![The fifth stanza from William Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” (1804).
Simon Jarvis writes:
The prominence of narrative stages here - infant, boy, youth, man - gives the passage a deceptive easiness. The dominant strain is clear enough. A divine light in the soul is replaced by daylight. Yet the final line nevertheless feels surprising, because the expected completion of the gradual darkening which has begun when ‘Shades of the prison-house begin to close’ does not occur. Instead light fades into light. ‘[F]ade into’ equivocates so far as to imply that the light of common day itself contains or is illuminated by celestial light. In the prospectus for ‘The Recluse’, the poet asks why paradise should not be a ‘simple procedure of the common day’. Here common day is quite capable of producing, not merely the compensatory varieties of feeling which are awarded to us in place of joy, but bliss itself. The phrase ‘common day’ captures a singular innovation of Wordsworth’s poetry: the steady observation of the quotidian in such a way as to see paradise. ‘Common day’ is the meeting point of bliss and disenchantment.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lvf60aPIMo1qb9yj1o1_1280.jpg)
The fifth stanza from William Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” (1804).
Simon Jarvis writes:
The prominence of narrative stages here - infant, boy, youth, man - gives the passage a deceptive easiness. The dominant strain is clear enough. A divine light in the soul is replaced by daylight. Yet the final line nevertheless feels surprising, because the expected completion of the gradual darkening which has begun when ‘Shades of the prison-house begin to close’ does not occur. Instead light fades into light. ‘[F]ade into’ equivocates so far as to imply that the light of common day itself contains or is illuminated by celestial light. In the prospectus for ‘The Recluse’, the poet asks why paradise should not be a ‘simple procedure of the common day’. Here common day is quite capable of producing, not merely the compensatory varieties of feeling which are awarded to us in place of joy, but bliss itself. The phrase ‘common day’ captures a singular innovation of Wordsworth’s poetry: the steady observation of the quotidian in such a way as to see paradise. ‘Common day’ is the meeting point of bliss and disenchantment.
