does he realized this and by this time it is too late, for he has already lost most of his childhood spirit and gleam. The child is divine because he remembers the glory of Heaven, and as the child grows into a man he “fades into the light of common day”(1482). The child’s virtue that he used to have has slowly dissipated with age and experience. The adult looking back at his childhood can no longer see nature and his surroundings as he did when he was a child; his perception has evolved with his maturation. The speaker rationalizes his development but does not understand it fully, he recognizes his loss of sight but is unable to do anything about it. His blindness is inevitable. The fourth stanza concludes with the climax of the Ode.Whither is fled the visionary gleam? Where is it now, the glory and the dream?The first four stanzas express the joy of childhood and reveal the sense loss he feels when he can no longer experience the celestial light, while the remaining seven stanzas attempt to reconcile the speaker’s loss with two conflicting responses.The first response beginning in the fifth stanza the speaker declares, “our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting”(1482). This coincides with Wordsworth’s belief that “our life on earth is a dim shadow of an earlier, purer existence, dimly recalled in childhood and then forgotten in the process of growing up”(Davis). "Heaven," he says, "lies about us in our infancy!" (1483). As the child matures into young adulthood and into manhood, the celestial gleam fades. In the sixth stanza, the speaker says that earthly pleasures conspire to make man “forget the glories he hath known, and that imperial palace whence he came”(1483).In stanzas six, seven and eight the poet compares the growing child to a petty “little actor who cons another part…as if his whole vocation were endless imitation” (1483). The poet seems sa...
