“Or let me die!” testifies both to a potential despair and a desperation for faith, the belief in his own poetic election that Wordsworth perhaps misleadingly calls “natural piety,” by which he does not men the “natural religion” of the Enlightenment that opposed natural reason to revelation. The shock of the poem commences with “Or let me die!” Wordsworth does not wish to survive if his days-past, present, and future-cannot be “Bound each to each” in the double sense of bound as “connected” and as “bond” or covenant. “So be it when I shall grow old” is clearly tertiary, since it depends both upon memory and the renewal of memory. “So is it now I am man” is necessarily secondary, since it depends upon memory of the child's joy. The child's ecstatic rainbow is primary, almost instinctive. Certainly this little poem is simple both in structure and in language, but the reader can come to uncover some perplexities in it. “My Heart Leaps Up,” remembering that Noah's covenant with Yahweh was symbolized by the rainbow, employs the rainbow to celebrate another covenant, the continuity in Wordsworth's consciousness of self. “My Heart Leaps Up,” remarkable in itself, is also the seed of the great Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, where Wordsworth employs as an epigraph the last three lines of this fragment (if it is that).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |