There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
       The earth, and every common sight,
                          To me did seem
                      Apparelled in celestial light,
            The glory and the freshness of a dream.
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.

These nine lines comprise the poem’s complete opening stanza. This stanza is significant for the way it introduces the key tensions that animate the poem. Perhaps most important is the way it establishes the melancholy tone that predominates throughout the poem’s first four stanzas. This tone is linked to the speaker’s feelings of grief, which in turn stems from a tension between his appreciation of the world’s beauty and his simultaneous awareness of its ephemeral nature. If the speaker is aware of the world’s fleetingness, it’s because he can’t help but notice the irreversible passage of time. The opening lines harken back to the time of the speaker’s childhood, and they emphasize the idyllic nature of that time by echoing the standard fairy-tale opening, “Once upon a time.” The speaker recalls the “glory and freshness” of the world as seen by his childhood self. However, he’s also all too aware that time has passed and that this world “is not now as it hath been of yore.” In this way, the speaker links his melancholy mood both to the ephemeral nature of beauty and to the loss of his childlike wonder.

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:
                      Not in entire forgetfulness,
                      And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
                      From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

Lines 58–66 constitute the opening sentence of stanza 5, which marks the poem’s first significant turning point. Coming after four stanzas in which he meditated on the grief associated with mortality, the speaker changes tack and contemplates the glory of the soul’s immortality. He presents a theory of the human soul that at once alludes to the Greek philosopher Plato and also draws on theological language from Christianity. In essence, he posits that the human soul has an existence that’s distinct from that of the body. He develops this theory using the sun as a metaphor. Just as the sun rises at the beginning of the day, our soul, which the speaker calls “our life’s Star,” similarly “rises with us” at the time of our birth. And, much like the sun exists before it rises above the eastern horizon, the soul exists before it is born into the body. What prevents us from seeing this truth more clearly is the fact that, as the speaker puts it, “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting.” That is, as soon as we are born, we begin to forget that our soul is immortal, and that it comes from God in Heaven.

The thought of our past years in me doth breed
Perpetual benediction: not indeed
For that which is most worthy to be blest;
Delight and liberty, the simple creed
Of Childhood, whether busy or at rest,
With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast:—
                      Not for these I raise
                      The song of thanks and praise
                But for those obstinate questionings
                Of sense and outward things; . . .
                      But for those first affections,
                      Those shadowy recollections,
                Which, be they what they may
Are yet the fountain-light of all our day,
Are yet a master-light of all our seeing;
                Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal Silence[.]

This passage is excerpted from the lengthy sentence that opens stanza 9 (lines 133–142, 148–155). This stanza is by far the longest and most complex in the poem, and it arguably represents the poem’s conceptual climax. In the stanzas leading up to it, the speaker has discussed how we gradually lose our awareness of the soul’s immortality as we pass from childhood to adolescence and adulthood. It is precisely this loss of awareness that conditioned the speaker’s melancholy mood in the opening stanzas. Here, however, the speaker presents his idea about how, even as adults, we can regain an awareness of our spiritual immortality. His idea centers on how intentional acts of recollection offer something of a “benediction”—that is, a blessing that brings a sense of peace and solace.

Significantly, however, it isn’t just any “thought of our past” that consoles the speaker in the present moment. The speaker is quick to insist that he isn’t talking about recalling “the simple creed / Of Childhood,” when “new-fledged hope [was] still fluttering in his breast.” Rather, the speaker emphasizes what he refers to as our “shadowy recollections.” These recollections refer to experiences when our “obstinate questionings / Of sense and outward things” gave us partial insight into an otherwise hidden reality. However dim this insight may be, it is nonetheless “a master light of all our seeing” and therefore able to illuminate more profound truths. In this way, our “shadowy recollections” provide us with the intimations of immortality referenced in the title. Crucially, these recollections “have the power to make / Our noisy years seem moments in the being / Of the eternal Silence.”

What though the radiance which was once so bright
Be now for ever taken from my sight,
                Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
                      We will grieve not, rather find
                      Strength in what remains behind;
                      In the primal sympathy
                      Which having been must ever be;
                      In the soothing thoughts that spring
                      Out of human suffering;
                      In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind.

Lines 175–186 close stanza 10 with what is arguably the rhetorical climax of the poem. After discussing at length the soul’s immortality and the consolation of memory, the speaker offers an affirmative vision of how “the philosophic mind” can effectively look “through death.” That is, by developing a thoughtful temperament rooted in intentional acts of recollection, it is possible to glimpse a “primal sympathy” that sees beyond the fact of death. The speaker is clearly in a more positive and enlightened state than he was in the poem’s melancholy opening stanzas. Wordsworth underscores this transformation through an innovative use of rhyme, which in this passage may be schematized as follows: DDEEFFGGHHIF. A mounting series of couplets amplifies the stanza’s rhetorical force, but gets interrupted with the final two lines, which pair “death” and “mind.” Notably, “mind” echoes the F rhymes of “find” and “behind” from earlier in the stanza, effectively creating a stretched rhyme that encompasses this final series of eight lines. This means that “death” is the only word without a rhyming pair in the stanza. This fact may initially appear to emphasize the absoluteness of death. However, the speaker refutes such a reading in the final line, which rescues the stanza from symbolic death by renewing an earlier rhyme.

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