“Ode:
Intimations of Immortality from Recollections in Early Childhood” (pp.51-57):
read the entire poem, but the questions will only focus on Stanzas 1-7
NOTE: This is a
longer poem, though it’s broken up into short stanza chapters. Read it slowly, and focus on each stanza as
an individual poem. Then consider how
each one develops a general ‘story’ or narrative about Wordsworth’s life. Consider this, too, as a kind of mid-life
crisis poem: Wordsworth feels himself pulling away from the innocent joys he
used to experience in life, and the poem is an attempt to find himself—and to
convince other readers to find themselves in the thickets of adulthood.
Answer TWO of the following...
Q1: According to
Stanzas 1-4, what causes the poet to feel distanced from the natural
world? What has come between him and his
imagination/emotions? In Stanza 2 he
writes that “But yet I know, where’er I go,/That there hath past away a glory
from the earth.” What is this “glory”
that has passed away? Can we hint at
what he feels or sees that is missing?
Q2: Read Stanza
5 carefully: how are the metaphors trying to explain the nature of life on
earth? Why is birth “a sleep and a
forgetting”? Why do “shades of the prison-house
begin to close/Upon the growing Boy”?
And why might a young boy/girl be “Nature’s Priest”?
Q3: In Stanza 6,
Wordsworth uses the metaphor of Nature as a Nurse, and the Youth being her
“Foster-child.” In what way are we to
understand Nature as nursing a child that is not her own, but which she loves
“with something of a Mother’s mind”?
Q4: Stanza 7 is
one of the most important in the entire poem for explaining a very Romantic
philosophy of adulthood. What does he
mean by the phrase “The little Actor cons another part…As if his whole
vocation/Were endless imitation.” How
might this be another way of stating Shakespeare’s famous line from As You Like It that “All the world’s a
stage”?
2.) Wordsworth states "Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:/The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,/Hath had somewhere else its setting" to resemble the fact that our body is the vessel that contains our soul. Our soul was before our body, but once we are born, we feel as though we have been asleep and forget the previous endeavor it took and start anew. This in no way resembles reincarnation, because he laters states that "God, who is our home:" which is to say our home (before God sent our souls to meet our bodies) was God beforehand. Then, Wordsworth uses the metaphor "Heaven lies within our infancy!/Shades of the prison-house begin to close/Upon a growing Boy" to show how innocence changes over time. While we are still infants, our place in Heaven is guaranteed because we have not yet done anything immoral or condemning. As time ebbs on, and we begin to coherently make our own actions, we are trapped in our prison of mortality and our innocence has every chance in the world to fade away from that point on. This is not something the child immediately realizes is happening. However, Wordsworth gives a bit of insight into the innocence and naivety of a growing child when he states that a young boy/girl is "Nature's Priest" because the child holds their imagination steadfast and is able to conduct nature as they see fit. They are - within the realm of their own mind - the driving force of how nature pans out on a day to day basis, and, much as a Priest who is looking through the Bible, they find themselves bewildered by the beauty and intimacy of nature.
ReplyDelete3.) Mother Nature is not simply the home to foliage, beasts, and the like. Mother nature is where everything around us begins and ends. When we are born, we are still children living amongst Mother Nature. When we create anything, we are using tools crafted from Mother Nature to create and manipulate our surroundings. In the sense that God is our real home for our souls, that then means that Mother Nature is the foster-home for our souls as well as our bodies and minds. What Wordsworth wants us to see is that Mother Nature supplies everything for us, and is thus a sort of motherly figure who is giving all of her love and accommodations to ensure all of her children are happy in their temporary home.
Great responses--a child is indeed a priest since its faith is unwavering and steadfast. He/she has no doubts or delusions. That comes with adulthood, which moves us inward, toward our selfish desires and fears. Yet these and everything we can call "mine" are merely masks and shadows. In a way, this poem reflects the Hindu concept of "maya" (illusion) which sees the world as a web of shadows, which we believe in at our peril. Though Wordsworth may have known this, as we read widely and stories/knowledge of the East was very popular at this time as we'll see later in class (and is reflected in the imagery of Kubla Khan).
DeleteQ1. I believe the poets eyes have cause him to feel distant from the natural world. When you first see something it is so cool and interesting, but after you’ve seen it numerous times, you know what to expect. People don’t look at trees and just stand in awe because trees are unmoving and they don’t do anything interesting. Sure, you may see a new tree with cool flowers on it, but pretty soon you lose interest in that as well. I think the poet’s eyes have caused him to lose his imagination as well as growing older. When you grow up you’re expected to act a certain way. The poet can no longer imagine the trees as something interesting rather than something stagnate and unmoving. I think the poet means his childlike view of nature has passed in Stanza 2. It’s almost as if he left his imagination in being a child and he grew up and could see that the world was a mess. He began to focus on the issues rather than life as it could be. I think he’s really looking at society and seeing the imagination missing along with the children.
