Coleridge's Distinction between Primary Imagination, Secondary Imagination & Fancy

Coleridge gave much thought to the Imagination. He considers poetry the product of the secondary imagination. The secondary imagination dissolves, diffuses and dissipates in order to recreate; it struggles to idealize and unify.

The two Cardinal Points of poetry according to Coleridge are: 

1) The power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature. 

2) The power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colors of Imagination. 

Primary Imagination: (Living power and prime agent of all human perception). Coleridge asserts that the mind is active in perception. This activity which is subconscious and is the common birth right of all men, is the work of the Primary Imagination, which may be defined as the inborn power of perceiving that makes it possible for us to know things. The Primary Imagination is a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal art of creation in the infinite I AM. The power of perception, Coleridge called as Primary Imagination whereas the poetic imagination as the Secondary Imagination. It differs from the Primary Imagination in degree, but not in kind. While all men possess the Primary, only some men possess the heightened degree of the universally human power to which the poet lays claim. 

Secondary Imagination: (Echo of the Primary Imagination) differs in two important respects from Primary Imagination. First, Primary Imagination is subconscious, while Secondary Imagination coexists "with the conscious will" and involves, therefore, elements of conscious and subconscious activity. Poetic "making" blends conscious selection with subconscious infusion, some elements are intentionally chosen while others are mysteriously given or supplied from the deepness of the poet's subconscious mind. Second, the secondary Imagination is described as a power that "dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate." It dissolves and then reintegrates the components in a new way that draws attention to their coalescence. Secondary Imagination bridges the gap between the world of spirit and matter; it fuses perception, intellect, feeling, passions and memory. It struggles to idealize and unify. 

Fancy: On the other hand, is distinguished from Imagination (both primary and secondary) because it is not poetic. It differs from Imagination in kind. Fancy is merely aggregative and associative; it is a mode of memory receiving all its materials ready made from the law of association. In other words, fancy joins without blending; it works together with the pre-existing sensations without creating anything originally new, fabricates without refashioning the elements which it combines. 

To Coleridge poetry was fundamentally and formally distinct from other modes of writing, and it possesses a logic of its own, as severe as that of science, and more difficult, because more subtle, more complex, and dependent on more and more fugitive causes. Poetry could and should bring together thought and feeling; it should reconcile the workings of both the head and the heart. Coleridge says that Wordsworth had unified thought and feeling in poetic utterance; he has both realized and idealized the common place and had made the reader see man and nature as if he was seeing them for the first time. Therefore; at times he seems to be still aware of the sensationalist philosophy of his youth which from it he inherits a conception of a world of facts, an inanimate cold world in which objects as objects are essentially "fixed and dead." But as a poet his task is to transform it by the imagination. He has a deep trust in the imagination and considers it as something which gives shape to life. His dead world may be brought to life by Imagination. He believes that meaning is found for the existence through the exercise of the creative activity which is a kin to that of god. 

As a poet, Coleridge was fascinated by the notion of unearthly power at work in the world. Thus, because of his belief that life is ruled by powers which cannot be fully understood, the result is a poetry more mysterious than that of any Romantic. However, because it is based on primary human emotions, he thought that the task of poetry is to convey the mystery of life. Coleridge believes in Imagination as a vehicle for truth. He felt about the creation of his imagination something similar to what he felt about dreams. He assumes that while we have them, we do not question their reality. Coleridge believes that creation needs joy, so without joy the poet is helpless and miserable.       

A poem Coleridge defines as an organic construct which, unlike works of science, proposes for its immediate object "Pleasure not Truth." In other words, while truth is the ultimate end of poetry, pleasure is its immediate end. Coleridge's definition of the ideal poet is characterized by its emphasis on imagination. The poet described in ideal perfection, bring the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other, according to their relative worth and dignity. He diffuses a tone and spirit of unity, that blends and fuses each into each by that magical power, imagination and synthesis. In Coleridge's view, Wordsworth's particular genius was Miltonic; his strength lay, as the Prelude had demonstrated, in impressing the stamp of his own mind and character on all that he chose to write about.  

A Comparative Study on Wordsworth's Ode On Intimations Of Immortality & Coleridge's Dejection

When Wordsworth arranged his poems for publication, he placed the Ode entitled "Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood" at the end, as if he regarded it as the crown of his creative life. 

