The Romantic View of Time and Transcience in “Ode: Intimations of Immortality”
by Keane Sabale
In my essay, I explore the great Romantic poet William Wordsworth's message on transience. I point out that despite his poetry's melancholy notes on the unstoppable passage of time, there is comfort in the idea that reality holds sacramental meaning and points beyond its temporary self.
In William Wordsworth's poem “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” the narrator establishes a melancholic perspective on the world, once beautiful and divine, as now something that is only filled with reminders of the earth’s past glory. In scholarly conversation around this poem, Lionel Trilling notes the poem’s tendency to move away from the idolatry of nature and towards an ephemeral and passing position—a guidepost to look past for an everlasting realm beyond. Simultaneously, literary critics such as Harold Bloom and Stephen Prickett interpret the narrator to be praising the mortal world as a symbol for the eternal (Bloom 170-177; Prickett 70-90). Within this conversation around the meaning of “Ode,” other writers analyze how this poem uses time and memory on this temporary world point to a transcendent parallel. Sifting through past research and analysis on the poem, it becomes clear that despite its somber tone, the poem makes an argument for the worth of an impermanent reality through highlighting the sacred power of memory and the beauty of the world. While the poem dwells on the inevitable end of all things, its consistent celebration of a fleeting natural world—as well as its play on the concept of preexistence—points to a romantic sacramental view of the natural passing of time that criticizes the thought of transience as the final truth of reality.
The romantic sacramental world of the poem finds cause to celebrate nature, despite how earthly and temporary it might appear. The poem finds value in the beauty of the world as it mourns the passing of the glorious “things” which were once “seen” but can be seen “no more” (Wordsworth l.9). Harold Bloom affirms this reading as he writes that the poem looks to the “natural world” as something that joys, traps, but ultimately saves (173). Even though the natural world cannot last forever, it stands as a concrete existence that points humans to a spiritual reality that does. Its transience is fitting, as this earth is not the final goal for humans—it is a
reality where earthly beauty reflects heavenly creation. As Stephen Prickett writes, nature in the poem is not seen to have “values of itself, but as capturing the fleeing shadows of an invisible unchanging Platonic reality” such as “Heaven itself” (81). The natural world must lead upwards then pass away for its existence to serve its glorifying cause. However, the material world, while it exists, holds worth as an easily grasped symbol for the divine senses that are not as easily understood. In these things of the world, higher planes can be seen and understood enough to be believed throughout one’s mortal life. Without direct, physical access to Heaven, nature serves as the ultimate promise for a coming celestial beauty.
Within the Ode, the narrator makes sure not to dwell on earth in an idolatrous sense; rather, he looks at nature’s transient quality as something that points beyond. Nature, according to the poem, does all she can to “make her Foster-child, her Inmate Man, / Forget the glories he hath known” and to forget as well the “imperial palace” he originated from (Wordsworth ll. 81-84). In his essay, Trilling affirms how this poem looks to the earth as a temporary home for humanity’s eternal souls. He writes that “although Man may be a true child of Nature, he is the ‘Foster-child’ of Earth” (165). The creatures and substances of this world may all be created by the same Creator, but this material earth does not share in His eternality. At the most, nature can only serve as a glimpse into more transcendent realities. To see the earth as a final home is to forget one’s status as a “Foster-child” and to become an “Inmate” trapped in a perishable dream instead of the “imperial” home humans were made for. Although it is important for the narrator to not forget that the sacramental world is not spiritually self-sufficient on its own, it still stands that the very ephemerality of this world points to the glory of its eternal parallel.
Situated in a passing world that naturally carries aging humans, Wordsworth’s poem manipulates the belief of preexistence into a portrayal of humanity’s tendencies to become
disenchanted as they grow older. The idea of preexistence holds that humans began in a spiritually higher realm and that their birth took them out of that realm and into our earth. Trilling describes the experience as coming into the world with knowledge of a spiritual existence that slowly gets “obliterated” from memory as humans “move forward into earthly life” as “the light of recollection” wears away (159). With this definition in mind, the poem makes an allusion to this idea of preexistence by having the narrator mourn for his lost “visionary gleam” (Wordsworth l.56). The poem presents the reality of disenchantment that many adults face, as if humans were born with a vision of a divine world that flees with age. Thus, preexistence becomes a metaphor for secularization: Much like how humans over the years lose their sacramental view of the world, adults under the concept of preexistence can lose memory of the miraculous, otherworldly life they were ripped away from at birth. The greatest grievance of this poem becomes the natural drift of individuals toward the loss of a vision of the world as filled with glory.
