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Lexico

  • Last seen on Apr 23 9:51 AM 2007. Member since April 22, 2007.
  • I am a 46 year old person
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  • on The Rainbow by William Wordsworth, on April 22, 2007

    On the Child being father of the Man

    On the Child being father of the Man

    Hello, Mazen.

    I think your question is an important one; I myself have been bewildered by that line ever since I first read the poem when I was 13. Surprisingly, line 7, "The Child is father of the Man," is also the most often quoted line from this poem; yet it somehow remains impenetrable to me, sticking out of the rest of the poem in tone as an abberation departing from the natural, non-expository language of the poem.

    What might have caused the writer to insert or to leave the anomaly? Why did he not simply write, "So was it when my life began; / So is it now I am a man; / Should I go blind to the rainbow of old, / Through the Child's eyes, let me see!"?

    I can think of three factors:

    1. He could have written about the naturally diminishing intuition, imagination, and feelings in response to sensation of natural phenomena such as the rainbow, the natural weakening of perceptiveness that accompanies aging, but he chose to keep to the romanticist notion of the supremacy of intuition, imagination, and feeling, which should stay as constant characteristics of the individual.

    2. Romanticist poets held the idea that the primitive man and the child, being closer to nature and their natural state in which they were brought into the world compared to the "civilized man" (in terms of phylogeny) and the "grown-up man" (in terms of ontogeny), are the most pure, unadulterated, unaffected beings; hence the apex of development is supposedly reached during savagery or childhood after which humans experience a general decay in, and loss of, the ideal qualities that characterize being human according to Romanticists.

    3. Faced with the obvious clash of logic, Wordsworth seems to have inserted a line, line 7, which betrayed his greatest fear: that he might some day lose the perceptive powers of the child, but that he must be reminded of the vitality of the ideal man only by inward introspection/remembrance and/or outward observation of the child-like state.

    It has been said that poetic language, though it follows the rules and patterns of natural language for the most part, departs from it occasionally by intention, which has the effect of distancing the reader from what is familiar so as to bring about novel discoveries and insights that had not been generally possible prior to the composition/reading of the poem. The result might be a greater or less distancing from what we customarily perceive as real.

    In the case of the Rainbow poem, the effect seems to be ambiguous. Faced with the conflicting internal logic, I do think line 7 is discordant with the rest of the poem. Wordsworth should have either reworked the rest of the poem or done away with line 7. All things considered, I think the Rainbow poem should do fine without line 7, which, incidentally, could stand alone as a 1-liner, or serve as the seed for another poetic piece, to great effect nonetheless, either way.