Still reading Intimations of Immortality, and into the next section now. Read the whole poem here.
Now, while the birds thus sing a joyous song,
And while the young lambs bound
As to the tabor’s sound,
To me alone there came a thought of grief:
A timely utterance gave that thought relief,
And I again am strong:
The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep;
No more shall grief of mine the season wrong;
I hear the Echoes through the mountains throng,
The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep,
And all the earth is gay;
Land and sea
Give themselves up to jollity,
And with the heart of May
Doth every Beast keep holiday;—
Thou Child of Joy,
Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy Shepherd-boy.
The timing is interesting in this poem. We began in the present, looking back to a golden past (‘there was a time…it is not now as it hath been of yore’). It’s hard to know, now, as we begin this third stanza, where the opening word, ‘Now’ places us. Has any time passed between the opening of the poem and this moment? Or is Wordsworth grounding himself (and us) in one specific – present – ‘now’ moment? He is out-of-doors, in the fields, which may be where he was when he started…or that may have been ages ago. Then I wonder – has all this (thought) happened in an instant, is there no time here? The poem seems to be mapping out, putting into slow words, a feeling that anyone might have, and which – if you are not a poet might well pass, nameless, unexpressed, hardly known. How do such feelings, thoughts, fit with time? They often seem instanteous.
But to go back to the poem…’Now’ puts us in a definite place in time, when something extraordinary has happened /is happening right now:
To me alone there came a thought of grief:
A timely utterance gave that thought relief,
And I again am strong:
So: he had the feeling (though I’m wrong in calling it that, because Wordsworth calls it ‘a thought’) then said something (‘a timely utterance’) then felt better (‘and I again am strong.’). This is a pattern many of us will recognise.
But what was it, ‘the ‘utterance’? Have we had it already in the poem? I don’t think so, but let’s go back and see;
Perhaps the ‘utterance’ is simply that last line, ‘That there hath past away a glory from the earth’. I suddenly notice the structure Wordsworth is giving this poem – this account of the working of his feelings, mind, thought, self;
Stanza One – sense of some glory lost
Stanza Two – remember certain other, more specific glories (moon, rose, heavens, sunshine) and calibrate one’s feelings – yes, they are good but still something lost.
Stanza Three – note how saying something, getting it into words, ‘an utterance’, has changed the way I feel.
Having found strength in saying something, in getting his thought into words, Wordsworth is strong enough again to look up and see that world, which suddenly feels ‘glorious’ again;
The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep;
No more shall grief of mine the season wrong;
I hear the Echoes through the mountains throng,
The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep,
And all the earth is gay;
Land and sea
Give themselves up to jollity,
And with the heart of May
Doth every Beast keep holiday;—
Thou Child of Joy,
Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy Shepherd-boy.
Something has shifted, those cataracts blowing their trumpets are quite glorious, annoucing something, and they are loud, they are ‘trumpets’! Wordsworth now seems in a different relation to his own feelings. Whatever the glory was at the beginning is still gone, but at least now he seems able to be glad of what he can see and hear and feel. The shouts of the Shepherd boy bring ‘joy’, not the opening sense of dislocation.
For me this is about a kind of readjustment you have to make – repeatedly – in life. Something is lost, you feel the loss, and the pain of loss is sometimes overwhelming. You lose more than the original loss with the loss of your capacity to feel joy. Over time the loss doesn’t go away, but you recalibrate and somehow that allows ‘joy’ to re-enter your universe.
readerjanedavis 
Your posts on this poem have really got me thinking hard. This idea of the loss and rediscovery of joy (or something that will do in its place) has got something twitching on the edge of my awareness. I think it’s another poem that gave me a similar feeling….struggling to think what it might be.
I look forward to these early morning work-outs!
Thank you Heather – work outs, yes, thats exactly how I think of them!