"Ode" by William Wordsworth

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Childhood is central in the poem, “Ode” by William Wordsworth because the decisions and visions that are made and seen as a child change overtime as you develop. He believes that as we grow, we are occupied with many problems that we never get the time to sit and admire the world for what and who it is. Wordsworth’s first stanza, “There was a time when meadow, grave and steam/The earth, and every common sight/To me did seem/Appareled in celestial light,” meaning that the time in his life as a child, he saw the dreamlike world that now cannot be seen as an adult. In his second stanza, he continues, “The sunshine is a glorious birth;/But yet I know, where’er I go,/That there hath past away a glory from the earth,” meaning that even though he can still see that the sunshine is glorious, something is still lost. However, the speaker starts to grieve but puts those emotions aside because it is May and he shall enjoy the season. These are only the first few stanzas in his poem that show when the speaker was young; the world was nothing but happiness to him. Now that he has grown older and looks at the world, he is saddened by the fact that he cannot see the way children see the world. The speaker analyzes his childhood. When the speaker came into earth as a baby, the speaker came from somewhere called heaven. In the fifth stanza, the speaker says, “Heaven lies about us in our infancy!” As infants, we have such a bond with heaven and this causes us to experience and see the world more clearly. We value the nature for whom and what it is. Then it continues by saying, “At length of the Man perceives it die away,/And fade into the light of common day.” As the speaker ages, he loses his connection with the world and everything that looked so magical, fades away. In his seventh stanza, the child does a similar imitation of being an adult before he actually is. Wordsworth

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