ReplyDeleteQ2. I feel like the metaphors in stanza two are trying to explain the nature of life in an interesting way. I think that the birth is “a sleep and forgetting” means something you don’t remember loving your mom. You don’t remember being fed or any of the natural things your mother did for you as a baby. As you grow up and she stops doing those things, when she does do them, you appreciate it more. You were asleep to the actions your mother did for you. The “shades of the prison-house begin to close/Upon the growing boy” could possibly mean as he is young he grows up, he loses that sense of wonder for exploration. He is slowly becoming imprisoned in his mind and loses the want for the natural world that he had when he first saw it and it was all new. The young boy/girl is “Nature’s Priest” because they find it sacred. They have a sense of wonderment. Everything that they find that is new is unique and fascinating. I remember picking a acorn up and thinking it was the coolest thing ever, now it’s just an acorn. That’s because it’s not new anymore. I’ve lost interest because my eyes have seen it before. It is no longer something to wonder about.
Great responses and great detail: yes, the moving, living world becomes fixed and stagnant for an adult. We simply forget how to look, and the child within us is the "eye among the blind" which remains asleep. If we could see things not as useful or not useful to us, not as objects, but as reflections of ourselves, the eye would open and we would no longer be deceived by the masks--or the roles of existence.
DeleteQ2: Our soul, when we are born, is not new. Somewhere else, it “set”. God took a soul, and dropped it into the world. This soul remembers heaven like we would a dream, looking around and being reminded. As this soul ages, it also forgets its dreams. This forgetfulness is the prison-house that is slowly approaching this soul. Because children retain more memories of their “dreams” they are better connected with Nature and therefore a better understanding, making them “Nature’s Priest”.
ReplyDeleteQ3: Right off the bat Wordsworth says that “Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own; Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind,” which suggests that not only does she find the child a pleasure, but that she also yearns for this child like a mother would. The Earth also does everything she can to make the child forget the wonderful place he came from, probably so that the child won’t leave her. She wants this child and wants to keep him.
Yes, the life of an adult is like a person awakening from a dream; the dream is vivid and beautiful for a few seconds, but quickly fades away and is forgotten. Yet sometimes, you can see something and an old dream (or memory) comes back with astonishing force. It lives and breathes again and is as real as you are. This poem is about finding ways to remember these 'dreams' again, and as often as possible.
DeleteAshley Bean
ReplyDelete3. The earth is ultimately sublime to us, and yet nature nourishes humans in every way. The child, or Youth in the poem, is the only one that recognizes nature and its beauty and maternal features. Wordsworth mentions the "imperial "palace" that men come from which I think means heaven, and nature tries to meet those standards, and hopefully, erase our memories of it with her towering mountains and shadowed forests. The earth supplies us with everything we need, and that makes her a motherly figure above all else.
4. Life, or more specifically society, is all a social game, and you gotta play it. Wordsworth is saying that we play the game in many different ways, such as "business, love, or strife." And Shakespeare's "all the world's a stage" is stating that we each have a part to play. Wordsworth just takes the saying a little further by asking how we will play our part.
Yes, there's a big irony here: nature is the source of the sublime yet also the way of tying us to earth, and away from our celestial past. This is why he calls Nature our "foster mother," because she takes us in, all the while telling us we've always lived here. And it's hard to resist the comfort of a mother--so we believe her, then believe the lies we tell ourselves.
DeleteAudra Benn
ReplyDelete2) Birth is a "sleep and a forgetting", because we tend to think of birth as the moment where we begin. This is logically true, but our soul has been around much before our physical body. Yet, we cannot remember any thing from birth to a certain time period, much less what happened before our birth. The "shades of the prison-house" metaphor expresses the idea that at a certain age, children start to lose their imagination and sense of wonder, and they start the long road into adulthood. Just like a prison, it is very hard to escape from losing our inner child. Children are the perfect fit for "Nature's Priests", because no one knows or sees nature the way a child sees it. They are able to see the magical aspects of nature that our eyes do not see. They also see Nature's spiritual side. Children are happy just being outside and truly exploring nature. Nature is their playground; it gives them a place to play "make believe", while we adults tend to our "important" business". Wordsworth ends Stanza V with "And by the vision splendid...And fade into the light of common day", which is a great way to show how we all start with a vision of the world's and nature's enchantment, but by the time we are adults, the vision has been lost in our every day, mundane lives.
4) I think he means that we reach this point in life, where we are no longer living for our own enjoyment, but we are living to please everyone around us. We are afraid to express our unique, unorthodox ideas, because we might be seen as "crazy", so, instead we live unhappy lives. We come to the conclusion that "the world is a stage", and we really have no choice how we interact with it. The Romantics wanted people to realize that is not true. We aren't just these pawns that just get moved about; we have the chance to interact with the world and nature. Even though nature is the "sublime", we can still let ourselves become a part of nature, and if we let ourselves do that, we might find that we are able to see the world's beauty, again.
