'The Immortality Ode’

 

‘The Immortality Ode’ is one of the most famous poems in English literature. It is the greatest poem in the whole series of Wordsworth’s poems. Wordsworth reached one of the highest peaks of the English poetry of the Romantic period with this ode. In fact, it is a landmark in the history of English poetry.

The theme of the poem is very simple but the thoughts conveyed are great. It deals with the theme of the immortal nature of the human spirit which is intuitively known by the child and partly forgotten by the growing man. But this spirit is to be known once more in maturity through the intense experience of heart and mind. Wordsworth’s philosophy of nature is beautifully expressed in this poem. According to the title, the poem deals with the knowledge of the immortality of the soul, or the recollection of childhood.

Wordsworth believes in the divine origin of the soul. The child is aware of this divine origin and had a direct touch with divinity. His soul is in direct communion with the divine spirit. As he grows up, he loses touch with spirit because of his attachment to the material world. In fact, this is beautifully explained in his sonnet ‘The World Is Too Much with Us’. The loss of childhood glory is the recurrent theme of Wordsworth’s poetry. ‘The Immortality Ode’

The Ode is built on a simple but majestic plan. The first four stanzas tell of a spiritual crisis, of a glory that has passed away from the earth and end by asking why and where the glory has fled. The middle stanzas examine the nature of this glory and seek to explain it through the philosophical doctrines of pre-existence and recollections from its childhood. Then the last three stanzas show that though the vision of celestial radiance is lost there remains much in life to compensate for this loss that can motivate him and bring his creative mind out of sadness.

‘The Immortality Ode’ can also be called an autobiographical poem. In this poem, the poet unlocks his heart and describes a crisis in his intellectual development. The ode deals with his childhood glory and the poet’s loss of ‘vision’ in his advancing years. ‘The Ode’ deals with two childhoods, the childhood everyone experiences after birth and the childhood we carry within us like memory. These two childhoods may be called ‘visible childhood’ and ‘invisible childhood’. The poet describes the experience of both these childhoods and contrasts it with the material world.

The descriptions of nature are also beautiful. The poem reveals the difference between his love for nature as a child and his love for nature as a man. As a child, he had a passion and appetite for nature, but he has a love for nature as a man. He was meditative and reflective towards nature. Even the most ordinary objects of nature gave rise to profound thoughts in him.

The poem is characterized by a strange sense of duality. Even though the world around the speaker is beautiful, peaceful, and serene, he is sad and angry because of what he (and humanity) has lost. Because nature is a kind of religion to Wordsworth, he knows that it is wrong to be depressed in nature's midst and pulls himself out of his depression for as long as he can.

‘The Immortality Ode’ is one of the greatest of Wordsworth’s odes. It is a poetic account of the immortal nature of the human spirit. So we can say that ‘Immortality Ode’ is the immortal ode in English literature.