4. Wordsworth: The Visionary Gleam

In these lines from the ‘Immortality Ode’, Wordsworth formulates the sense of loss of vision which he saw as both a personal grief and also as an ubiquitous phenomenon or phrase in the mind's history. In his own ‘thought of grief’ there is also perhaps a sense of relief, which he proceeds to justify through his account of historical inevitability. Wordsworth and Coleridge both considered the intensity of poetic vision to be an aspect or manifestation of a universal experience of spiritual nourishment, beginning in infancy. Hence Wordsworth's description of the birth of the soul which follows in the ode, with its beautiful evocation of the newborn infant's radiance in its new heavenly home, not naked but clothed in clouds of glory: