Poems you should read before you die: William Wordsworth- Ode: Intimations of Immortality

Wordsworth is the romantic poet. Amongst the group that we call the romantics, nothing epitomised what we think of as the poems of the romantics more than Wordsworth, skipping around the English countryside writing lines and odes and sonnets about the beauty of clouds and flowers, the expression of wonder at the natural world, and the reverence of nature for which the romantics made themselves a conduit. Perhaps what has been left in our impression of this era of poetry is something twee, an impression maybe at times justified (And then my heart with pleasure fills / And dances with the daffodils), but this impression leaves aside the profundity of much of Wordsworth’s poetry, expressed not the least in his Ode, with the longer title Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.

Begun in 1802 while living in the Lake District with his sister, the ode deals with Wordsworth’s sense that childhood memories of a divine presence in the natural world had become and continued to dim as he travelled into adulthood. The opening lines look back to childhood, “There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, / The earth, and every common sight, / To me did seem / Apparelled in celestial light,” and are answered by the complaint of his present condition of adulthood “It is not now as…