nature raises you then you go away from god or divinity and nature is the one to help you somehow have a connection back to divinity nature is not god herself but like an access to god [Music] hello and welcome back to nibble pop we have already done one poem by william wordsworth tintin and today in this video we are going to look at another of his very memorable poems which is popularly called the immortality ode don't skip anything in this video because we are going to take up like we always do every line of the poem and then talk about the images the rhyme scheme the different patterns which emerge and how they are all connected to was words idea of romanticism and nature in this long long video just kidding it's not going to be a long video although the poem is definitely a long one but it's a simple poem although the philosophy is very deep and let's explore together this wonderful poem right here on nipple pop [Music] now although i know many of you have watched the video on tinton abbey as well as the background of romantic uh poetry or in general romantic age that we have made but still just to brush up your memory let me remind you that wordsworth was or is considered to be one of the first persons who brought in romantic period in england it was with his lyrical ballads which he published in collaboration with s t coleridge who was his very good friend they published lyrical ballads in 1798 was what was born in 1770 so he was pretty young at that time and then that collection of poems it brought in a fresh lease of life for the kind of poetry that was popular but was losing grounds so wordsworth had a great contribution to make this movement from neoclassicism to romanticism a very delightful one and like since almost our birth or initiation into literature we are familiar with many of what's poems especially poems like daffodils the solitary reaper and now this point which we are going to take up today is comparatively a long one although the message is the same thing nature is supreme and we will understand what impact nature has on a person like wordsworth this poem was published in his collection of poems in two volumes in 1807 and the whole title of this poem is odd colon intimations of immortality from recollections of early childhood so it's a very long title again just as we had in case of tintern abbey and let me again remind you uh something else which i had told you when i was doing tintin abbey with you that the poems by wordsworth especially these kinds of poems like tintin abbey like immortality ode these kinds of poems may also be seen as poetic essays so it's like there's a development of thought and he gives you whatever he's thinking uh in a logical manner at the same time he repeats himself yes there is a repetition of images and at times you might feel that he is saying the same thing over again but that is only because he wants to make sure that his points are communicated appropriately and effectively okay he begins this poem with a set of lines which are from another poem of his okay so we will just go through the lines the first few lines of his poem the child is father of the man and i could wish my days to be bound each to each by natural piety and that poem is my heart leaps up now since the poem from which these lines are taken is a very short one i'll just uh give you the whole poem you can see it right on the screen my heart lifts up when i behold a rainbow in the sky so was it when my life began so is it now i am a man so be it when i shall grow old or let me die so the first part of this poem means that whenever he sees a rainbow in the sky he feels happy he had always felt happy when he was a child now that he has grown up and eventually when he grow old and die he will still be happy by the rainbow in the sky and then he says the lines which begin our immortality would do and those lines are very important they are the key lines of the poem the child is father of the man this line apparently looks like a paradox paradox is what whenever you say something which looks like this cannot be true we know what that man is father of a child right but here he is saying child is the father of man why because on a deeper level he believes that a child is wiser than an adult a child knows things which an adult doesn't know okay so we will come to an explanation of what he means by this later and just let's read on and i could wish my days to be bound each to age by natural piety piety means piousness goodness of the soul so he wants to lead a pious life a life where he is led by humanity where he passes one day after the other without any grand sense of achievement he doesn't uh have any big ambition he only wants to ensure that he stays human okay so that's what he wants and then he straight away goes to the main part of his poem there was a time when meadow grove and stream the earth and every common sight to me did seem appareled in celestial light so he's talking about a time in his life when all these things what things meadow which means the green valleys grove stream earth common things which you see around you those things appeared to him as if they were apparel apparel means clothes or garment so as if everything in nature that was you know kind of wearing a dress an apparel what kind of apparel celestial light divine light it's like he could see a halo you know surrounding a mountain or a tree as if all these things appeared magically clothed to him when he was a child the glory and the freshness of a dream so he is somehow comparing that childhood to a state of dream when everything appeared to be you know mystified and mysterious and clothed in light okay and somehow uh childhood is associated with this kind of image also in case of william blake you remember songs of innocence we had just covered that a few days back in lamb we see a world of innocence where everything is clothed in transcendental light and divine light we see around the lamb and the child they are all connected with god the same kind of emotion is seen in this poem as well it is not now as it had been of your now he has grown up he has become an adult this poem was written sometime after 1800 so he is of course an adult now and this is a phase where he has lost that charm of childhood that air of mystery around natural objects is gone turn wheresoever i may by night or day the things which i have seen i now can see no more so there is a sense of loss what has was worth lost he has lost his childhood sight his childhood ability to see things in a magical way so remember when we were doing tintana we were seeing how he's talking about past memories five long years have passed and he is revived by those memories so it's all about nostalgia and romantic poetry is nothing if not nostalgia nostalgia for what for a certain kind of existence which existed beforehand now now it doesn't exist so for him now it's a state of loss and this is the central idea of the poem if you are to give one word to describe what the poem is about it's about loss and how he manages to recover something of it now from the very beginning let us focus on the form and meteor of the poem as well look at the rhyme scheme when you look at the first few lines you would see it's a steady pattern you know a b a b a pattern so it's like alternating rhyme scheme it's very musical very steady consistent but when he starts to describe how things have changed you know from line six onwards the pattern changes and now we have what we have a kind of a c d d c rhyme okay so that breaks the rhyme and somehow this seems to turn back and forth you know as if he is looking back at his childhood days with a change in the way the rhyme is speaking to you poetry is all about the sound effect that is created the rainbow comes and goes and lovely is the rose again see when he's describing natural objects is trying to keep it simple the language here is simple because wordsworth was a great advocate of simple language back in those days this was very simple language after milton and pope and dryden this looks pretty simple to us also the rainbow comes and goes and lovely is the rose the moon death with delight look around her when the heavens are bare so when the sky is bare heaven's here means sky there's no cloud then the moon is shining even brighter waters on a starry night are beautiful and fair the sunshine is a glorious birth because it now the day begins with the sunshine or the sunrise so it's like a birth but yet i know wherever i go that there had passed away a glory from the earth all these things that he describes here that rainbow and then the moon the stars the sunshine everything is still glorious still beautiful but something has gone away the element of childhood magic has gone away it happens you know when we go to a beach uh vacation when we are very young we have certain memories etched in our minds the ocean appears vaster or the sea appears bigger mightier and the mountains they appear as if they are more magnificent than uh when we go there as an adult why you know because maybe when we go to any spot when we are grown ups we are obsessed or bothered about uh which place to book for the night stay and what the mode of transport will be so we kind of mechanically view the place as itineraries as items that has to be checked you know people carry checklists have you watched this have you watched that so those checklists those markers are signs of adult tourism but when a child goes to visit a place it's always full of wonder that wonder is missing so wordsworth is saying that earlier when he was a child a baby then these things you know the rainbow the moon the the heavens the waters the sunshine they appeared to be clothes in bright light and now they are still beautiful he's still writing poetry on that but they have lost that magical value or magical glory so he's saying passed away a glory from the earth now when you look at loss what loss is he really talking about it's not just his personal loss remember from our discussion on the background of romantic period i had emphasized on two things that were happening one people were losing faith every day with the development of science they were starting to question their faith on the other hand the rapid industrialization was threatening london was threatening england with a depletion of environmental assets like trees and people were rushing towards cities so there was this mass movement towards urban places manchester london these places were getting crowded and overcrowded and smoky if you have red chimney sweeper and london by blake you would know what london smoke looks like this is the loss which wordsworth is also talking about so it's not just his personal loss it's as if england has lost something because england before this time had been in a pristine stage where maybe there were not you know so many industrial progress or so much industrial development but there was peace and there was this glory of divinity this is something which in dover beach we have matthew arnold talking about the sea of faith now going away this is the loss the earth has lost her real beauty because of what blake had called satanic mills okay now while the birds does sing a joyous song so now when what is writing this poem even now the birds are singing in a beautiful way and while the young lambs bound christian ethos remember lamb is always associated with who jesus christ so he is looking around himself he's like now standing at a meadow at a pleasant valley around him you can see these little creatures lambs some kids are playing some shepherd boys and while the young lambs bound us to the tabor's sound to me alone there came a thought of grief everybody around him were in extreme happiness they were enjoying themselves because the people or the animals is describing here they are all very young they are not corrupted by maturity by adulthood so he can see that i am like different from these animals who are happily roaming about to me alone there came a thought of grief what grief the grief about his loss that