as evidenced by "Ode," that the real object of Wordsworth's poetry, as is true with his poetry generally, is himself, specifically his consciousness. "Ode" recalls Wordsworth's days as a child where, as the poem's introduction by Wordsworth himself in the Longman Anthology explains, he says he experienced that quintessential "dreamlike vividness and splendor which invest objects of sight in childhood." His subsequent inability to live the rest of his life with this peculiarly magical relation to the external world proved to be for a significant period of his life a source of consternation. No matter the facts around him that proved otherwise, a certain part of himself refused or had an inability to believe that death's sting would eventually be applied to him one day. As his words suggest, the deepest recesses of his body would scream to him that to believe so about himself represented a kind of blasphemy. However, from one point of view for Wordsworth, his recollections of childhood, as the opening stanza intimates, would become a source of wisdom and knowledge: ("The Child is Father of the Man..."). I am reminded, and perhaps Wordsworth was as well, of how Christ in Matthew spoke of people coming to him like a child, which at that particular time in history, was a perplexing and somewhat revolutionary thing to say. Socially, children were seen as little more than nuisances, that is, as objects not to be taken too seriously from any meaningful philosophical perspective. They had little if any sense of natural rights ascribed to them by society and thus, were treated rather poorly when judged by today's western standards. And one can only guess that it was in part for this reason that Christ decided to use the image of a child as a metaphor for what it means to live one's life by faith alone. A child's love of life has about it a certain purity, and manifests a certain faith that when found in adults tends to ennoble the spirit: "Let the children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these." Wordsworth's child imagery in "Ode," coincidentally (or not), then, would seem to refer to a similar kind of faith, although here, to be sure, of a pagan variety, and as something instinctive to the young. The upshot of all this is that for Wordsworth, adulthood, in the most profound sense of the word, is something that mandates an eventual spiritual detachment in a person from the natural world, a view which for ecocritics and their green aspirations, one can be certain, makes for a perspective of humankind's relationship to nature that is fraught with ethical and philosophical concerns.