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Recommended Reading: 600 Classics Reviewed

Ode: Intimations of Immortality

by William Wordsworth

1807

Poetry

Lyric

One of the most famous and important works of the English Romantic period, this profound philosophical poem at once bemoans the loss of childhood and celebrates the wisdom that comes with maturity.

Like so many of William Wordsworth's poems, the Ode illustrates the concerns with childhood and human psychology that were central to English Romanticism. The speaker of the 203-line poem catalogs the gains and losses of growing older, at the same time making some profound observations about the effect one's childhood has on adult life.

The poem can be divided into three parts. The first (roughly stanzas 1 through 4) details the loss of the glory of childhood. No longer is the poet able to see the earth, as he once did, through the visionary eyes of childhood. While nature still holds wonders for him, he realizes that he can never again behold the life around him as he did in years gone by.

The middle section of the poem (stanzas 5 through 8) elaborates the process by which all human beings suffer this loss as they mature. Growing from childhood to adulthood, says the poet, involves gradually forgetting the glory that we knew in paradise before birth. As the sensory pleasures of earth replace the spiritual pleasures of preexistence, the child gradually forgets the glories that once were his. Thus childhood is a truly blessed state, retaining as it does some vestige of “celestial light.”

The poem ends with a celebration of the recompense that comes with maturity. These new pleasures are the products of what the adult remembers of his early life. Thus, the adult intellect is tempered by recollections of early childhood to remind us of our spiritual nature.

The “Intimations Ode” is a complicated and highly abstract work, a poem to be read and reread. It probes the very nature of the spiritual plane of human existence.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
Wordsworth, William. "Ode: Intimations Of Immortality." Recommended Reading: 600 Classics Reviewed, edited by Editors of Salem Press, Salem Press, 2015. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=6CR_0373.
APA 7th
Wordsworth, W. (2015). Ode: Intimations of Immortality. In E. Salem Press (Ed.), Recommended Reading: 600 Classics Reviewed. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Wordsworth, William. "Ode: Intimations Of Immortality." Edited by Editors of Salem Press. Recommended Reading: 600 Classics Reviewed. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2015. Accessed September 15, 2025. online.salempress.com.