The three parts of the Ode deal with a crisis, an explanation, and a consolation, and in all three parts Wordsworth speaks of what is most important and most original in his poetry. The Ode's unusual form is matched by its unusual language. The stately metrical form is matched by a stately use of words. Wordsworth seems to have decided that his subject was so important that it must be treated in what was for him an unusual manner, and for it he fashioned his own style. Because the Ode lies outside Wordsworth's usual range, it doesn't perhaps realize its ambitious aims. He, who had known moments of visionary splendor, found that he knew them no more, and that is a loss which no poet can take lightly, or however comforting his consolations may be, accept in a calm, philosophic spirit. But Wordsworth was so determined not to surrender to circumstances that he made his Ode more confidant than was perhaps warranted by the mood which first set him to work.

Wordsworth lost something very special in his whole approach to nature and his relation with it. At the height of his career Wordsworth discovered that nature, in which he had put on unquestioning trust as the inspiration of his poetry, seemed to have abandoned him and deprived him of his most cherished strength. Tintern Abbey anticipates the Ode in distinguishing between two periods in Wordsworth's life. In his youth he throve on a visionary power which worked through nature; later he found a living presence which inspired him with devotion and was the "soul of all his moral being." This difference and this contrast run through the Ode. Wordsworth needed time and tranquility to absorb his experiences and transform them into poetry. When we look at the circumstances in which the Ode was begun, we notice that something had recently happened to Wordsworth and that an old problem had developed a new seriousness and insistence. Wordsworth began the Ode at a time when he was exercised by two different ideas about nature. In the first place, the fitful returns of his youthful vision made him ask why they were not more frequent and more secure. This made him anxious and uneasy. In the second place, he believed that in the moral inspiration of nature he had found something to take the place of his visions, and the discovery gave to the Ode its positive and consoling character. Such, no doubt, was his state of mind when he conceived the outline of the Ode. Wordsworth found that his visionary gift was not so dead as he had thought, but still at times returned to him. He saw more clearly how much comfort was to be found in his moral conception of nature.

He was thirty-two years old and found that his inspiration was not what it had once been, that it didn't work so readily or come in the same way as of old. He built his poetry on nature. It was the source of his creative strength and opened worlds of the imagery to him. It was therefore a matter of anxious concern when he realized that this source was in some ways drying up. Nature might fail him in one way but it still supported him in another, and he was more than content with that.

Wordsworth, then, seems to have begun his Ode because of some deep trouble which he had brought to the surface by his affection for Coleridge. The problem which concerned both friends was that of poetical inspiration. Wordsworth faced the problem in the first three stanzas of the Ode and then abandoned it for at least two years; Coleridge, slower perhaps to start but quicker once he had started, told of his crisis in the poem which he called "Dejection". Wordsworth's Ode, at least in its eight last stanzas, is a kind of answer to Coleridge's "Dejection". The two poems are concerned with central problems in the Romantic outlook and show to what different conclusions two men could come who shared their inner most thoughts, and followed, as they believed, very similar aims. Both poets share a common crisis, but each interprets it in his own way. When Coleridge examines himself and speaks with fearful candor of his inner being, he sees nothing but an empty, lifeless depression. At some moment, Wordsworth felt something like this, but he has conquered and suppressed it. In the Ode, almost as if in answer to Coleridge, he stresses his own confidence and the delight which he still takes in nature, despite his loss of something most valuable. There was in Wordsworth something tough which Coleridge lacked. Coleridge's sensitiveness was part of a gentle nature. When things went wrong with him, he didn't know what to do and was prone to lament defeat. Wordsworth was made of harsher stuff and sought for a new scheme of life to replace the old.

The differences between the two men is well illustrated by the different scenes which they describe. While Wordsworth speaks of a fine mourning in spring, Coleridge speaks of a stormy night with the moon shining between clouds. What should fill him with inspiring joy leaves him cold. There was one thing which touched Coleridge more than anything and it was the moon. He saw in it a symbol of the poet's power to transform the material world into a world of the imagination. In "Christabel" the hidden moon serves to emphasize the helpless state of the heroine, and in the Ancient Mariner, the moon increases the mystery of a spirit-haunted world. It is appropriate to use it to illustrate his dejected state. Wordsworth was inspired not by vague forms and definite contours, but by the stirring of light and life, the budding of flowers, and the sunshine on the meadows. While Coleridge was at his best among dimly described shapes, Wordsworth moved happily and confidently among solid forms.

