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William wordsworth ode to immortality analysis
Immortality theme in literature
William wordsworth ode to immortality analysis
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Essay on “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” Kelsea Brewer Professor Flynn English 232 March 21, 2014
In William Wordsworth’s "Ode: Intimations of Immortality" the speaker laments the passing of his youth and the disappearance of “that dreamlike vividness and splendor which invest objects of sight in childhood” (179). As children, he explains, we lack knowledge of mortality and are closer to God and nature. With time, however, Earth’s pleasures weaken this link and children become mere imitations of adults. In this essay, I will argue that the narrator’s crisis is resolved by the realization that he can still be “enlightened” as an adult. Our youth is regarded as a superior time because we feel invincible and in awe of our surroundings. We are also most connected to our original home and have not yet assumed the role of a “little actor.” However, maturing too has its benefits. Through our experiences we gain “a philosophic mind” (186) and our acknowledgment of death deepens our appreciation for nature and it’s restorative effects on the mind. Our memories or “hints of immortality” provide a window into our childhood and imbue us with the feelings of glory we once experienced.
In this poem, the narrator views the spiritual and natural worlds as being intimately connected. In his childhood he was completely in awe of nature and viewed it as being “Apparell’d in celestial light” (4). While the speaker associates his childhood experiences in nature with joy and happiness he feels a sense of loss in adulthood. He claims that because “Heaven lies about us in our infancy!” (66) we are closest to God, and thus to nature, when we are young. The terms used to ...
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...ence, children are more intimately linked with God and as thus possess philosophic truths that are lost in adulthood. However, our souls have access to memories that allow us to re-live what the wonder and invincibility we felt. In addition, aging brings a maturity and an awareness. There are lessons to be learned from our experiences- even the most difficult ones can become sources of strength. By the end of the poem the narrator has stopped questioning what he has lost and has come to view his situation positively. He says,
We will grieve not, rather find Strength in what remains behind; In the primal sympathy Which having been must ever be; In the soothing thoughts that spring Out of human suffering; In the faith that looks through death. (179-185)
In conclusion, both poems are clear on the perspectives of innocence and the perspectives of experience and while experience lifts the veil of innocence it does not erase the raw belief that there is some place or someone who may just be better or may just be holy in a harsh world that is covered by manmade innocence.
Thus when he states: “’for if the fountain gushed at my very doorstep, I would not stoop to bathe my lips in it--no, though its delirium were for years instead of moments’”, he has achieved his desired expectation of whether or not he would in fact return to his own foolish follies or not. Yet both of the works reveal the fact of malleability and ignorance that youth brings upon the characters and their evidential throes of death due to malice and endless sorrow caused by their encounter with the
Even if he grew up within nature, he didn’t really appreciate it until he became an adult. He is pantheistic; a belief that nature is divine, a God. Since he has religious aspect of nature, he believes that nature is everything and that it makes a person better. His tone in the poem is reproachful and intense. His poem purpose is to tell the readers and his loved ones that if he feels some kind of way about nature, then we should have the same feeling toward it as well.
"Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they? Think not of them, thou hast thy music too." So often, people look back upon their youth and wish that they still had it before them. Our natural tendency is to fear old age, to see it as the precursor to death, rather than a time of life, desirable in its own right. However, in John Keats' poem, To Autumn, he urges us not to take this view, but to see old age as a beautiful and enviable state of life, rather than something to be feared.
... speaker shows the breakdown of youth’s beauty and the weakening of the machinery incorporated inside of the human body. By integrating this idea with the concept of cerebral impairment, leaves the speaker with a heightened sense of fear. Intertwining these two concepts, the speaker explores the idea of an “inverted childhood”, suggesting that when an individual reaches a peak in their development that they start to digress backwards in time, until they arrive at the primary stages in life. (Larkin 1427). “The Old Fools” explores the idea of the speakers’ gerascophobia, through analyzing the physical and mental deterioration of the elderly and their digression back into early childhood.
In these poems and many others, Dylan Thomas expresses God’s presence and unconditional love for everyone. He has conventional spiritual views, occasionally alluding to the Bible, but his images are unique. He describes heaven with the stars and the wind, and connects God with thunder, rainbows, and gravel. Using the motion and life on the earth, Dylan Thomas facilitates these concrete ideas to describe his abstract spiritual beliefs. Nature is an ideal way to describe God because He is present everywhere on our earth. Whether it be the soul’s redemption into heaven with God and the earth or God’s great force that creates all motion on the planet, His presence is the theme that Dylan Thomas expresses best of all of his poetry.
