"Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood"
The so-called "Lucy Poems" are about an unknown woman, probably not Wordsworth's mistress Annette Vallon with whom he had a daughter during his year in France, 1791-92; Wordsworth left France due to a shortage in funds, and then was separated from Marie by the war between England and France. He and Marie decided to go their separate ways after the war.
The Lucy Poems were not written until 1799-1800. Some scholars believe "Lucy" to be Wordsworth's sister, Dorothy, with whom he lived all his adult life, including the years of his marriage. Dorothy acted as his companion, collaborator, and secretary and shared his love of nature.
"Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early
Childhood": Wordsworth had a theory that we inhabited heaven before our births,
not a Christian heaven but a place of ideal beauty. As children we unconsciously
remember that ideal heavenly state when we experience the beauty of nature. Children,
then, have a rapturous spiritual response to nature that they gradually lose as
they grow older and begin to forget their previous experience in heaven.
This theory was based on Wordsworth's experience: as a child he felt a rapturous, almost mystical, sensation when he rambled around the countryside. Wordsworth judges this rapture to be an unconscious perception of God in nature. But as he got older he began to lose this rapture, only occasionally experiencing an "intimation," a glimmer, of his past ability to respond to nature in a spiritual way.
His predicament is described in the first stanza: "There was a time when meadow, grove and stream,/ The earth, and every common sight,/ To me did seem/ Apparelled in celestial light,/ The glory and the freshness of a dream./ It is not now as it hath been of yore;/ Turn wheresoe'er I may,/ By night or day,/ The things which I have seen I now can see no more."
As he has grown older he feels "That there hath past away a glory from the earth" (17).
This is a "grief" (22) to him, and he wonders"Whither is fled the visionary gleam? (56) of his youth.
He suggests that "Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting" (68) of our pre-existence in heaven , that the "Soul that rises with us . . . "cometh from afar" . . . "trailing clouds of glory do we come/ From God who is our home: / Heaven lies about us in our infancy" (59-66).
Unfortunately as we get older we become confined to the material world that closes in: "Shades of the prison-house begin to close/ Upon the growing Boy" (67-68).
Bravely he concludes that "Though nothing can bring back the hour/ Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;/ We will grieve not, rather find/ Strength in what remains behind" (178-180). What remains behind is "intimations," glimmers, of that heaven. Though his experience of nature is not what it was, "To me the meanest flower that blows can give/ Thoughts that do lie too deep for tears (202-03).