The opening stanza is about mourning the loss of
childhood, so there is a general sense of melancholy about aging and a heart-wrenching
nostalgia/yearning for one's lost youth. The speaker notes the change from the way he
experienced the world as a child and how he experiences the world as an adult. For him,
immortality means the Soul exists before, during and after the life of the body. So, the
child is closer to the memory of that spiritual realm than the adult. Stanza
V:
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:/ and later,
"not in entire forgetfulness" and "but trailing clouds of glory do we
come."
As the child becomes an adult, he is further removed
from that dream and becomes mired in a life of "endless imitation." (Stanza VII). The
adult must rely on memory, which fades with age, to get glimpses of that fresh outlook
that is characteristic of a child. The older you get, the more you focus on the day to
day repetition of life. Also, the more you understand of the world, the less miraculous
it seems. So, the adult suffers in that loss of viewing the world with such freshness.
He grieves in "nothing can bring back the hour/Of splendour in the grass and the glory
in the flower" (X), but then goes on to say he'll find strength in what remains
behind.
The speaker also finds strength or wisdom in that
the mature philosophic mind can see "through death" to immortality, and more to your
question, as the speaker ages, he learns to more appreciate the fragility of life, the
tenderness of the human heart and sensitivity, empathy to human suffering. So the
speaker talks about suffering individually, only being able to intimate immortality from
recollections from early childhood. But he achieves wisdom through philosophical
maturity and finds "soothing thoughts" arising from his appreciation of this world, the
fragility of mortality and sensitivity to human suffering.
No comments:
Post a Comment