SDecorte - Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood

The ode is a complex form of poetry, lyrical, dignified, that makes use of complex language, charged with metaphors; the object of the ode is usually a philosophical problem which leads to a reflection

The extract is taken from a Wordsworth's ode, Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, in which he sums up his philosophy of childhood.

Wordsworth's conviction is that we come from God, we have our origin from God, and we bring with him. The child is sensitive to God's emotional memory and to all natural influences. The younger he is the better he perceives the emotional memory which makes everything bright and beautiful; as he grows up his emotional memory of God faint and fade, and he becomes incapable of perceiving God's memory. The poet has the ability to keep the emotional experience with god.

The speaking voice is remembering a past moment in his life when he was young and when his relationship with nature was close, spontaneous, natural.

"Celestial light" is a metaphor for heaven, that is a metaphor for God, that is a metaphor for perfection.

He has a nostalgic and elegiac attitude, he is regretting because the things are changed: wherever he may turn, by night or day, the things he saw as a boy he can't see them anymore.