Ode: Intimations of Immortality: Key Poetic Devices

Allusion

An allusion (uh-LOO-zhun) is a passing reference to a literary or historical person, place, or event, often made without explicit identification. Wordsworth makes several allusions in “Intimations of Immortality.” The most important allusion is to the Greek philosopher Plato and his theory of the soul. In the Phaedo, Plato describes the soul as immortal and separate from the body. Plato thought the soul lost all memory of its prior existence when born into a body. According to him, philosophy offers the only way to recollect the soul’s immortal nature. Wordsworth at once adopts Plato’s theory and alters it. As the speaker describes it in stanza 5, the soul doesn’t immediately lose its memory of preexistence at birth. Rather, the loss is gradual. Thus, children and adolescents maintain access to “the vision splendid” (line 73), but “at length the Man perceives it die away” (line 75). Whereas Wordsworth differs from Plato on how quickly “the vision splendid” fades, he has a similar idea about how to rediscover the soul’s immortality. As he writes in stanza 10, the act of recollection enables the adult to develop “the philosophic mind” (line 186) necessary to contemplate the soul’s true nature.

Aside from the reference to Plato’s theory of the soul, Wordsworth makes two other notable allusions in the poem. The first comes in stanza 7, where the speaker likens the development of a child to an actor taking on different stage roles (lines 101–105):

                      And with new joy and pride
The little Actor cons another part;
Filling from time to time his “humorous stage”
With all the Persons, down to palsied Age,
That Life brings with her in her equipage

The phrase “humorous stage,” marked within quotes, references the famous speech delivered by Jaques in Shakespeare’s As You Like It. This speech famously begins, “All the world’s a stage, / And all the men and women merely players” (2.7.146–47). Though the theatrical metaphor is most likely an allusion to Shakespeare, some critics have linked the use of the word “humorous” to Shakespeare’s contemporary, Samuel Daniel. Regardless, humorous should be understood in its Elizabethan sense, meaning “capricious,” yet also referring to the “humors” of the body, which influenced a person’s temperament. A third allusion appears in the final stanza: “Another race hath been, and other palms are won” (line 199). This line alludes to I Corinthians 9:24, where Paul asks, “Know ye not that they which run in a race run all, but one receiveth the prize?”

Apostrophe

Apostrophe (uh-PAW-struh-fee) is a rhetorical device that occurs whenever a speaker directly addresses an absent person, or else an object or abstract entity. Apostrophe is a common device in odes, which typically have a specific addressee. In most odes, the addressee is concrete. For example, one of John Keats’s most famous odes is addressed to a nightingale, and another is addressed to a Grecian urn. In this case, however, Wordsworth has addressed his ode to a far more abstract entity: “immortality.” As this abstraction may indicate, apostrophe works a bit differently in the poem, where the speaker only addresses the title subject indirectly. Indeed, rather than speaking directly to immortality, the speaker addresses various entities that allow him access to the truth of his soul’s immortality. Most important of all is the speaker’s address to the figure of the child, which also represents an earlier—and happier—version of himself (lines 34–35):

                      Thou Child of Joy,
Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy Shepherd-boy.

Elsewhere, the speaker addresses “Ye blessed Creatures” (line 36) of the earth, as well as the earth itself: “O, ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves” (line 187). Each of these different forms of address indirectly reflects the divine nature of the soul, giving the speaker “intimations” of its immortality.

Simile and Metaphor

At various points in the poem, Wordsworth makes effective use of two basic forms of figurative language: simile and metaphor. Recall that a simile (SIH-muh-lee) is a figure of speech that explicitly compares two unlike things to each other. A metaphor (MEH-tuh-for), by contrast, makes a more implicit comparison between two unlike things. An important simile appears at the top of the third stanza (lines 19–22):

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

Here, the speaker likens the lambs’ movement to a pastoral dance accompanied by a small drum known as a tabor. The simile is effective because it helps emphasize the speaker’s feeling of alienation. Whereas he is feeling melancholy, the lambs are dancing like it’s time to party. Later in the poem, the speaker conjures another simile that describes how immortality “broods” over a person “like the Day, a Master o’er a Slave, / A presence which is not to be put by” (lines 119–20). In other words, the truth of the soul’s immortality is ever-present, regardless of whether we are aware of it.

Effective though these similes may be, it is metaphor that plays a more important role in the poem overall. In stanza 2, for instance, the speaker refers to the sun in symbolic terms, metaphorically connecting this natural entity to the more supernatural concept of the soul. When the speaker claims that “the sunshine is a glorious birth” (line 16), he is subtly establishing a link to the notion of the immortal soul. The sun exists regardless of whether sunlight appears in the sky. Even so, the emerging of the sun at dawn marks a “glorious birth” that may be metaphorically connected to the birth of a person, whose body temporarily carries the immortal soul. A similar metaphor appears in stanza 3, where the speaker describes “the Winds” as an inspiring force that awakens him from the metaphorical “fields of sleep” (line 28). Later, in stanza 6, the speaker likens the earth to a nurse taking care of “her Foster-child” (line 82). Then, in stanza 7, the speaker develops a theatrical metaphor to describe how a child develops in the same way an actor might take on different stage roles. Like the other metaphors Wordsworth deploys, these invest the poem with a rich and diverse array of images.

Repetition

Wordsworth uses repetition frequently throughout “Intimations of Immortality.” He makes particular use of two related types of repetition, both of which involve the recurrence of a single word or short phrase in quick succession. The first type is known as diacope (die-ACK-uh-pee), which involves repetition separated by one or more words. The repetition of “shout” in line 35 offers a good example of diacope: “Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy Shepherd-boy.” Closely related to diacope is epizeuxis (eh-pih-ZOOK-sis), which occurs when a word or phrase is repeated in quick succession, but with no intervening words. For example, consider line 41: “The fulness of your bliss, I feel—I feel it all.” In addition to using these forms of repetition separately, Wordsworth also frequently combines them, as in line 50: “I hear, I hear, with joy I hear!” In every instance, repetition functions as a rhetorical amplifier that gives greater force to whatever emotion the speaker is experiencing. At times, Wordsworth uses repetition to underscore the speaker’s despair: “In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave” (line 117). Other times, however, the repetition functions to highlight the speaker’s jubilance: “Then sing, ye Birds, sing, sing a joyous song!” (line 168).