Yes, that's a nice way of putting it: the world is a place of play to make believe...though we come to believe a little too strongly in the game. This makes us forget our true identity and the wonders all around us, which we mistake for the mere backdrop of our game. Yet the game is an abstraction, a mask, which we inevitably take off to find the self that has been slumbering all the while.
DeleteQ1: As we get older, we begin to take nature's beauty for granted as the things around us are no longer novel. How can the speaker appreciate nature when he feels the initial allure is gone? We also feel the weight of adult responsibilities weigh on us, and everything else seems like background noise. The speaker is projecting his own emotional state onto nature in stanza IV. "The Pansy at my feet/Doth the same tale repeat:/ Whither is fled the visionary dream? Where is it now, the glory and the dream?" The pansy, or tree, or field cannot feel or think anything, nor have they changed in any way since the speaker was a child, and yet he feels they are lacking somehow, when he is the one lacking childlike wonder.
ReplyDeleteQ4: Children learn to fit parts as they get older, and seek to imitate the adults in their lives. They take on the parts of being husband/wife, professional, etc., and they no longer act spontaneously. They seek to fit a role they feel is expected of them, and, in turn, behave falsely, or like an automaton. They no longer can just be; they have to be something, whether or not this fits their true desires.
Great responses--with age and maturity comes cynicism and complacency; how to see the world anew when we've seen it so many times before and know (or think we know) its secrets? By projecting himself onto nature, he realizes that nature is more than trees or clouds; we make it in our image, and it means more to us as a result. The world is us, and we are the world; a child can't see that because he/she feels it. We know it (or can learn it) and that's the most sublime lesson of all for him.
DeleteMason Horanzy
ReplyDeleteQ2: When young children go outside to play, nothing is able to hinder their amazement at the natural world. Children are able to be fascinated by anything from the smallest insect, to the largest clouds in the sky. It is not until the children begin to grow up, and the "prison-house shadows" of adulthood begin to manifest themselves, do they lose their sense of imagination and wonder. Children are priests of nature because they are always so eager to share their discoveries. A child may run up to his father and excitedly show off the bug he just caught. Once a child becomes an adult, they develop an indifference to the minor discoveries in daily life. There is a specific quote that has stuck with me throughout my life; it seems relevant to this topic. It goes: "The creative adult is the child who survived."
Q3: This answer is related to my answer for question 2. Nature is such a simple and pure thing. There is no sense of morality or ethics; it is the most basic medium for existence. Nature allows one's mind to be free. Children are born as natural scientists, they form an idea and then act upon that idea simply to see what will happen. For example, a child may simply wonder what would happen if he threw a rock into the creek. The child would then throw the rock, and observe what happens; this is the most basic manifestation of the scientific method. Nature is every child's laborotory, it is where they first learn about the would through their own self driven curiosity. They able to learn about cause and effect in a pure, innocent way.
Great point--nature and children lack the ethics and morality that we learn as adults. This causes us a certain maturity and sadness, but it would be truly 'childish' to reject this knowledge as well. We can't learn the same lessons as children, but we can use our experience to remember what we lost in the first place.
Deleteq1. I felt like Wordsworth (pretty much the coolest name for a poet) was saying that it's amazing how much has existed and gone. He's looking at the beauty of this nature and realizes that there was once a different tree here but it has died and he never had the chance to appreciate it the way he's appreciating the one in it's spot (not that he specifically mentioned a tree--that's just what I had pictured). The line that makes me think he's being reminiscent is in the first stanza where he says "the things which I have seen I now can see no more." He follows that with the second stanza which talks about rainbows coming and going and I just associate those with death. Like we discussed last semester about the death of seasons brought on by the next one; that's what I see here.
ReplyDeleteq3. This might be a stretch, but I think the foster-child we speak of is man's progression. It seems that we are constantly putting pressure on nature to conform to our personal destruction. Mother Nature, the nurse, gets pleasure from her own children--her creations. Man isn't her creation, though. I think "Inmate Man" suggests that this is a temporary "prison" that man experiences before heading to heaven, or the imperial palace. I think Nature is trying her hardest to make man forget that he's serving a temporary sentence on this planet by making it pleasurable to him. "To make her Foster-child, her Inmate Man, forget the glories he hath known" from heaven.
Great responses--and yes, it IS a fitting name! Yes, his idea is that the world is temporary, as is the role we play in it. So why believe in it so strongly? Our "foster mother," Nature, makes us belief that the world is all there is or was. But this isn't true, and through sorrow we can see back to a time before masks or pain.
