5/26/2023 0 Comments Wordsworth odes![]() And Wordsworth’s substance was as revelatory as his style. This vernacular eloquence exercised a tremendous influence on modern poetry, opening up “democratic vistas,” in Walt Whitman’s pregnant phrase. Wordsworth perfected an artful use of plain, everyday speech, overturning the tradition of ornate diction in poetry. Now he, along with Shakespeare and perhaps John Milton, belongs to the exclusive company of English poets whose names even the minimally educated are almost certain to have heard. He was the greatest of the English Romantics, innovative in form and content, yet with a lasting influence on the conservative sensibility in culture and politics. But with a body of poetic work about nature both gentle and fearsome, wandering beggars with “a spirit and pulse of good,” stout-hearted leech-gatherers on the lonely moor, the “visionary gleam” of childhood perception that intimates the soul’s immortality, and the poet’s attempt to recover that elusive wonder, Wordsworth won an admiring readership in the early years of the nineteenth century. On its own, a little ditty like this does not earn a poet a formidable reputation. The poet comes upon “a crowd, / A host, of golden daffodils.” The flowers flutter and dance before him, their petals like “stars that shine / And twinkle on the milky way.” And when the poet retires to his couch and solitary reverie, his “heart with pleasure fills / And dances with the daffodils.” 1] Wordsworth recorded that "two years at least passed between the writing of the four first stanzas and the remaining part." Begun on Saturday, March 27, 1802: "At breakfast William wrote part of an ode." The poem was evidently finished in some form down to the end of the fourth stanza by April 4 when Coleridge composed the first version of his Dejection: An Ode, which echoed phrases from his friend's new poem.“I wandered lonely as a cloud.” So begins a famous poem of William Wordsworth’s, one that was often taught to schoolchildren back when memorizing poetry was part of education. After two years, Wordsworth completed his ode, by early in 1804. Long afterwards, in 1843, he remarked of the poem: "Nothing was more difficult for me in childhood than to admit the notion of death as a state applicable to my own being. ![]() with a feeling congenial to this, I was often unable to think of external things as having external existence, and I communed with all that I saw as something not apart from, but inherent in, my own immaterial nature. Often termed as immortality ode or the Great Ode, this poem of Wordsworth brings out the inner philosopher that he is. Many times while going to school have I grasped at a wall or tree to recall myself from this abyss of idealism to the reality. ‘ Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’ by William Wordsworth is a 206 line poem that is split in eleven stanzas of varying lengths. At that time I was afraid of such processes. ![]() Throughout Ode: Intimations of Immortality, William Wordsworth expresses an idealized view childhood as the stage of life in which human beings enjoy the. There is no single rhyme scheme, but there are individual patterns of rhyme in each stanza. Wordsworth uses several different metrical patterns used throughout the poem. In later periods of life I have deplored, as we have all reason to do, a subjugation of an opposite character, and have rejoiced over the remembrances, as is expressed in the lines-'obstinate questionings/Of sense and outward things,/Fallings from us, vanishings" etc." For the general idea of the poem, cf. ![]()
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