The child is father of the man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.
(Wordsworth, "My Heart Leaps Up")
1
There was a time when meadow, grove, and streams,
2 The earth, and every common sight,
3
To me did seem
4
Apparelled in celestial light,
5 The glory
and the freshness of a dream.
6 It is not now as it hath been of yore;--
7
Turn wheresoe'er I may,
8
By night or day.
9 The things which I have seen I now can see no more.
10
The Rainbow comes and goes,
11
And lovely is the Rose,
12
The Moon doth with delight
13 Look round her when the heavens are bare,
14
Waters on a starry night
15
Are beautiful and fair;
16 The sunshine is a glorious birth;
17 But yet I know, where'er I go,
18 That there hath past away a glory from the earth.
19 Now, while the birds thus sing a joyous song,
20 And while the young lambs bound
21
As to the tabor's sound,
22 To me alone there came a thought of grief:
23 A timely utterance gave that thought relief,
24
And I again am strong:
25 The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep;
26 No more shall grief of mine the season wrong;
27 I hear the Echoes through the mountains throng,
28 The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep,
29
And all the earth is gay;
30
Land and sea
31 Give themselves up to
jollity,
32
And with the heart of May
33 Doth every Beast keep
holiday;--
34
Thou Child of Joy,
35 Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy Shepherd-boy.
36 Ye bless{`e}d creatures, I have heard the call
37 Ye to each other make; I see
38 The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee;
39 My heart is at your festival,
40 My head hath its
coronal,
41 The fulness of your bliss, I feel--I feel it all.
42
Oh evil day! if I were sullen
43
While Earth herself is adorning,
44
This sweet May-morning,
45
And the Children are culling
46
On every side,
47
In a thousand valleys far and wide,
48
Fresh flowers; while the sun shines warm,
49 And the Babe leaps up on his Mother's arm:--
50
I
hear, I hear, with joy I hear!
51
--But there's a Tree, of many, one,
52 A single field which I have looked upon,
53 Both of them speak of something that is gone;
54
The Pansy at my feet
55
Doth the same tale repeat:
56 Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
57 Where is it now, the glory and the dream?
58 Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
59 The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
60
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
61
And cometh from afar:
62
Not in entire forgetfulness,
63
And not in utter nakedness,
64 But trailing clouds of glory do we come
65
From God, who is our home:
66 Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
67 Shades of the prison-house begin to close
68
Upon the growing Boy,
69 But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
70
He sees it in his joy;
71 The Youth, who daily farther from the east
72
Must travel, still is Nature's Priest,
73
And by the vision splendid
74
Is on his way attended;
75 At length the Man perceives it die away,
76 And fade into the light of common day.
77 Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own;
78 Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind,
79 And, even with something of a Mother's mind,
80
And no unworthy aim,
81
The homely Nurse doth all she can
82 To make her Foster-child, her Inmate Man,
83
Forget the glories he hath known,
84 And that imperial palace whence he came.
85 Behold the Child among his new-born blisses,
86 A six
years' Darling of a pigmy size!
87 See, where 'mid work of his own hand he lies,
88 Fretted by sallies of his mother's kisses,
89 With light upon him from his father's eyes!
90 See, at his feet, some little plan or chart,
91 Some fragment from his dream of human life,
92 Shaped by himself with newly-learn{`e}d art
93
A
wedding or a festival,
94
A
mourning or a funeral;
95
And this hath now his heart,
96
And unto this he frames his song:
97
Then will he fit his tongue
98 To dialogues of business, love, or strife;
99
But it will not be long
100 Ere this
be thrown aside,
101 And with
new joy and pride
102 The little Actor cons another part;
103 Filling from time to time his "humorous stage"
104 With all the Persons, down to palsied Age,
105 That Life brings with her in her equipage;
106 As if his
whole vocation
107 Were
endless imitation.
108 Thou, whose exterior semblance doth belie
109 Thy
Soul's immensity;
110 Thou best Philosopher, who yet dost keep
111 Thy heritage, thou Eye among the blind,
112 That, deaf and silent, read'st the eternal deep,
113 Haunted for ever by the eternal mind,--
114 Mighty
Prophet! Seer blest!
115 On whom
those truths do rest,
116 Which we are toiling all our lives to find,
117 In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave;
118 Thou, over whom thy Immortality
119 Broods like the Day, a Master o'er a Slave,
120 A Presence which is not to be put by;
121 Thou little Child, yet glorious in the might
122 Of heaven-born freedom on thy being's height,
123 Why with such earnest pains dost thou provoke
124 The years to bring the inevitable yoke,
125 Thus blindly with thy blessedness at strife?
126 Full soon thy Soul shall have her earthly freight,
127 And custom lie upon thee with a weight,
128 Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!
129 O joy!
that in our embers
130 Is
something that doth live,
131 That
Nature yet remembers
132 What was so fugitive!
133 The thought of our past years in me doth breed
134 Perpetual benediction: not indeed
135 For that which is most worthy to be blest;
136 Delight and liberty, the simple creed
137 Of Childhood, whether busy or at rest,
138 With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast:--
139 Not for
these I raise
140 The song
of thanks and praise
141 But for those obstinate
questionings
142 Of sense and outward things,
143 Fallings from us, vanishings;
144 Blank misgivings of a Creature
145 Moving about in worlds not realised,
146 High instincts before which our mortal Nature
147 Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised:
148 But for
those first affections,
149 Those
shadowy recollections,
150 Which, be they what they may
151 Are yet the fountain-light of all our day,
152 Are yet a master-light of all our seeing;
153 Uphold us, cherish, and have
power to make
154 Our noisy years seem moments in the being
155 Of the eternal Silence: truths that wake,
156 To perish never;
157 Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour,
158 Nor Man
nor Boy,
159 Nor all that is at enmity with joy,
160 Can utterly abolish or destroy!
161 Hence in a season of calm weather
162 Though
inland far we be,
163 Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea
164 Which
brought us hither,
165 Can in a moment travel thither,
166 And see the Children sport upon the shore,
167 And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.
168 Then sing, ye Birds, sing, sing a joyous song!
169 And let
the young Lambs bound
170 As to the
tabor's sound!
171 We in thought will join your throng,
172 Ye that
pipe and ye that play,
173 Ye that
through your hearts to-day
174 Feel the
gladness of the May!
175 What though the radiance which was once so bright
176 Be now for ever taken from my sight,
177 Though nothing can bring back the
hour
178 Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
179 We will
grieve not, rather find
180 Strength
in what remains behind;
181 In the
primal sympathy
182 Which
having been must ever be;
183 In the
soothing thoughts that spring
184 Out of
human suffering;
185 In the
faith that looks through death,
186 In years that bring the philosophic mind.
187 And O, ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves,
188 Forebode not any severing of our loves!
189 Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might;
190 I only have relinquished one delight
191 To live beneath your more habitual sway.
192 I love the Brooks which down their channels fret,
193 Even more than when I tripped lightly as they;
194 The innocent brightness of a new-born Day
195
Is lovely yet;
196 The Clouds that gather round the setting sun
197 Do take a sober colouring from an eye
198 That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality;
199 Another race hath been, and other palms are won.
200 Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
201 Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
202 To me the meanest flower that blows can give
203 Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.
Together with the editors, the Department of English (University of Toronto), and the University of Toronto Press, the following individuals share copyright for the work that went into this edition:
Screen Design (Electronic Edition):
Sian Meikle (University of Toronto Library)
Scanning:
Sharine Leung (Centre for Computing in the Humanities)
Form:
irregularly rhyming
Composition Date:
March 27, 1802-early 1804
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. 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. 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. At that time I was afraid of such processes. 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. Vaughan's Retreat. The three preliminary lines are from Wordsworth's brief poem beginning "My heart leaps up," composed on March 26, 1802, the day before the beginning of the ode.
86.
Six years: in Poems, 1807, "four years." Throughout the stanza, Wordsworth seems to have had young Hartley Coleridge in mind.