Poem of the Day: "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, Part II" by William Wordsworth, Poet of the Month

For the Songs of Eretz Poem of the Day for June 21, 2014, we continue with Part II of "Ode:  Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood" by William Wordsworth, Poet of the Month.

Ode:  Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, Part II

William Wordsworth

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;

     But yet I know, where’er I go,
That there hath past away a glory from the earth.

The poem is presented in a single stanza of nine lines broken into three pseudo-tercets by the use of indentation.  The arrangement of the final "tercet" is a near mirror image of the one preceding it, creating a reflection in print evocative of the reflection that the moon or sun might make upon the "waters" in the fifth line.  The penultimate line contains an internal rhyme but lacks an end-line rhyme--a first in our survey of Wordsworth's rhyming poems.

Here Wordsworth continues his theme of the inexorable passage of time and the preciousness of each moment.  The "glory" of a moment may only be enjoyed in its full intensity once--when it happens; memory and poetry may imitate but never fully capture it.