The Song of Innocence and Experience is a collection of poems written by William Blake. “Innocence” and “Experience” are two definitions of consciousness that rethink John Milton’s existential-mythic states of “Paradise” and the “Fall”, this coincides with the romantic notion that adolescence is a state of protected innocence instead of original sin and yet is still not immune to the fallen world and its institutions.
Primarily in Lines composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey the mortality of creativeness and imagination is expressed by Wordsworth. This is a poem about the beauty of an old cathedral called Tintern Abbey. He hasn’t been there in five years and he brought his sister along. Even though imagination isn’t immortal, there is a way to reclaim it, “That time is past, / and all its aching joys are ...
In conclusion, “Fern Hill” by Dylan Thomas demonstrates that at some point in life people will experience reminiscing on the past lifetime. It’s eye opening to see time pass oh so quickly, with death impending, youth is fleeting and infinitely valuable, as well as we do not fully appreciate childhood until it is too late. This poem displays beautiful imagery of how great childhood was, but it comes to a depressing thought at the loss of the beauty of his childhood, and he longs for his youthfulness. In the end, the whole idea of youth and age is
In the first stanza, the poet seems to be offering a conventional romanticized view of Nature:
Wordsworth and Hopkins both present the reader with a poem conveying the theme of nature. Nature in its variety be it from something as simple as streaked or multicolored skies, long fields and valleys, to things more complex like animals, are all gifts we take for granted. Some never realize the truth of what they are missing by keeping themselves indoors fixating on the loneliness and vacancy of their lives and not on what beauty currently surrounds them. Others tend to relate themselves more to the fact that these lovely gifts are from God and should be praised because of the way his gifts have uplifted our human spirit. Each writer gives us their own ideals as how to find and appreciate nature’s true gifts.
As previously mentioned, there are countless paths to the attainment of Immortality. As this is an individual journey, it is up to each individual to find his own path, which may in fact not work for another person. That is why we say that Freemasonry is an individual journey. It is, of course, always helpful to have help along the way, a spiritual adviser or mentor if you will. Nevertheless, despite some guidance, no two paths are the same, just as no two bodies, etc., are the same.
He is writing the poem as if he were an object of the earth, and what it is like to once live and then die only to be reborn. On the other hand, Wordsworth takes images of meadows, fields, and birds and uses them to show what gives him life. Life being whatever a person needs to move on, and without those objects, they can't have life. Wordsworth does not compare himself to these things like Shelley, but instead uses them as an example of how he feels about the stages of living. Starting from an infant to a young boy into a man, a man who knows death is coming and can do nothing about it because it's part of life.
In William Wordsworth’s poems, the role of nature plays a more reassuring and pivotal r ole within them. To Wordsworth’s poetry, interacting with nature represents the forces of the natural world. Throughout the three poems, Resolution and Independence, Tintern Abbey, and Michael, which will be discussed in this essay, nature is seen prominently as an everlasting- individual figure, which gives his audience as well as Wordsworth, himself, a sense of console. In all three poems, Wordsworth views nature and human beings as complementary elements of a sum of a whole, recognizing that humans are a sum of nature. Therefore, looking at the world as a soothing being of which he is a part of, Wordsworth looks at nature and sees the benevolence of the divinity aspects behind them. For Wordsworth, the world itself, in all its glory, can be a place of suffering, which surely occurs within the world; Wordsworth is still comforted with the belief that all things happen by the hands of the divinity and the just and divine order of nature, itself.
The poem “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” by William Wordsworth is about the poet’s mental journey in nature where he remembers the daffodils that give him joy when he is lonely and bored. The poet is overwhelmed by nature’s beauty where he thought of it while lying alone on his couch. The poem shows the relationship between nature and the poet, and how nature’s motion and beauty influences the poet’s feelings and behaviors for the good. Moreover, the process that the speaker goes through is recollected that shows that he isolated from society, and is mentally in nature while he is physically lying on his couch. Therefore, William Wordsworth uses figurative language and syntax and form throughout the poem to express to the readers the peace and beauty of nature, and to symbolize the adventures that occurred in his mental journey.