ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses some stanza in the poem 'Intimations of Immortality'. In this poem, the author proclaims that human life is merely 'a sleep and a forgetting', that human beings dwell in a purer, more glorious realm before they enter the earth. 'Heaven', he says, 'lies about us in our infancy!' The children still retain some memory of that place, which causes their experience of the earth to be suffused with its magic, but as the baby passes through boyhood and young adulthood and into manhood, he sees that magic die. The author also experiences a surge of joy at the thought that his memories of childhood will always grant him a kind of access to that lost world of instinct, innocence and exploration. The noisy years seem moments in the being of the eternal silence: truths that wake, to perish never; which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour.
