Monday, April 28, 2008
Ode
I really enjoyed this poem. I know I say that a lot, but along with the imagery and beautiful wording, Wordsworth did something really neat with the length of his stanzas. I may be making this up, but it would be really cool if this were indeed true. As you read the poem, the child starts off young and the stanza's start off short. As the poem continues, the child gets older, six years, to being a teenager when he is "Nor man nor boy," to manhood and "philosophical thought." As the child grows, so do the stanzas. They start off short when the child is young and grow in length. I have no idea if Wordsworth intended this but its neat even if he didn't. This way you not only get the image of growth in your head but also on the page.
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2 comments:
I also liked how Wordsworth wove the thinkings of a mature mind into the stanzas where he is young and innocent. For instance in the third stanza he begins with a description of nature and its innocent beauty, and his construction of the lines reflect the free nature of these thoughts. "Now, while the birds thus sing a joyous song,/And while the young lambs bound/As to the tabor's sound". Yet Wordsworth reacts to this music with sadness and feelings of lonliness "To me alone there came a thought of grief;/A timely utterance gave that thought relief,". The structure of the poem becomes rigid and even in length for several lines afterwards. He then gives into the good tidings of nature for several stanzas, but slowly, as he develops, he falls into a solid structure culminating in the final stanza where the lines are all similar lengths and the rhyme scheme is predictable. The content of the last stanza is also like a reflection back on his feelings in the first stanza where he states that he still loves the fountains, meadows, hills, and groves, but his realization of mortality has subdued it.
I also loved this poem for the many various reasons that everyone else provided. However, I did have one question about his structural choice at various points. Why did he choose to indent certain parts of the stanzas and not others? For instance the section in stanza 3 starting with "And all the earth is gay" and ending with "Thou child of Joy" is set off from the rest of the stnaza, and this type of set up appears on numerous occasions in the poem. This could very well be unimportant to the overall plot of the poem, I just thought I would ask to see if it had any significance at all.
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