Analysis of William Wordsworth Poem

Dark Cloud

The pervasive tone of Wordsworth’s poem is that of a dark cloud. A dark cloud emotionally, is one that hangs over your life. His dark cloud is a painful awareness of appending mortality. It over shadowing him throughout his life sometimes moving closer and other times farther away. The cloud isn’t there all the time in the same way. He describes periods of being free from it. His descriptions of nature, the earth, the heavens, all of the life of the Earth, are so vivid that they convey a deep connection to life and awe with it’s beauty. What Wordsworth himself said about the Ode: Intimations of Immortality, offers many clues for understanding what he is dealing with. (The Norton Anthology, 6th Edition pg.1382) “Nothing was more difficult for me in childhood then to admit the notion of death as a state applicable to my own being. ...My difficulty came as from a sense of the indomitableness of the spirit within me.” With these words, Wordsworth speaks to the heart of the dilemma that this poem is about. The reality of death is incomprehensible to the child but inevitably must be faced as he grows up. He is so very alive, so full of the joy of life, that death is beyond what his mind can grasp. (Wordsworth 67-68) “Shades of the prison house begin to close upon the growing boy.” The child is starting to grow out of innocence and is gaining a clearer view of reality. The dark cloud slowly intrudes. (Wordsworth 81-84) “The homely Nurse doth all she can to make her foster child, her Inmate Man, forget the glories he hath known and that imperial palace once he came.” Here Wordsworth is moving into the child’s process of maturing and the inevitible pain it will bring. With maturity he will need to give up his ideal of immortality and confront reality. (Wordsworth 121-125) “Thou little child, yet glorious in the might, if heaven-born freedom on thy being’s height. Why with such earnest pains dost thou provoke the years to bring the inevitable yolk.” The

References: of loss permeate the poem. It’s interwoven with the ecstasy of his memory. He hasn’t lost immortality, he lost the feeling of being immortal. His recollections of early childhood are the basis for the feelings he expresses throughout the poem. They bring him back to the feeling of being immortal and the dark cloud hovers over him over and over again. (Wordsworth 135-138) “The thought of our past years in doth breed perpetual benediction: not indeed for that which is most worthy to be blest; delight and liberty, the simple creed of childhood.” As you grow up you’re always trying to match the sense of what is possible to what is really going to be possible under the circumstances in your life. (Wordsworth 140-144) “Not for these I raise the song of thanks and praise; but for those obstinate questionings of sense and outward things, fallings from us, vanishings of a creature.” He had something that was powerful for him as a child. He had these deep feelings of being immortal and they were taken away from him and he has been on a journey to fill the void of what he used feel. (Wordsworth 112-114) “Thy heritage, thou Eye among the blind, that deaf and silent, read’st the eternal deep, haunted for ever by the eternal mind.” His memories haunt him. As the poem intensifies towards the end, as he says (Wordsworth 67) “Heaven lies about us in our infancy!” Wordsworth again brings us back to the innocent state of childhood because as adults we still posses memories of that place, of that immortality. He is almost angry and the dark cloud comes over him again when he imagines that human life is imitation, similar to a child playing. His memories of himself as a child will always grant him access to that lost world of exploration and innocence. The child’s feeling of immortality enables him to love nature and natural beauty all the more. The simplest of things can raise him and stir his thoughts, “thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.” (Wordsworth 1) “There was a time when meadow, grove and stream, the earth, and every common sight, to me did seem apparelled in celestial light.” These words suggest that Wordsworth believed that life on earth is a dim shadow of an earlier, purer existence, dimly recalled in childhood and then forgotten in the process of growing up. The uses of metaphors and images shift from the register of lost childhood to the register of the philosophic mind. (Wordsworth 125-128) “Thus blindly with thy blessedness at strife? Full soon thy Soul shall have her earthy freight, and custom lie upon thee with a weight, heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!” Wordsworth explores the relationships between nature and human life and stresses the importance of personal experiences and a desire to understand what influences the human mind. He captures the universal human experience of having childhood dreams, confronting the reality of what will be possible in ones life and then dealing with the sense of loss. Not only was Wordsworth writing something very profound but he was doing it within the constraints of a difficult poetic structure. The Ode is written in a lilting songlike cadence with frequent shifts in rhyme scheme and rhythm. He moves from idea to idea while always sticking close to the central theme. There is a genius of language. (Wordsworth 134-137) “O joy! that in our embers is something that doth live, that nature yet remembers what was so fugitive!” His mind is at odds with the atmosphere of joyous nature all around him. He also shows us that nature doesn’t forget it’s early memories in the way that humans forget the important things and are asleep. He is saying that humans live in a purer, more glorious realm before they enter the earth. As children, some memory of the former purity and glory in which they lived remains but as children grow older, the memory fades and the magic of nature dies. The memory of childhood offers solace which brings an almost re-access to the lost purities of the past. The connection with nature and human beings gets old and that connection can only be preserved in memory. Wordsworth uses this poem to display the suffering that comes with maturity. These new pleasures are the products of what the adult remembers as his early life. The adult intellect is tempered by recollections of early childhood. The Ode illustrates the concerns with childhood and human psychology that were central to English Romanticism.