Wordsworth's Glorification of Childhood in his "Immortality Ode".

Wordsworth's Glorification of Childhood in his "Immortality Ode".  

Ode on Intimations of Immortality is the high watermark of poetry in the 19th century. The theme of the poem is the immortality of the human soul. In the poem, the poet has glorified childhood. The poem contains a metaphysical doctrine of our childhood that informs us about life before birth and therefore the immortality of the soul.

In the poem, the poet has glorified childhood. In his childhood: the most commonplace objects of Nature such as meadow, grove, and stream, seemed to him to be invested with a heavenly light. All these objects appeared to him to be unreal and unsubstantial, having a visionary otherworldly gleam upon them.

The poet glorifies childhood and the child because he believes that "Heaven lies about us in our infancy." He believes that the human soul lives in heaven before it comes to earth. A child brings along with it heavenly glory when it is born into this world. This heavenly glory gradually becomes fainter and fainter as the child grows into the boy, the boy into the youth, and the youth into a man. The poet says:

At length the man perceives it (heavenly glory) die away,

And fade into the light of common day.

Wordsworth draws the picture of the child playing with his toys which represented the plan of his things. His activities are nothing but the endless imitations of the manners and whims of men. But our business with worldly affairs gradually turns him from heavenly bliss and makes him forget his original home from where he comes.

The poet places the child in a very high position, saying that he is the best philosopher. The child is closer to God, who holds the divine heritage and is able to understand those spiritual truths which the grown-up man cannot understand. To him, the child is greater than man or the child is a blessed seer, mighty prophet, etc. That is why he calls the child:

Eye among the blind,

That, deaf and silent, read'st the eternal deep,

Haunted for ever by the eternal mind,

Mighty prophet! Seer blest!

Thus child and childhood had always played a vital role in the poet's being. In childhood, he discovers a divine radiance and own innocence which any quested of truth must retain and uphold. Like Plato and his English disciples Coleridge and Henry Vaughan, Wordsworth also believed in the theory of recollection. He is in fact indebted to Coleridge for the idea of prenatal existence, which Vaughan had made him aware of the slow decline in celestial power.