he cannot become young like them he has lost his youth or his childhood a timely utterance gave that thought relief so he had this grief inside him this sorrow inside him and he expresses that sorrow timely utterance utterance means when you express something through words so how is he expressing himself by writing this poem so this poem acts like a a healing process for him so through this poem through poetry he's trying to recover that lost happiness and feeling of glory a timely utterance gave that thought relief and i again am strong the more he speaks the more he realizes that he has some strength in him the cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep and he goes on describing everything that he sees around him no more shall grief of mind the season wrong beautiful way of writing what's what has this amazing capacity of handling sentence structures and he creates proverbs which go on and down centuries look at what he's saying here no more shall grief of mind the season wrong wrong here is verb wrong means to do wrong to the season this season he's describing the month of may like you can say late spring in england and it's a beautiful time everything is so fresh and green and flowering all around him he feels that if he is sorrowful if he has grief then that will do injustice that will do wrong to the season so he is saying no more shall grief of mine the season wrong which means no more will i let my sorrow do any wrong to this season which means i will participate in the happiness of this season because i want to be you know in unison with everybody around me who are there okay i hear the echoes through the mountains throng the winds come to me from the fields of sleep and all the earth is game and from the moment that he feels that he should not be a mismatch to this whole surroundings this beautiful part of the year he tries to focus on the positive images the winds are rushing in and the world is so happy land and sea give themselves up to jolility jolility means enjoyment fun happiness joyfulness and with the heart of me that every beast keep holiday thou child of joy shout around me so not just animals he's talking about human kids as well let me hear thy shouts thou happy shepherd boy the idea of a shepherd boy is also very uh you can say it's like a trope it's like a pattern it's like a repeatedly used image this uh is also defined as the archetype later on by um philosopher jung called jung archetypes are these set images which bring about a certain kind of emotion in the reader when you say shepherd boy you don't just don't talk about a boy who is going out with lambs and just helping them roam about it's not just that shepherd boy has with it the connotation of the christ figure because a shepherd does what he takes care of his flock just like christ said he is the lamb of god and then god is like the shepherd and there's a song actually and there are hymns where god is referred to as the shepherd so in that state of innocence these children who are acting as shepherds they are taking on a divine role so what's what feels that he is an outcast he is an adult he doesn't belong here and then he feels that no i must participate i must somehow manage to be a part of this beautiful scene i have lost this ability but i will have to regain that and how does he do that he blessed creatures he is referring to the lambs that he is seeing around him and the shepherd boy okay they are also playing there i have heard the call e to each other make i see the heavens laugh with you in your jubilee so when you are enjoying i can hear god's laughter in your laughter so they are directly referred to as divine creatures my heart is at your festival my head hat it's coronal the fullness of your bliss i feel i feel it all so he surrenders he says that my heart is at your disposal my head head means my brain my thought so heart means emotion head means logic reason intelligence intellect so he surrenders with his entire self in front of these tiny little creatures these young children because he feels that well he has told that right child is father of the man oh evil day if i wear sullen while earth herself is adorning saline means you know in a bad mood sulking sad moroes sorrowful so while everybody is enjoying while the earth is decorating herself because it's spring now i would be a mismatch this sweet may morning and the children are culling on every side in a thousand valleys far and wide now wordsworth when he's rights he often uses a lot of exaggeration and sometimes hyperbole hyperbole is when you when you give a figure which is way more than what they actually are like in daffodils he says 10 000 saw at a glance i don't know how you can manage to have any idea of how how big a field should be to view 10 thousand daffodils and so this is a way of expressing it doesn't matter maybe he saw a hundred daffodils maybe he saw two thousand daffodils we don't know ten thousand is a round figure just like that here he is using in a thousand valleys he is saying valleys and he's saying ah or thousand valleys usually what do we do we say a thousand valley or in thousands of valleys but he is of course he was a great english poet so this is not a mistake this is a deliberate inclusion of an article why is he doing this because here thousand valleys is just a symbolic way to say a lot of valleys like right across the globe this is me and everybody everywhere is happy this is what he's saying fresh flowers look at the alteration you know it gives all these beautiful things right through his poem that's why wordsworth's poems are teachers favorites because they can ask you all kinds of questions all kinds of figures of speech emerging wordsworth's poems fresh flowers while the sun shines warm and the babe leaps up on his mother's arm i hear i hear with joy i hear but there's a tree of many one a single field which i have looked upon both of them speak of something that is gone now the point is he wants to participate in the joyful celebration of spring but the