This contrast shows the more delicate nature of Coleridge's genius and illustrates why when his crisis came, it was more fearful and more final than Wordsworth's. The differences of personality which are illustrated by the "Ode" and by "Dejection" are raised by differences of outlook on the task of poetry and the place of imagery in life. 

In the first place, the double crisis shows how differently Coleridge and Wordsworth reacted to the external world. As a poet Coleridge was an idealist who believed that the mind fashions the universe for all purposes that really matters. His present grief has come because he feels that he has lost his power to create through the imagination that he can no longer shape experience into beauty and impose his will on nature. Because he has lost his inner joy, he has lost his gift of imaginative creation, and he can't but lament the circumstances which are responsible for this. He has lost not only his poetical gift but what makes life worth living. With Wordsworth it is quite different. For him nature exists independently and needs only to be used and interpreted. He stresses this independence and this essential joyfulness of nature as he develops his poem. Whereas Coleridge puts all his trust in his own imagination and is in despair when it fails him, Wordsworth continues to believe that nature stands outside himself and has still much to give him, if he will only be ready to receive it. 

A second point of contrast revealed by the two poems is between the different ways in which Coleridge and Wordsworth were inspired to write poetry. On his own experience, Coleridge is empathetic. For creation he needs joy. It may not be all that he needs, but so far as it goes, it is indispensable. This pure joy is the "strong music in the soul" which enables Coleridge to create, and this is what he has lost. Without it he feels helpless and miserable. What stirred Wordsworth's creative energy was not joy, as Coleridge describes it, but something more complex. Nature might delight him, but it also did something else. It woke hidden powers in him by a process which was not always enjoyable. For him, beauty and awe were closely mingled in any keen appreciation of natural things, and each contributed to his conception of his task. When he talks about his childhood, he gives a correct account of his spiritual development. If he was sometimes assailed by fear, it was not a deadening emotion but something which enriched his nature through the awe with which it struck him. Wordsworth saw that some kinds of fear are good and that a man does well to be afraid before the mysteries of life and death. Fear bred surprise, and from surprise Wordsworth derived a special exaltation, a sense of enhanced life, a keener vision and a greater power to create. His childhood had moments of anguish and terror, and he was more grateful for them than for its hours of happiness. When he wrote the Ode, he saw that his moments of awful vision were responsible for the best things which he did or knew. In comparison with the strange workings or Wordsworth's creative faculty, those of Coleridge were indeed frail, since they were founded in a joy which he lost early and never regained.

A third point of comparison between Coleridge and Wordsworth turns on their conception of the world which the imagery finds beyond the senses. Through the exercises of the imagination the "inanimate cold world is transformed into something real and living. The imagination creates reality by absorbing the given into the world of spirit. This is the only reality for Coleridge, but this is not Wordsworth sought or found. There were moments when by some mysterious and magnificent process he passed beyond the visible world into some other order of being, vaster, and more wonderful. Instead of examining nature with a close observant eye and extracting all that he could from it, he found himself unaccountably transported into another sphere of being, shapeless, and frightening and beyond the reach of exact words. He seemed then to lose all ties with common life and to be absorbed in something much wider and more majestic. Physical nature ceased to count for its own sake and became the entry into another world. While Coleridge seeks to transform the given world through the imagination, Wordsworth knows moments when he passes beyond it to something else, and he believes that this task is essentially one of the imagination.

The Ode, then, is a kind of answer to Coleridge's "Dejection" or at least to the doubts and anxieties which prompted it. Wordsworth lived not only with but on nature, and what he prized most in it was its capacity to open to him another world through vision. It is this which he lost, perhaps not entirely, but enough to cause him a deep anxiety. There is Wordsworth's conviction that at times he was in another world which was more real than that of the senses, a world not of sight but of vision. His entries into this world were closely connected with his creative and imaginative faculties. And when he had this experience, he felt that he passed outside time into eternity. He was then so unaware of the common ties of life that he had a timeless exaltation. 