Despite the implications of sorrow amidst the loss of divinity, the poem recognizes childhood as an existing link to the spiritual world. The narrator of the poem describes “infancy” as the stage in which “Heaven lies about” (Wordsworth l.66). He then describes the “growing Boy” as the one who “beholds the light” and “sees in it his joy” before he becomes a “Man” who lets this vision “fade into the light of common day” (Wordsworth ll.68-76). Romantic scholar Robert Barth reads this emphasis on childhood as a statement on the importance of life stage—it is the stage in which humans experience their “deepest selves” and “the most profound ‘otherness’” (135). Having once had a grasp of the spiritual world, reconnecting to the higher realm is not an impossibility. Trilling supports the idea that this connection is something that can be returned to; to him, the “child’s recollection of his heavenly home exists in the recollection of
the adult” (159). While the vision of a heavenly light may fade in the face of material realities as one grows up, the vision is still there amongst the distractions. Unlike children with their innocence and trusting faith, adults have developed into a stage which finds enchantment difficult to rekindle. Years of learning to handle a physical, material, broken world have dampened the sight of glory. Yet, despite this perspective change that comes with aging on this earth, once -enchanted adults still have the yearning for the spiritual and their past childhood experiences within them to call them back to a beholding of the light.
The Ode furthers its stance on memory as not only a state that brings one to reconnect to preexisting childhood memories of the divine, but a state that produces a new spiritual self. Further in life, “shadowy recollections” become “a master-light of all our seeing” in which revelatory “truths” are awoken; truths that are never to perish, be abolished, or destroyed in the passing of time (Wordsworth l.149). While Bloom does not believe that there is an actual immortality to be gained, he understands that within these lines, the reconnection to the mindset of a child serves to reveal eternal truths (176). Jon Thompson’s article, on the other hand, delves deeper and sees the “wonder and profundity of childhood experiences” as proof “that our soul has its origin in God” (249). Reconnecting to this younger self not only brings one to a greater appreciation of the world, but also a greater awareness of the divine grace that sustains it. A reading from the article “Recuperating the Virtual Past Through Recollection” sees adult recollection as an even more triumphant return to a spiritual reality than children may have an inclining to in their early stages—because the truths of childhood “are subject to degradation and transformation over time,” in adult recollection they give way to “new, imaginatively-rendered selves” (Cameron). The innocent times of youth may see the world as more obviously enchanted, or, under the analogy of preexistence, may happen closer to a life in Heaven; but, as Wordsworth’s poem implies, it is the adult recollection that produces an eternal, salvific belief.
Memories as mere carriers of past instances produce nothing but time-tainted visions of childhood—memories as tools that are utilized and applied to understandings gained later in life produce profound revelations. The eternality of the human soul is ultimately recalled once the wonders of a porous childhood are returned to in a wise adulthood.
Literary critics look at Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” and understand the romantic meaning behind the higher worth the poem has placed on natural beauty and the understandings children reach. Despite the predominant subject of a temporary world, the Ode sees meaning in its ephemerality that glorifies eternality. The poem’s value of childhood memories and its implications of preexistence turns this passing subject into a means to point to an ultimate eternity rather than an ultimate transience. While childhood naturally holds the wonder of enchantment—and, under the precepts of preexistence, the closeness to divinity—as time passes, this wonder can be recollected by adult memory and restorative, redemptive understandings of the world can be conceived. Amidst the fading of the natural world and the changes that follow the passing of time, the lost past bears fruit as greater divine truths become more accessible to mature adults and the sacramentality of reality is more fully understood. The world is beautiful, and the world is temporary; both truths that serve to reveal and glorify the even more beautiful and everlasting God.
Works Cited
Barth, Robert J. “Religious Imagination and the Transcendence of Art.” Romanticism and Transcendence: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the Religious Imagination, University of Missouri Press, 2003, pp. 119–136.
Bloom, Harold. “Ode: Intimations of Immortality.” The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry, Cornell University Press, 1971, pp. 170–177.
Cameron, Rachael. “Recuperating the Virtual Past Through Recollection: Wordsworth’s ‘Immortality Ode.’” Colloquy: Text Theory Critique, no. 9, May 2005, pp. 92–107. EBSCOhost, research.ebsco.com/linkprocessor/plink?id=c6362784-10de-31c4-9381-464989f37696.
Prickett, Stephen. “Wordsworth and the Language of Nature.” Romanticism and Religion, Cambridge University Press, 1976, pp. 70–90.
Thompson, Jon W. “‘Intimations of Immortality’: A Response to Bernard Williams.” Religious Studies, vol. 55, no. 2, June 2019, pp. 245–60. EBSCOhost, https://doi.org/10.1017/s0034412518000537.
Trilling, Lionel. “The Immortality Ode.” English Romantic Poets, Oxford University Press, 1975, pp. 149–169.
Wordsworth, William. “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.” Poems in Two Volumes, 1807. Representative Poetry Online, https://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/content/ode-intimations-immortality-recollections-early-childhood. Accessed 2024.