fact is he has grown up and now he looks at a tree which is a maybe a lonely tree you know you have trees who stand together and you have these random lonely trees alone and he feels that this tree is like me i know alone secluded and then he looks at a field which is also alone and he thinks that are they also unhappy because they are alone and lonely okay so strange now this is the kind of uh empathy empathy means when you feel a connection so he's feeling connection he wants to feel connection with the spring uh with the make or with the flowers of me but he ends up feeling connected with what with images which are part of nature but still looking somehow sad and lonely because that is what he is so he projects his emotions onto the natural objects he said and somehow he manages to make himself or convince himself that this tree is sad this tree is lonely that field is lonely so he is saying both of them speak of something that is gone the pansy at my feet does the same tale repeat even the flowers at his feet why is this happening these are natural objects this is may morning they are supposed to laugh and smile and enjoy these trees these flowers look trees flowers maybe they have some vegetarian or vegetable emotions which we are not aware of but they are certainly not capable of feeling any human emotions that we are sure of they don't have brains like us therefore whatever emotions or whatever loss what says that this tree this flower is feeling is not their loss it is worse what's loss so wordsworth is seeing himself reflected in nature all right wither is fled the visionary gleam where is that dream where is that vision which i had as a child where is it now the glory and the dream the repetition of loss and this this set of interrogative sentences you can also call it rhetorical interrogation questions which kind of have their answers hidden in them when he's saying where is that visionary gleam or that glory or that dream he's trying to say that they are gone they are nowhere so these are rhetorical questions okay and then the most remarkable line of this poem my personal favorite line our birth is what a sleep and a forgetting now why why is this line so significant you see normally we have this idea in our minds that death is like sleep it's like we'll fall asleep right and uh in greek mythologies there are ideas that after death you have to immerse yourself drown yourself in a river of forgetfulness which is also called lead or lithi and after that you forget everything so after death you forget whatever has happened in your life and you pass on to your next life or after life or whatever it is so usually in our minds we see death as a moment when we forget whatever has happened in our life he is saying the opposite so he's inverting this idea again second paradox so the first paradox of this poem is child is father of the man which is again not not of this poem it belongs to another poem but here also since it's the first line of this poem so we can call it the first paradox mentioned in the poem another paradox is our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting what does he mean he says that when we take birth before that we are in a state of immortality we are at one with god and when we take birth right at that moment we have memory of that past existence of that immortal existence that's why a newborn child is like divinity itself and the more we grow up we tend to forget things i'm sure if you try to remember things about your childhood you won't be able to remember uh what you did how your life was when you were like two years old one year old it's not possible for us to remember those things we we do forget so forgetting is part of growing up and worship insists that it's not just the human experiences that we forget but the divine experience before birth so he's saying that we have some memories when we are born and we simply get rid of those memories and eventually forget them all together and this life is like forgetting this life is like a dream this somehow reminds me of this movie matrix where it said that everything around you is something like you're dreaming you're actually in a battery cell dreaming of this whole thing and participating in here so this is somehow very surrealistic this is not a realistic way to say things that this life is but a dream but he is always very sure of one thing that a child knows more than an adult and from where does this knowledge come from before birth now when we were discussing romanticism we had talked about john locke if you have not watched that video i'll just give you a short recap of what locke did john locke he was a philosopher who maintained that when we are born we are like this clean slate our brains are all empty and we start collecting different kinds of sensations and then that adds to our knowledge so this is locke's idea of taboola rasa where he says that we are not born with any innate knowledge but wordsworth is going like completely opposite to lock's idea and he's saying that no we are born with memories of a paradise where we were before we were born so this dream like stayed this life is like an interruption and we will soon wake up again when we die and then he goes on to describe uh his idea our birth is what a sleep and a forgetting the soul that rises with us our life's star so there's a soul which rises with us hat had elsewhere it's sitting and commit from afar so before our birth we have an existence our soul had an existence and that was far away from this place somewhere paradise not in entire forgetfulness and not in utter nakedness but trailing clouds of glory do we come from god who is our home so we don't come like tabula rasa we don't come like a blank slate we don't come completely forgetting everything when we come we bring with us the memory of our homeland home which is god so now normally uh we do not associate romantic poets with um religious ideas because normally we see see if you uh look at william blake conventional churches they pronounced