Ans: “Immortality Ode” is one of the most outstanding lyrics of William Wordsworth. This very poem is about a balance sheet of the profit and loss of a man from childhood to adulthood. It is a loss that seems to leave him a dead thing in a world of life and beauty. But the poet has its compensation in the obstinate questionings in quickened human sympathy and in the growth of the philosophic mind.

At the outset of the poem “Immortality Ode”, the poet describes the various divine charms and pleasures, powers, and gratifications of childhood in melancholic mood remarks at a certain stage of growth. In the language of the poet:

“The things which I have seen I now can see no more.”

When the poet was a child, he saw all the objects of nature clothed in celestial light. He used to enjoy the objects of Nature through his senses in his childhood. The most commonplace objects of Nature such as meadow, grove, and stream appeared to him having a visionary celestial gleam upon them. But in his mature years, the dream-like vividness and splendor have vanished.

The beautiful objects of Nature like the rainbow, rose, and moonlight came in their proper time but the poet does not find the same celestial light in them in his mature years. In the spring season, the bird’s sing, the young lambs bound as to tabor’s sound, the waterfalls make a roaring sound and every beast keeps holiday. But the poet cannot attune his mind to Nature’s joy because of his loss of heavenly glory. The poet summarizes his loss of visionary power in the following couplet:

“Wither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?”

In the opinion of Wordsworth, the child is not capable to recognize his own morality. But the adult is more conscious of the fact of death and of the faith in the existence of an eternal reality from which he came and to which he will eventually return enabling him to look beyond or through death. This quiet and meditative response to life that the adult alone is capable of is summed up in the expression of the philosophic mind.

The final stanza confirms Wordsworth’s resolution of the problem he faced at the beginning of the poem. His response to the natural world has changed since childhood but his love of nature is unchanged or even greater and the adult response offers its own kind of satisfaction to the poet. The poet says —

“I only have relinquished one delight
To live beneath your more habitual sway.”

Here, the poet acknowledges that what he has gained is a new sensitivity to the morality and sufferings of his fellow human beings. This quality of tender sympathy is quite evident in the poem’s concluding lines —

“To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.”

Through the above lines, the poet means to say that now he looks at nature in a different mood. He can now perceive something noble and wise. Even in the humblest and most commonplace objects of nature even the most ordinary objects of nature have a deeper and more profound meaning for him. Even when he looks at the most ordinary flowers he is filled with certain thoughts which are so deep that even tears cannot express them.

In light of the above discussion, the poet thinks that his loss has been great, but his compensation has also been greater. Though he has lost the visionary gleam of childhood, he has gained maturity and humanity.