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As with many of Wordsworth’s poems, it has become customary for readers to conflate the speaker with the poet himself. For those familiar with Wordsworth’s biography, this conflation is supported by the fact that his poems often relate to parts of the English countryside where he spent much of his time. His poems also share a thematic focus on childhood, memory, and mortality, all of which were personal preoccupations throughout Wordsworth’s life. Though “Intimations of Immortality” doesn’t describe an obvious biographical event from his life, the poem does take place somewhere in his beloved English countryside. It also centers on an emotionally-restless speaker who, much like Wordsworth himself, has a capacity to move between philosophical speculation and admiration for the natural world. The speaker’s mostly melancholy mood also tracks with Wordsworth, who often relied on intense introspection to salvage something affirmative from a prevailing sense of grief over the irrevocable passage of time and life’s ephemerality. For all these reasons, it has become customary to associate the poem’s first-person speaker with Wordsworth himself.
It’s important to note that, in at least one important way, the speaker doesn’t align with the poet. In a letter he wrote to Isabella Fenwick in 1843, Wordsworth reflected on the poem’s spiritual components. Specifically, he remarked that the discussion of the soul’s divine immortality was merely symbolic, and that it should be understood as a poetic device rather than an expression of his belief. As he put the matter to Fenwick: “I took hold of the notion of preexistence as having sufficient foundation in humanity for authorizing me to make for my purpose the best use of it I could as a Poet.” This remark is significant for the way it distinguishes the poet from his speaker. Whereas the speaker seems to believe in the soul’s immortality and its separate existence from the body, Wordsworth would appear not to. If this is the case, then the speaker must be understood on his own terms. Though in many ways he may resemble Wordsworth, his struggle to affirm and find comfort in the soul’s divine nature is his own.