him like a heretic we have shelley completely going mad with his rebellion against religion romanticism is rebellion so what is what was doing here maybe he's really getting old now because he's talking about god all the time and this god is very much in the image of the christian god he's saying that we are a one with god and when we are born we do not forget everything in the first two three years of our lives we remember the moments when we are with god or we were with god and so that age that age of innocent childhood is a divine state of being okay so he's repeating himself that's all so it's this is the central idea that not in entire forgetfulness not in utter nakedness but trailing clouds of glory do we come so when we come we appear in this world when we take birth we are coming riding on glorious clouds from god who is our home heaven lies about us in our infancy so the closest we are to god is when we are just born or still kids so heaven lies about us we have heaven all around us when we are kids shades of the prison house begin to close upon the growing boy so look at the beautiful images creating this life is like a prison house and the and the bars are closing down on you you were free when you were not born then you are born and then the prison house it starts to trap you and you remember those lines from tintana bay he's talking about london city and he's talking about the fretful star unprofitable and the fever of the world this is the prison which is talking about reality is prison it makes you forget from where you have come but he beholds the light and once it flows he sees it in his joy the youth who daily further from the east so maybe you are growing up and every time you are having a new day in your life you are going away from that moment of birth right every day you are going away from that moment of birth and this is like you're going further from the east so he is looking at our lives as a process from sunrise to sunset so we journey from east to west because sun rises in the east and sets in the west so we move from east to west and then he says the youth who daily further from the east must travel still is nature's priest like it's okay if you are growing old you can still appreciate nature and by the visions blended is on his way attended and nature will always look upon that person if that person believes that nature is like an extension of god this we have seen in tintin abbey too right at length the man perceives it die away yes at the end that glory will fade we will reach our sunsets and fade into the light of common day earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own so this whole earth is full of beautiful things beautiful gorgeous objects of nature yearnings she had in her own natural kind so emotions in human heart they are also created by the earth by nature and worship is not against human emotions and even with something of a mother's mind and no unworthy aim so wordsworth is comparing nature to mothers so he's saying that nature has a mother's mind and what does nature do and no unworthy aim so the aim the target the ambition of nature is to do something which mothers do and what do mothers do the homely nurse does all she can so once uh he is comparing nature to mother and now he is comparing nature to a nurse to make her foster child her inmate man forget the glories he had known now this is a very tricky thing he's saying we know that wordsworth is a worshipper of nature very good but here he is giving a different kind of a sentiment he is saying that nature raises a person like a foster child so foster child is not somebody's real child it's like human beings are taken care of by nature and this kind of a sentiment is also said in his lucy poems if you are familiar with lucy poems there also we see that lucy an imagined character is shown to be raised by nature and she dies pretty young and that's a very sad thing too but the same kind of sentiment that nature is like a nurse and a teacher too and what does nature do here now this is tricky just just look at what he's saying homely nurse and what does she do her inmate man not the word inmate normally we use the word inmate when we talk about prisoners convicted prisoners or people who are admitted in asylums or hospitals patients so in an imprisoned state restricted movement that is quality of an inmate so man is like an inmate in hands of nature that's not a very positive thing to say he's saying that nature it gives you a happy feeling but it also makes you forget god yes forget god so he's saying forget the glories he hath known and that imperial palace when she came why does nature do that that's also very tricky thing nature wants you to be humble nature teaches you humility not pride now if we keep on remembering that we were sitting with god enjoying our time with god then we will start feeling very proud which is not good for humanity so nature decides to make us forget our high position so that we see ourselves as just human beings so nature teaches us to be humble and for that nature has to make us forget from where we have come behold the child among his new born blisses now is looking at one child playing in front of him are six years darling of a pygmy size a small little boy see where amid work of his own hand he lies created by sally's of his mother's kisses so he is you know kind of enjoying himself his mother is filling him with kisses he is playing with some small little things with light upon him from his father's eyes this kind of is reminiscent of blake's world of innocence especially there is a poem called infant joy and you have a similar kind of an idea here the child is protected by a loving mother and father and he is playing with his play things and then he describes the game that this child is playing see at his feet some little plan or chart some fragment from his dream of human life life is always like a dream he had just told us so what the child is doing is he is playing uh things with children play you know play acting playing