ode.

i enjoyed this poem. there are so many themes to be taken out of it that it seems a difficult task to fully analyze it. one passage that stood out particularly was the fifth stanza. man, as wordsworth claims, is a vessel for the divine, and he moves about the world he "trails clouds of glory...from god, who is our home..." wordsworth inverts the nature of life and death, insisting instead that our waking life here on earth is "but a forgetting" of the "heaven" that "lies about us on our infancy." he holds that man's conception of god and of immortality are not necessary illusions brought about by the presence of suffering on earth, but rather they are the elemental forces that have created our world, which is the real illusion. cast into this life, the infant and the boy will see "the glory and freshness of a dream," as the languidly of a child is compared to the lingering presence of the divine. unfortunately, the world begins soon to "close upon the growing boy," until the glowing light dies away and becomes part of everything else. in essence, this seems a tribute to Plato's republic, where plato suggests that mankind is imprisoned within a cave, watching his existence as shadows upon a wall reflecting imperfect imitations of the true "world." if he is able to free himself and leave the cave, man will discover a bright world of clear color and form outside the cave. similarly, wordsworth suggests that mankind has come from the "divine" light of some other world. as he grows, spending more time in his "cave," and slowly accepting the shadows as the "shades of (a) prison house," the brilliant light of the outside world grows dimmer.
another passage i greatly enjoyed was the 7th stanza. here wordsworth outlines the journey from childhood to maturity. he seems to conclude that the majority of man's life is "imitation," and that humans simply move from role to role," filling from time to time his 'humorous stage'." because man is trapped in this world of illusion, he must "fit his tongue to dialogues of business, love or strife..." thus wordsworth laments the human condition, suggesting the very nature of identity is false. like before, this passage seems a refitting of Shakespeare's lament in his play "as you like it":

"All the world's a stage
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts..."