DeleteQ1: I feel like the pain of immortality is what has come between him and the full enjoyment of nature. He says "The Rainbow comes and goes,/ And lovely is the Rose,/ The Moon doth with delight/ Look round her when the heavens are bare," (II). This stanza is reflective of the fact that everything passes away, from the rainbow, to the rose, to the moon. Nothing is forever, and that's what is missing.
ReplyDeleteQ3: I actually think it's really odd the we are referred to as the "foster-child," because we are derived from nature just like everything else. Maybe Wordsworth is trying to make a point here - that we've become so disconnected from our beginning that we cannot focus on the beauty we have here.
Q3 continued...: Wordsworth refers to the "Imperial palace" which sounds like a reference to Heaven to me. I'm not sure whether or not he was religious, but I feel like he might be trying to say that creation and nature are one in the same and we should focus on becoming a child of both. They don't have to be separate.
DeleteGreat responses--it's the problem of growing old and realize that you and everything you love has to die. How can you rejoice in beauty that grows old? This is Keats' dilemma, too. Wordsworth realizes that this sorrow leads ironically back to the first innocence, and helps him find his way toward emotion and belief once more.
DeleteElyse Marquardt
ReplyDeleteQ1. In stanza I, Wordsworth says that all of creation used to seem "apparelled in celestial light, the glory and the freshness of a dream." Then in stanza II, he states his belief that "there hath past away a glory from the earth." So this glory was that of the world bathed in celestial light in his eyes, the delighted and innocent eyes of a child just introduced to a dazzling new world. But as Wordsworth has grown up, his view of the world has grown and matured too. Maturity is a good thing, but unless it is carefully cultivated, cynicism usually comes hand in hand with it. Now Wordsworth sees the physical beauty of a rainbow or a sunrise, but he does not see the celestial glory that once came along with it. The bright eyes of the child have been dimmed by the dust of the world.
Q4. As soon as I read these lines, I thought of Shakespeare's famous passage that begins with "All the world's a stage." Both Shakespeare and Wordsworth are stating the same idea: life is but a series of costumes that we don and lose as time passes. We do not hold one specific role long enough for it to become part of us, so it is merely a mask that we put on for a short while. Both these great poets seem to think that we are only copying others as we go through life. Shakespeare lists the schoolboy, the soldier, the scholar, etc, and ends with the second childhood of old age and dementia. Wordsworth likewise goes through the sets of business, love, and strife, and ends with the last costume of "palsied Age." This is a depressing viewpoint to have in my opinion, but apparently one which both poets held firmly in their minds, as evidenced by their writing.
Elyse Marquardt
Great point--how to become mature/wise without being cynical? this is what he wrestles with and why he can't rejoice in nature as he once did. But he finds that through sorrow he can feel an older, and deeper, emotion than before. However, reason always has to come into play, never simple emotion.
DeleteQ2: Birth is a "sleep and a forgetting" because it is the most important point in out lives, its the moment we begin the journey of life, yet none of us remember it. After we begin our lives, little girls and boys could be called "Nature's Priests" because they are the most innocent beings in this world, possibly after woodland creatures...but that has yet to be determined. By being innocent, they are able to enjoy and relish in nature in its purity. They aren't worried about how large trees choke and kill out the younger, smaller trees out until they die, or the "circle of life". Children just enjoy nature at its beautiful value, without the worry that adults have. That is also why the "prison" closes in on the growing boy. Grown-ups are boxed into cages by all the rules and fears and social standards and responsibilities that they give themselves.
ReplyDeleteQ4: This poem gives itself to the romantic notions of adulthood by alluring to the idea that adults are leading actors in their own play and supporting actors in everyone else's... much like Shakespeare's play. Wordsworth is saying in stanza 7 that as adults, we do not live life like we think we should, but merely fill in the blanks of the template provided to us by the rest of our society.
Great responses--their innocence allows them to obey/prey to Nature without question or distraction. Of course, there is a danger in this, too, since adults question and know sorrow, and see a different world than a child. Maybe not a better one, but a world with its own meaning and power, as Wordsworth comes to realize.
DeleteQ3- I think in some way he's saying that we come from heaven and our home is Heaven and our Father is God but after we're born we are taken away from our "home" and become part of nature. Plus nature has always been known as Mother Nature. She is cruel and wonderful and beautiful. She will "raise" you to become a man in her own way.
ReplyDeleteQ4- I think as you become an adult you are expected to go to college and take on a profession. As we learn, all we are doing is simply imitating what our instructor shows us. Monkey see, monkey do. As in watch me do it, now you try. That is how I learned to be a groomer and I feel that is what he's taking about in this Stanza. We pick our vocation/part and we play it.
Good responses--though of course it's not just jobs and careers we learn to act, but life itself. Our life on earth is one big 'act,' that distracts us from who were are. The sublime helps us see beyond the mask we've been forced to wear even when we're not working or visibly acting.
ReplyDelete