house or playing or just just imitating some character some fragment from his dream of human life shaped by himself with newly learned art so this child has learned to act like maybe a doctor or maybe a cook or maybe something else altogether so this child is imagining himself to be an adult and playing this this all of us we did that right when we were young kids we used to uh you know play act all kind of roles we know of and then he's describing some situations which the child is probably making which is toys and play things a wedding or a festival a morning or a funeral so it doesn't matter it doesn't matter because it's all a game okay and this had now his heart he is completely focused on his game this child and unto this he frames his song he is totally engrossed he's singing to himself then will he fit his tongue to dialogues of business love or strife so since this child is imagining himself as an adult he will also talk like an adult while playing but it will not be long or this be thrown aside with new joy and pride this little actor cons another part maybe after a few minutes he'll get bored you know imagining himself as a teacher then he'll start to imagine himself as a doctor so he will keep on changing his role but the question which was what has for this child is very unique feeling from time to time his humorous stage with all the persons down to paul seed age so he is first imagining himself to be a young man then maybe an old man maybe he is play acting as a as a grandfather figure so he does everything out of sheer childhood joy that life brings with her in her equipment jacqui page means a whole spread of actors so this is also very similar to shakespeare's idea of seven ages of man being seven parts uh you know which we play in our lives so this child is playing as an actor in his game as if his whole vocation were endless imitation now this is what our lives are too aren't they we all imitate our role models what we believe in and this child in his game is doing what we do as adults we imitate thou whose exterior semblance does belie immensity now we will have a lot of big and heavy words because this is where wordsworth is philosophizing he is saying exterior semblance semblance means appearance you whose outer appearance shows your immensity of soul why because a six year old is a child and since according to what was theory a child is divine so this child's soul is immense it's not yet imprisoned in an adult life now best philosopher who yet does keep thy heritage thou i among the blind so he is decorating or glorifying this child with so many um adjective clauses here he is calling him a philosopher he is calling him an eye among the blind this child that deaf and silent redust the eternal deep haunted forever by the eternal mind mighty prophet seer blessed so he is really throwing himself out so many um you can say praise what the words he is associating with the child so the child is the prophet the child is the seer on whom those truths do rest because you are just born you know just six years back you were born so maybe you have not forgotten that you are a divine existence and so you are like a prophet a seer in darkness lost the darkness of the grave so you are still almost one with god thou over whom thy immortality broods like the day you are still almost like that immortal soul because you are not yet corrupted by reality experience and matured life okay you are not yet corrupted by that a master over a slave so immortality is like master we are like slaves slaves of what immortality because maybe we always want to reach that state of being immortal but we are mortals so that is like being a master over our heads so this child is still sharing some something some connection with that immortal being god a presence which is not to be put by so you are in this great state now you're this six year boy is and then what's what is saying that don't throw that away don't just forget from where you have come tar little child yet glorious in the might of heaven-born freedom you still have in you that quality of heavenliness or divinity you can say on thy being's height why with such earnest pains does thou provoke the years to bring the inevitable yoke he's not saying something complicated here now let's break the sentence up yok means suffering yoke is that wooden structure which is placed on the neck of the bulls or bullock pull the cart okay so yoke is like a pressure what pressure the pressure of life real life so he is saying that inevitable yoke some pressure which will definitely come what pressure this child will definitely grow up so he will have to definitely take up responsibilities which an adult has to take up so before that time comes before the years bring that suffering which will come like something which absolutely will come why are you provoking the years so why are you imitating the life which is full of suffering so the child is acting like an adult an adult's life is full of suffering wordsworth can't understand why the child wants this life at all which is so much full of trouble unlike a yoke now this is funny because when we are kids we want to grow up when we grow up we want to be kids we are never happy it seems that's that's being human i guess thus blindly with thy blessedness at strife the blessedness the happy state of the child is compromised when he is playing or acting as an adult full soon thy soul shall have her earthly fright very soon you will grow up you will you will go through the adventure of real life real grown up life and custom lie upon thee with the weight custom means things which are accepted as laws or you can say rules of society traditions of our society those are the customs and they act as heavy weight now i want you to look at these words yolk strife fright wait all these words they imply a sense of burden so life is not just a forgetfulness but it's like a burden because it drags you down away from divine light that's what life does heavy as frost see heavy and deep almost as life