Wordsworth devotes some stanzas in the Ode to his special idea of childhood as time when "the vision splendid" is normally with us, and to his explanation of this by a theory that a child has memories, which he gradually loses, of a blessed state in another world before birth. Of course, he has his own childhood in mind. Now, on looking back over the years, he sees what childhood was and finds in it an explanation of his early visions. Indeed, we can almost see why his mind turned to childhood and children in this way. In the first version of "Dejection", Coleridge complained that his children had become for him a cause for regret and anxiety which only made his situation more painful. In answer to this, Wordsworth puts forward his belief that in childhood we see a celestial state which explains much that we most value in ourselves. He contradicts Coleridge's complaint and to say that instead of children being an occasion for lamentation, they should be an occasion for joy. In childhood Wordsworth sees the imagination at work as he has known it himself in his finest, most creative moments. To explain the presence of this power in childhood and its slow disappearance with the coming of maturity, he advances his account of recollections from a celestial state before birth.

Wordsworth was not a man to put ideas into poetry merely because they were suitable for it, nor was he capable of saying as a poet what he didn't believe as a man. When he said a thing, he did so because he believed it to be true and to need saying. It is impossible to read the Ode without seeing that, when he wrote it, Wordsworth was convinced of pre-existence and of recollections from it in childhood. The theory of recollections from it in childhood. The theory of recollection goes back to Plato, but Wordsworth didn't take it from him, nor is his application of it Plato's. His sources are Coleridge and Henry Vaughan. Coleridge had played with the idea of pre-existence as an explanation of a feeling that we have in a previous existence done something or been somewhere. Wordsworth picked up the idea because it helped him to explain his own visionary moments. He is concerned with the loss not of imagination but of innocence. From Coleridge Wordsworth took the idea of pre-existence and from Vaughan that of a slow decline in celestial powers, and from this combination formed his own original theory. Wordsworth's theory of recollection enabled him to put into a single consistent form the three matters which most concerned him.

 In the first place, he had known a vision of another world, and he couldn't but believe that this was both real and divine. He saw that his moments of intimacy with it were close to something which he had enjoyed in childhood and which other children enjoyed. In the child's vision of another world Wordsworth saw something very like his own visions, and he could not but connect the one with the other. 

Secondly, Wordsworth knew that this visionary power was closely connected with the imagination and the creative process. Indeed, he hardly distinguishes between the two, so convinced that the act of creation in the highest sense involves a special insight into the nature of things. In children he sees this creative power in its purest form. The child fashions his own little worlds of the mind because he is divinely inspired by heavenly memories.

Thirdly, through vision Wordsworth found what he called eternity. The idea is too vast for analysis, but we can at least say that when he felt himself in its presence, Wordsworth believed both that he had transcended his temporal being and that he was at the heart of reality. Wordsworth found his explanation of imaginative power in the capacity of children to create and to imagine and while doing so, to have no sense of time or of the limitations of our human state. In the visionary experience which Wordsworth once knew so well and now knows only rarely and fully, he feels that he passes to eternity, and this is what his theory expresses. 

Wordsworth believed himself to be immortal because through the objects of sense he had known a lofty exaltation in which he passed beyond time. He enjoyed the companionship with nature and believed to be more lasting and less intermittent than his vision. In the presence of nature his human emotions were stirred and enhanced in a peculiar way. His feelings for the fellowship of natural things was so instinctive and so powerful that he was almost more at home with them than with human beings, and among human beings he preferred on the whole those who were closest to nature. He believed that life in town corrupts and deadens the finer instincts of men and that they find their true selves only in the presence of natural things. He found it hard to release his feelings except with a very few intimate friends and relations. But in the presence of nature his feelings were set free and felt no shyness afterward in writing of them. In him nature awoke especially those emotions of sympathy and affection which he felt for his sister and his wife and a few chosen friends. Under his impenetrable exterior he concealed a real need for giving and receiving affection and when he was among his mountains and trees and flowers, he allowed this to rise to the surface and express itself in poetry.

