Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality" Quiz

Answer: The loss of childhood innocence

Wordsworth begins his poem with the assumption that a child is born close to the divine, and it is age and society that gradually causes him to lose his innocence. As he becomes more worldly, he loses sight of the divine glory in nature. The full title of the poem is "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood". It is sometimes called "Immortality Ode".

Answer: dream

The poet begins by describing the divine glory he saw in nature as a child and then how that sense has been lost:

"It is not now as it hath been of yore;-
Turn wheresoe'er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more."

Wordsworth served as Poet Laureate of England beginning in 1843.

Answer: Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Coleridge made this criticism in "Biographia Literaria". Byron was also dismissive of the poem, but without commentary. Over time, however, it has come to be regarded as one of Wordsworth greatest works and is even sometimes called the "Great Ode".

Answer: The rainbow

"The Rainbow comes and goes,
And lovely is the Rose,
The Moon doth with delight
Look round her when the heavens are bare,
Waters on a starry night
Are beautiful and fair;
The sunshine is a glorious birth."

William Wordsworth was born on April 7, 1770 and became one of the most prominent poets of the Romantic Age. Along with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, he published "Lyrical Ballads" in 1978. His greatest work is generally considered to be the semi-autobiographical poem "The Prelude".

Answer: glory

Wordsworth was married to his childhood friend Mary Hutchinson. He died from pleurisy (an inflammation of the membranes that surround the lungs) on April 23, 1850.

Answer: grief

"Now, while the birds thus sing a joyous song,
And while the young lambs bound
As to the tabor's sound,
To me alone there came a thought of grief..."

Despite all the beauty around him, the man, unable to see the divine glory in nature, feels grief. However, a new perspective gives him relief and strengthens him:

"A timely utterance gave that thought relief,
And I again am strong.
The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep;
No more shall grief of mine the season wrong..."

But the poet's mood swings once again, and he loses sight of that glory:

"Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?"

Answer: forgetting

"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar."

Here Wordsworth expresses a doctrine of pre-existence, the belief that each human soul existed before physical conception and at some point before birth enters the body. In AD 553, pre-existence was condemned as heresy in the Second Council of Constantinople, but the second and third-century church father Origen advocated a version of the doctrine.

Answer: Clouds of Glory

"Clouds of Glory: The Life and Legend of Robert E. Lee" was published in 2014. The title alludes to these lines from Wordsworth:

"Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home..."

Answer: the prison house

"Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature's Priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day."

In keeping with the prison theme, Wordsworth later refers to the "Inmate Man."

Wordsworth had five children, three of whom died before he did.

Answer: divine babe

Wordsworth depicts the child as a natural philosopher who is closer to the divine truth than the grown man, a prophet and seer in his youth and innocence:

"Thou best Philosopher, who yet dost keep
Thy heritage, thou Eye among the blind,
That, deaf and silent, read'st the eternal deep,
Haunted for ever by the eternal mind,-
Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!
On whom those truths do rest
Which we are toiling all our lives to find..."

Answer: yoke

"Why with such earnest pains dost thou provoke
The years to bring the inevitable yoke,
Thus blindly with thy blessedness at strife?"

A yoke is a wooden crosspiece fastened over the necks of two animals (often ox or cattle) and attached to a plow or cart to enable the animals to pull it. The word is often used as a metaphor for burden in general.

Answer: frost

The poem continues:

"O joy! that in our embers
Is something that doth live,
That Nature yet remembers
What was so fugitive!"

Wordsworth was born on April 7, 1170 in Cockermouth, Cumberland, England and died at age 80 in Rydal, Westmorland.

Answer: Blank misgivings

Wordsworth's poem takes a turn and the poet finds value in the uncertainty that accompanies the loss of innocence:

"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;
Blank misgivings of a Creature
Moving about in worlds not realised..."

In 1841, Arthur Hugh Clough, a poet and assistant to Florence Nightingale, took this line to form a title for his own poem, "Blank Misgivings Of A Creature Moving About In Worlds Not Realised".

Answer: tears

Wordsworth received honorary doctorates in Civil Law from both the University of Durham and the University of Oxford. In addition to this work, he composed numerous other poems, including a series of five poems known as "The Lucy Poems", four of which were included in the second edition of "Lyrical Ballads".

Answer: An irregular Pindaric ode

Pindar was an Ancient Geek lyric poet. A Pindaric ode consists of three sections and is characterized by irregular line lengths and rhyme schemes. Wordsworth's ode contains 11 stanzas split into three sections.