so what is he comparing with what is comparing life with life that's what's what when he's on a writing spree he just goes on using images after images oh joy that in our embers is something that that live that nature yet remembers what was so fugitive he is constantly calling us prisoners us means grown-ups you are almost like grown-up you are almost there where you will lose everything that was what says a child has nature still remembers the point is nature makes us forget what we are born with but nature will contain some of that blessedness so that there is a chance of going back you know at least temporarily when we are close to nature maybe nature has a plan that it takes away something from us and stores it inside itself so that we will always give some importance to nature this is what warsworth feels the thought of our past years in me that breed perpetual benediction not indeed for that which is most worthy to be blessed delight and liberty now there are things he is fascinated by things like liberty delight the simple creed of childhood whether busy or at rest when when a person is a in his childhood with new fledged hope still fluttering in his breast not for these i raise the song of thanks and praise but for those obstinate questionings of sense and outward things fallings from us vanishings wordsworth is not entirely sad about the loss he is rather happy that he's able to question this loss so somehow he feels that this whole episode or series of episodes are important to him because this is how he is reaching to a conclusion about the divinity of nature itself and he says fallings from us vanishings so the memories which are taken away from us our childhood days which are vanished from us blank misgivings of a creature moving about in worlds not realized high instincts before which our mortal nature did tremble like a guilty thing surprised so his calling or he's rather talking about a contrast between instinct and mortal nature but aren't they same we are mortals so we have instincts like just like animals but no he says that high instincts are not just normal creature instincts they are not your drives or or just feelings which come to you naturally they are high instincts but for those first affections those shadowy recollections which be they what they may are yet the fountain light of all our day so these shadowy recollections so he's saying that we forget our divinity our source of divinity when we are growing up but at certain moments we have these flashes inward flash maybe from a scene in the mountains maybe from a wide open sea we have those flashes of memory okay are yet a master light of all are seeing uphold us cherish and have power to make our noisy ears see moments in the being of the eternal silence as i was telling you that before our birth we were in a you can say immortal vacuum silence now we are born we are in a dream we will die we will go back to that so this is like a momentary transition and this is what he's talking about he is saying our noisy years are moments in the being of the eternal silence so our birth our life is that noisy ear and the word noisy it's not very melodious is it truths that wake to perish never so when we die it's like we wake up to truth which neither listlessness nor mad endeavor nor man nor boy nor all that is at enmity with joy can utterly abolish or destroy truth that is never destroyed no matter what happens what truth hence in a season of calm weather though england far we be maybe we are far away from the sea inland our souls have sight of that immortal sea which brought us hither so now he's totally talking in metaphoric terms he's talking about this immortal existence is like a sea from which we have come and from like we were going to reach there eventually after we die and we can look at that sea even when we don't have a sea in front of us which brought us hither can in a moment travel wither we can go back to that immortality so this is the immortality to which he is writing the odd so when he is writing an oat he is supposed to address someone when you write an oh do you address someone immortality you are addressing immortality then first he has to define immortality what does he mean by immortality then he will say that i am writing an ode to immortality and what is immortality is getting access to immortality by recollections of childhood that is the whole title remember recollections of childhood so recollection or memory of childhood is something which links him to immortality and now he is addressing his ode to immortality so what happens when he goes back to that immortal state and see the children sport upon the shore and hear the mighty waters rolling ever more so when you reach that state go back to that state then you can see everything beautiful children are playing you can see the beautiful sea then sing a bird sing sing a joyous song and let the young lambs bound as to the table sound so there's a repetition of the images which you have seen earlier we in thought will join your throng thought imagination so this is the only vehicle which will allow you to reach that point where you can participate in the celebration of this childhood this innocence he that pipe i need that play eat that through your hearts today feel the gladness of the me look at the rhyme you know the playfulness it almost reminds us of william blake's songs of innocence little more made that kind of a rhyme here and then it breaks again and he says what though the radiance which was once so bright be now forever taken from my sight loss again so whenever he's talking about what is happening with him he is even taking recourse to iambic meters here and longer lines no apparent uh parity with the lines with just you know goes before this and then he says so nothing can bring back the hour of splendor in the grass of glory in the flood we will grieve not he is constantly saying that no i can never reach that pristine state i can never reach that state of glory but we will not break down we will not grieve