In analyzing his creative powers, Wordsworth distinguishes between his moments of vision and the more enduring effect which nature had on his affections. Thus, he believed, it remained with him when his visions had departed. Wordsworth's happiness came from living close to nature. In it he found a calm and a contentment. He who had once put his trust in visions now put it in a religion of nature and thought that all would be well with him. Before long it was clear that the religion of nature was not enough, and Wordsworth abandoned it for a more orthodox faith. Wordsworth's belief in natural religion began to wane soon after the completion of the Ode. Its decay almost inevitably followed his loss of visionary power. But what mattered most in him was gone - the creative imagination which carried him beyond the bounds of space and time into some vast order of things, where, in almost losing his individuality, he saw in impassioned vision the power which sustains the universe and gives meaning to life. And when he lost this, it was not long before he lost his secondary but hardly less remarkable gift of feeling himself so close to nature that in its presence he was able to understand the tender movements of the human heart and to enter into full sympathy with them.

Dejection: An Ode by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Late, late yestreen I saw the new Moon,

With the old Moon in her arms;

And I fear, I fear, my Master dear!

We shall have a deadly storm.

      Ballad of Sir Patrick Spence.

I

Well!  if the Bard was weather-wise, who made

  The grand old ballad of Sir Patrick Spence,

  This night, so tranquil now, will not go hence

Unroused by winds, that ply a busier trade

Than those which mould yon cloud in lazy flakes,

Or the dull sobbing draft, that moans and rakes

    Upon the strings of this Aeolian lute,

    Which better far were mute.

  For lo! the New-moon winter-bright!

  And overspread with phantom light,

  (With swimming phantom light o'erspread

  But rimmed and circled by a silver thread)

I see the old Moon in her lap, foretelling

  The coming-on of rain and squally blast.

And oh! that even now the gust were swelling,

  And the slant night-shower driving loud and fast!

Those sounds which oft have raised me, whilst they awed,

    And sent my soul abroad,

Might now perhaps their wonted impulse give,

Might startle this dull pain, and make it move and live!

II

A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear,

  A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief,

  Which finds no natural outlet, no relief,

    In word, or sigh, or tear --

O Lady! in this wan and heartless mood,

To other thoughts by yonder throstle woo'd,

  All this long eve, so balmy and serene,

Have I been gazing on the western sky,

  And its peculiar tint of yellow green:

And still I gaze -- and with how blank an eye!

And those thin clouds above, in flakes and bars,

That give away their motion to the stars;

Those stars, that glide behind them or between,

Now sparkling, now bedimmed, but always seen:

Yon crescent Moon, as fixed as if it grew

In its own cloudless, starless lake of blue;

I see them all so excellently fair,

I see, not feel, how beautiful they are!

III

    My genial spirits fail;

    And what can these avail

To lift the smothering weight from off my breast?

    It were a vain endeavour,

    Though I should gaze for ever

On that green light that lingers in the west:

I may not hope from outward forms to win

The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.

IV

O Lady! we receive but what we give,

And in our life alone does Nature live:

Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud!

  And would we aught behold, of higher worth,

Than that inanimate cold world allowed

To the poor loveless ever-anxious crowd,

  Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth

A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud

    Enveloping the Earth --

And from the soul itself must there be sent

  A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth,

Of all sweet sounds the life and element!

V

O pure of heart! thou need'st not ask of me

What this strong music in the soul may be!

What, and wherein it doth exist,

This light, this glory, this fair luminous mist,

This beautiful and beauty-making power.

  Joy, virtuous Lady! Joy that ne'er was given,

Save to the pure, and in their purest hour,

Life, and Life's effluence, cloud at once and shower,

Joy, Lady! is the spirit and the power,

Which wedding Nature to us gives in dower

  A new Earth and new Heaven,

Undreamt of by the sensual and the proud --

Joy is the sweet voice, Joy the luminous cloud --

    We in ourselves rejoice!

And thence flows all that charms or ear or sight,

  All melodies the echoes of that voice,

All colours a suffusion from that light.

VI

There was a time when, though my path was rough,

  This joy within me dallied with distress,

And all misfortunes were but as the stuff

  Whence Fancy made me dreams of happiness:

For hope grew round me, like the twining vine,

And fruits, and foliage, not my own, seemed mine.

But now afflictions bow me down to earth:

Nor care I that they rob me of my mirth;

    But oh! each visitation

Suspends what nature gave me at my birth,

  My shaping spirit of Imagination.

