WILLIAM WORDSWORTH ON IMMORTALITY

 

          WILLIAM WORDSWORTH ON IMMORTALITY

            Mortality is visible. Every creature who is born in this world dies within a destined span of time.  We don’t find such beings alive today as were born centuries ago. They left this world according to their limited existence.

           

            But in each one of us there is a constant desire for immortality. We fear death and want go on living as long as possible.

 

            Lord Krishna in the Hindu sacred book assures the readers that they have two sides to their life.  ‘the physical’  and ‘the spiritual.’ They have perishable bodies but immortal souls. When they die, the soul gains a new form and thus they go on living timelessly.

 

            There are several  poets like Ben Jonson ((1572-1637), Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) and William Wordsworth (1750-1830) who believe in immortality.

 

            Before you find below an extract from a Wordsworth’s poem, look at a couple of quotes:

 

            “All men’s souls are immortal, but the souls of the righteous ate both immortal and divine. ---Greek Philosopher Socrates (469?-399 B.C.).

 

            The spirit of man, which God inspired, cannot together perish with this corporeal clod. ---English poet John Milton (1608-1674).

 

            Wordsworth uses the word immortality to mean timelessness. In his  long poem Intimations of Immortality , he says that when a child is born, he feels that he has always been alive ---and he had an experience of living before his present life on this earth.  But as that  child passes  through the experience of continuous growth in this world, he forgets his divine beginning.

 

            Here is the first stanza of the poem which is adequate for our theme today:

 

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.

                                    *********

G. R. Kanwal

19 June 2025