instead what he decides to do rather find strength in what remains behind now although tennyson he wrote uh like almost half a century later in ulysses we have very similar sentiments that what if what if we are not the same people anymore what if there is uh no strength left in us we can still go for new adventures so this hope in whatever remains will manage will make do this is what what is doing here too in the primal sympathy which having been must ever be so there is a primal sympathy there is a connection it was always there so maybe it's still there somehow hidden somewhere that primal sympathy the connection between man and nature that is something wordsworth really gives at most importance too in the soothing thoughts that spring out of human suffering and not just nature when man suffers out of that suffering some kind of humanity emerges you'll see that whenever whenever there's a situation where everybody is very happy they grow more selfish and when people are not happy they come together they come together in shared empathy they bring about a revolution right so somehow human suffering is not always something futile it brings about empathy a connection which wordsworth talks about in the faith that looks through death in years that bring the philosophic mind and oe fountains meadows hills and groves now he's addressing everything in nature forbode not any severing of our loves we are not separated not severed from our love like the connection with nature is still not lost yet in my heart of hearts i feel your might i only have relinquished one delight there's only one loss i cannot be a child anymore but i have not lost that connection completely to live beneath your more habitual sway so when i was a child i was under complete control of this divinity of this natural divinity now i am away but there is still a connection somehow okay i love the brooks which down their channels fret even more than when i tripped lightly as they when he was a child then he used to trip a little okay walk in an unsteady way now he has grown up but he still likes loves the brooks the small little rivers the innocent brightness of a newborn day is lovely yet the clouds that gather around the setting sun to take a sober coloring from the eye so he goes on describing scene after scene from nature that everything has still managed to remain beautiful in his eyes that had kept watch over man's mortality another race had been and other palms are one so it's like a different life when you're grown up thanks to the human heart by which we live thanks to its tenderness joys and fears to me the meanest flower that blows can give thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears so it doesn't matter what kind of natural object you're looking at it can be a small little flower but even that small flower can be a symbol of eternity eternity symbolized through nature so he says that the human heart is something which helps me stay connected even to the smallest image or rather the smallest symbol there is a small flower or a mighty cloud so what do we have here in this poem the whole idea is he is feeling sorrow at his loss of childhood but he somehow manages to reach back to a state of understanding where he has some consolation that he can participate in the happiness that nature provides now interestingly he took a long time to write this poem uh he started writing in some time around 1802 series of questions that came to his mind and he completed it in 1804 it was published in 1807 but he took almost two years to write it so definitely that's why it's not like a spontaneous overflow many people say that what's what talks about spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings he also talks about emotions recollected in tranquility he had strong feelings at various points and then he thinks about those feelings and then he writes about his feelings that's why sometimes his essay sorry see that's a slip of tongue here that's why his poems are like essays with beautiful images uh but somehow they lack the the concreteness or rather the density that we find in coleridge's writing or keith's writing or even shelly's writing ok so this is something here but he is bringing about a change of course so the last seven stanzas were written like in 1804 and the last part the rhyme scheme again it's it's exactly a mirror of the first stanza mirror means somehow there's an inversion too so we can say that the last tensor looks back at the first tensor what is happening in the last stanza is talking about looking back at his childhood through a connection which is there with nature so nature acts as a mediator nature raises you then you go away from god or divinity and nature is the one to help you somehow have a connection back to divinity so this is why wordsworth is often called a worshiper of nature because nature is not god herself but like an access to god so everything is like this huge spirit running through everything okay so this is uh simply like an extension of uh tinternabe in tintin abbey also we had seen his sentiments regarding human heart the acts of kindness and of love the same things are happening here too so this is a big poem nonetheless but the idea is simple he's talking about child being a wiser entity because a child is in unison with god a child has not yet forgotten from where a child has come we when we grow up we go away from that state of innocence just like blake rights and then we need to filter ourselves through nature again to go back to that state so that we can participate in this beautiful spring happiness which happens around us i hope this poem finds you too in very good spirits because yes this is also springtime here and this is a huge shout out to my very favorite subscriber disha khanna who was missing my pink doll in my last video so there she is back again and she says thank you uh for calling her so awesome and you all are very awesome too so till our next video this is monami mukherjee signing off stay happy stay safe [Music] you