For not to think of what I needs must feel,

  But to be still and patient, all I can;

And haply by abstruse research to steal

  From my own nature all the natural man --

  This was my sole resource, my only plan:

Till that which suits a part infects the whole,

And now is almost grown the habit of my soul.

VII

Hence, viper thoughts, that coil around my mind,

    Reality's dark dream!

I turn from you, and listen to the wind,

  Which long has raved unnoticed.  What a scream

Of agony by torture lengthened out

That lute sent forth!  Thou Wind, that rav'st without,

  Bare crag, or mountain-tairn, or blasted tree,

Or pine-grove whither woodman never clomb,

Or lonely house, long held the witches' home,

  Methinks were fitter instruments for thee,

Mad Lutanist! who in this month of showers,

Of dark-brown gardens, and of peeping flowers,

Mak'st Devils' yule, with worse than wintry song,

The blossoms, buds, and timorous leaves among.

  Thou Actor, perfect in all tragic sounds!

Thou mighty Poet, e'en to frenzy bold!

    What tell'st thou now about?

    'Tis of the rushing of an host in rout,

  With groans, of trampled men, with smarting wounds --

At once they groan with pain, and shudder with the cold!

But hush! there is a pause of deepest silence!

  And all that noise, as of a rushing crowd,

With groans, and tremulous shudderings -- all is over --

  It tells another tale, with sounds less deep and loud!

    A tale of less affright,

    And tempered with delight,

As Otway's self had framed the tender lay, --

    'Tis of a little child

    Upon a lonesome wild,

Not far from home, but she hath lost her way:

And now moans low in bitter grief and fear,

And now screams loud, and hopes to make her mother hear.

VIII

'Tis midnight, but small thoughts have I of sleep:

Full seldom may my friend such vigils keep!

Visit her, gentle Sleep! with wings of healing,

  And may this storm be but a mountain-birth

May all the stars hang bright above her dwelling,

  Silent as though they watched the sleeping Earth!

    With light heart may she rise,

    Gay fancy, cheerful eyes,

  Joy lift her spirit, joy attune her voice;

To her may all things live, from pole to pole,

Their life the eddying of her living soul!

  O simple spirit, guided from above,

Dear Lady! friend devoutest of my choice,

Thus mayest thou ever, evermore rejoice.

Ode On Intimations Of Immortality: From Recollections of Early Childhood

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, 

The earth, and every common sight
 To me did seem

  Appareled in celestial light,

The glory and the freshness of a dream.

It is not now as it hath been of yore;--

 Turn wheresoe'er I may,

  By night or day,

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

            The rainbow comes and goes, 

            And lovely is the rose; 

            The moon doth with delight

     Look round her when the heavens are bare;

       Waters on a starry night

     Are beautiful and fair;

     The sunshine is a glorious birth;

     But yet I know, where'er I go,

That there hath past away a glory from the earth.

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.

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;

  Land and sea

     Give themselves up to jollity,

            And with the heart of May

     Doth every beast keep holiday;--

        Thou child of joy,

Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy 

    Shepherd-boy!

Ye blesséd Creatures, I have heard the call 

     Ye to each other make; I see

The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee; 

     My heart is at your festival,

    My head hath its coronal,

The fulness of your bliss, I feel--I feel it all.

         O evil day! if I were sullen 

         While Earth herself is adorning

         This sweet May-morning;

         And the children are culling

       On every side

         In a thousand valleys far and wide

         Fresh flowers; while the sun shines warm, 

And the babe leaps up on his mother's arm:--

        I hear, I hear, with joy I hear!

         --But there's a tree, of many, one, 

A single field which I have look'd upon, 

Both of them speak of something that is gone:

    The pansy at my feet

      Doth the same tale repeat:

Whither is fled the visionary gleam? 

Where is it now, the glory and the dream?

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;

    Not in entire forgetfulness,

     And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come 

         From God, who is our home:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy! 

Shades of the prison-house begin to close

     Upon the growing Boy,

But he beholds the light, and whence it flows, 

    He sees it in his joy;

The Youth, who daily farther from the east 

     Must travel, still is Nature's priest,

          And by the vision splendid

        Is on his way attended;

At length the Man perceives it die away, 

And fade into the light of common day.

Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own; 

Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind, 

And, even with something of a mother's mind,

     And no unworthy aim,

          The homely nurse doth all she can 

To make her foster-child, her inmate, Man,

          Forget the glories he hath known,

And that imperial palace whence he came.

Behold the Child among his new-born blisses,

A six years' darling of a pigmy size!

See, where 'mid work of his own hand he lies,

Fretted by sallies of his mother's kisses,

With light upon him from his father's eyes!

See, at his feet, some little plan or chart,

Some fragment from his dream of human life,

Shaped by himself with newly-learned art;

    A wedding or a festival, 

     A mourning or a funeral;

           And this hath now his heart,

          And unto this he frames his song:

          Then will he fit his tongue

To dialogues of business, love, or strife; 

  But it will not be long 

      Ere this be thrown aside, 

      And with new joy and pride

The little actor cons another part;

Filling from time to time his 'humorous stage'

With all the Persons, down to palsied Age,

That life brings with her in her equipage; 

     As if his whole vocation

    Were endless imitation.

Thou, whose exterior semblance doth belie 

Thy soul's immensity;

Thou best philosopher, who yet dost keep

Thy heritage, thou eye among the blind,

That, deaf and silent, read'st the eternal deep,

Haunted for ever by the eternal Mind,--

   Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!

  On whom those truths rest

Which we are toiling all our lives to find,

In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave;

Thou, over whom thy Immortality

Broods like the day, a master o'er a slave,

A Presence which is not to be put by; 

To whom the grave

Is but a lonely bed, without the sense of sight

Of day or the warm light,

A place of thoughts where we in waiting lie;

Thou little child, yet glorious in the might

Of heaven-born freedom on thy being's height,

Why with such earnest pains dost thou provoke

The years to bring the inevitable yoke,

Thus blindly with thy blessedness at strife?

Full soon thy soul shall have her earthly freight,

And custom lie upon thee with a weight

Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!

  0 joy! that in our embers

    Is something that doth live,

   That Nature yet remembers

What was so fugitive!

The thought of our past years in me doth breed

Perpetual benediction: not indeed

For that which is most worthy to be blest,

Delight and liberty, the simple creed

Of Childhood, whether busy or at rest,

With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast:--

   --Not for these I raise

          The song of thanks and praise;

     But for those obstinate questionings

     Of sense and outward things,

     Fallings from us, vanishings,

     Blank misgivings of a creature

Moving about in worlds not realized, 

High instincts, before which our mortal nature 

Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised:

   But for those first affections,

    Those shadowy recollections,

     Which, be they what they may,

Are yet the fountain-light of all our day, 

Are yet a master-light of all our seeing;

     Uphold us--cherish--and have power to make 

Our noisy years seem moments in the being 

Of the eternal Silence: truths that wake,

To perish never;

Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour,

   Nor man nor boy,

Nor all that is at enmity with joy,

Can utterly abolish or destroy!

   Hence, in a season of calm weather

          Though inland far we be,

Our souls have sight of that immortal sea

      Which brought us hither;

          Can in a moment travel thither--

And see the children sport upon the shore, 

And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.

Then, sing, ye birds, sing, sing a joyous song!

          And let the young lambs bound

    As to the tabor's sound!

     We, in thought, will join your throng, 

     Ye that pipe and ye that play, 

          Ye that through your hearts to-day 

       Feel the gladness of the May!

What though the radiance which was once so bright 

Be now for ever taken from my sight,

     Though nothing can bring back the hour 

Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower;

   We will grieve not, rather find

    Strength in what remains behind;

 In the primal sympathy

   Which having been must ever be;

     In the soothing thoughts that spring

  Out of human suffering;

     In the faith that looks through death, 

In years that bring the philosophic mind.

And O, ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves,

Forebode not any severing of our loves!

Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might;

I only have relinquish'd one delight

To live beneath your more habitual sway;

I love the brooks which down their channels fret

Even more than when I tripp'd lightly as they;

The innocent brightness of a new-born day

Is lovely yet;

The clouds that gather round the setting sun

Do take a sober coloring from an eye

That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality; 

Another race hath been, and other palms are won.

   Thanks to the human heart by which we live,

  Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,

   To me the meanest flower that blows can give

   Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.