My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold

-William Wordsworth

“My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold” is a poem written by a famous nature poet William Wordsworth. In this poem, the poet recollects/remembers an experience of his childhood days and gives his emotion and feelings a meaning. The poet also expresses his love towards nature. He feels great joy when he sees a rainbow in the sky. He used to enjoy a lot when he saw the rainbow in the sky in his childhood. He hopes he will still get pleasure at seeing the rainbow when he becomes old and if such feeling stops in the future he wishes to die.

                According to the poet, child is the father of man because childhood is the beginning of the manhood. In other words, the qualities of the grown up men are all derived from childhood. At last, the poet wishes that his remaining days would be bound by his love to nature.

                A paradox is a statement containing opposite ideas that make it unlikely although it may be true. The above statement is paradoxical in the sense that it contains opposite ideas for normal people. The child cannot be the father; he is the man who can be the father. But, the poet through his statement “The Child is the Father of the Man”,wants to say that childhood is the beginning of manhood. The thing we do and feel as children affect the way we feel when we are adults. The poet also wants to say that the present is the result of past.   

Analysis

Written on March 26, 1802 and published in 1807 as an epigraph to “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” this poem addresses the same themes found in “Tintern Abbey” and “Ode; Intimations of Immortality,” albeit in a much more concise way. The speaker explains his connection to nature, stating that it has been strong throughout his life. He even goes so far as to say that if he ever loses his connection he would prefer to die.

The seventh line of the poem is the key line: “The Child is father of the Man.” This line is often quoted because of its ability to express a complicated idea in so few words. The speaker believes (as explained in more detail in “Tintern Abbey”) that children are closer to heaven and God, and through God, nature, because they have recently come from the arms of God. The speaker understands the importance of staying connected to one’s own childhood, stating: “I could wish my days to be / Bound each to each by natural piety.”

Wordsworth chooses the word “piety” to express the bond he wishes to attain (and maintain) with his childhood self, because it best emphasizes the importance of the bond. His readers would have been accustomed to the idea of piety in the religious sense, and would thus have been able to translate the meaning behind the word to an understanding of the power of the bond Wordsworth hopes to attain.

The format of “My heart leaps up when I behold” gives the poem a somewhat staccato feeling and forces the reader to pause at important points in the poem. For instance, the two short lines of the poem are both quite significant. First, “A rainbow in the sky” harkens back to God’s promise to Noah signifying their bond, and foreshadows the speaker’s wish to be “Bound…by natural piety.” The sixth line, “Or let me die!” shows the strength of the speaker’s convictions.

IMPORTANT QUESTION

Explain the paradox in “The child is the father of the man”.

A paradox is a statement that seems to be absurd on contradictory but is or may be true. Generally we think the man is the father of the child because father is the source from which something originates. We know that the role of man is instrumental behind the birth of the child. A child can never produce a man, therefore the statement; “the child is the father of the man” is a paradoxical.

However the poet does not mean that a child can biologically produce a grown up man by the above statement he has expressed his opinion about the natural growth of a human being in which a child always develops into man. A man can never transform into child, child posses a seed like quality a seed develops into an autonomous tree and bears flowers and a fruit according to the seed similarly the man also inherits all the characteristics from its childhood a kind child manifests cruelty in its manhood. Thus, it can be said that “the child is the father of the man”.

 The statement also means present is the outcome of past the statement assured the poet about the continuity of the time and natural beauty. According to which if the rainbow is as beautiful as it was in the past, it will certainly remain equally beautiful in future too.