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The Sun

The most important symbol in the poem is the sun, which the speaker uses as a metaphor for the soul’s immortality. The speaker first mentions the sun in stanza 2, where he declares, “The sunshine is a glorious birth” (line 16). The use of the word birth here foreshadows the reappearance of the sun in stanza 5, where the speaker transforms this heavenly body into a symbol for the soul (lines 58–61):

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

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. The implications of this comparison are significant. Although it may appear that the soul comes into being with the birth of the person, the truth is that the soul preexists the physical body. Much like the sun exists before it rises above the eastern horizon, the soul exists before it “rises with us.” 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.” Strangely, despite his symbolic references to sunrise and daylight, the speaker frames human life in terms that belong more to the night—namely, the oblivion of sleep. Yet if life is obscure like the night, it’s only because our birth into physical existence dims the shining truth of “our life’s Star,” which is, in fact, ever present.

The Child

Several times in the poem the speaker references the figure of a child, which is symbolically linked to the concept of immortality. In one sense, this child is an earlier version of the speaker, who begins the poem by thinking back to how he used to see the world as a boy. This was a time when the whole world seemed to him “apparelled in celestial light” (line 4). As an adult, however, this light has grown dim, and the speaker has developed a melancholy preoccupation with his own mortality and the world’s fleetingness. At this point in the poem, then, the figure of the child symbolizes an earlier mode of perceiving the world that the speaker wants desperately to rediscover. He makes this desire painfully clear in his command at the end of stanza 3 (lines 34–35):

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

Later, in stanzas 5–8, the speaker uses the figure of the child more generically to describe how all humans gradually lose their youthful ways of seeing the world. This more generic child leads the speaker to his theory of memory, according to which “shadowy recollections” (line 149) from early childhood offer a way to rediscover the immortal nature of the human spirit.

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