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The tone of “Intimations of Immortality” is largely determined by the speaker’s emotional turmoil. From the very beginning, it is evident that the speaker struggles to keep his spirits up in the face of a mounting melancholy. The first four stanzas demonstrate this struggle in different ways. In stanzas 1 and 2, for instance, Wordsworth emphasizes the sadness the speaker feels when he considers the ephemerality of all that is joyful and beautiful in life. The speaker’s meditation on the transitory nature of all life is emotionally destabilizing, which becomes clear in the opening of the third stanza (lines 19–24):

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:
A timely utterance gave that thought relief,
                      And I again am strong

Whereas the first four lines juxtapose the speaker’s grief to the pastoral scene of singing birds and dancing lambs, the last two lines describe a sudden emotional shift. All it takes is a “timely utterance,” perhaps from a companion, and the speaker quickly regains his strength. What follows is an almost manic insistence on joyful feeling (lines 25–29):

The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep;
No more shall grief of mine the season wrong;
I hear the Echoes through the mountains throng,
       The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep,
                      And all the earth is gay

Yet for all ways the speaker attempts to abolish his grief, it returns in stanza 4 and, indeed, throughout the poem. Wordsworth mimics the perennial instability of the speaker’s emotional state in the form of the poem itself, and particularly in the constant variation in the meter and the rhyme. No two stanzas have an identical structure. Thus, even when the speaker arrives at a more positive outlook in the poem’s final stanzas, the specter of emotional instability remains.

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