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“Intimations of Immortality” consists of eleven numbered stanzas of varying length and structure. Though each stanza develops a distinct idea, the poem follows an overall arc that moves from the speaker’s distress over the ephemeral nature of life to a moving affirmation of the soul’s immortality. Stanzas 1–4 open the poem with a series of meditations on how the beauty and wonder of life is easily destabilized by the grief that comes when reckoning with mortality. These stanzas inaugurate a structural rhythm in which the speaker oscillates quickly between happy and sad thoughts, though the prevailing mood is decidedly melancholy. In stanza 5, the speaker shifts into a new mode and attempts to formalize his observations about life and death in a philosophical way. Alluding to the Greek philosopher Plato, he argues that though a person’s life is ephemeral, the soul is eternal. However, over the course of our lives we gradually forget the immortal nature of our souls. By the time we’re adults, “the vision splendid” (line 73) we once enjoyed in our youth begins to “fade into the light of common day” (line 76). Following on this thought, stanzas 6–7 consider the ways that nature and culture both contribute to us forgetting our immortal inheritance.

In stanza 8, the speaker makes a significant rhetorical shift. Though still concerned with the vanishing of “the vision splendid,” the speaker addresses the figure of a child. He asks this child, who is possibly his own younger self, why he would ever hasten to grow up if the price is to forget the soul’s glory. In stanza 9, which is by far the poem’s longest, the speaker turns his attention to the act of recollection. Specifically, he considers how the faculty of memory allows a person to reach back toward their childhood and retrieve a sense of their “first affections” (line 148). Though the passing of time will necessarily make these recollections “shadowy” (line 149), the speaker insists that our memories “are yet the fountain-light of all our day” (line 151). With a newfound faith in the ability to recall the forgotten truth of our spiritual immortality, the speaker conjures a jubilant mood in stanza 10. After celebrating the ability of “the philosophic mind” (line 186) to see past death, the speaker concludes, in stanza 11, with a return to his earlier thoughts about mortality. Though a sense of melancholy remains here, the nature of the sadness has been transformed, and it now “lie[s] too deep for tears” (line 203).

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