Analysis of the poetry 'Rainbow'

It was a task given by our visiting faculty. and i performed very well.

1. Prepared by - Milan Parmar “My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold” By- William Wordsworth

2. Historical B ackground Most famous work of William Wordsworth ‘The Lyrical Ballads’ published in 1798. It was more popular in America than in England . This poem was composed in 1802, at that time W ordsworth was at Dove cottage, Grasmere. It was published as part of Poems, in Two Volumes in 1807. Wordsworth didn’t give the title to this poem. So generally the poem known as “my heart leaps up Or The Rainbow.”

3. My heart leaps up When I behold, A rainbow in the sky: So was it when my life began; So is now I am a man; So be it when I shall grow old, Or let me die ! The child is the father of the man; And I wish my days to be Bound each to each by natural piety. - William W ordsworth

4. Let’s see some images

5. The opening lines of the poem ‘My heart Leaps up’ creates tension in the readers mind, but the tension get resolved by the next line ‘A rainbow in the sky.’ The word behold means to see. These lines of the poem are very appropriate to his definition of the poetry. The word ‘Heart leaps’ up is the example of personification. The next two lines of the poem creates sense of the time as So was it when my life began; So is now I am a man; So be it when I shall grow old, Or let me die !

6. in these lines we can see that the speaker has had this feeling about rainbows ever since his life begun, which takes us back to his childhood. In the next line he takes us back to present. He still has the same kind of excitement, even though he is mature now, but he is just kid at heart. In the previous two lines he talk about past and present and he is even sure about future that he will have the same kind of feeling for rainbow. And the last line ‘ Or let me die ! ’ shows that if he lost that excitement and thrill towards rainbow he would want to die. For him life without the capacity to appreciate nature’s beauty would not be worth living.

7. “ The child is the father of the man;” This line is an example of paradox- a contradictory statement. A child could father a man, right ? The sentence may be looked as philosophical one. H e wants to say that his childhood formed who he is an adult. His childhood gave birth to his adult man or mature man. Not only for him but it has universal appeal. “And I wish my days to be Bound each to each by natural piety .” here one more time we confused by the word piety as it has some religious connotation, one who staunchly follows the religion. But here according to my opinion here he doesn’t mean a day as a literal day but his all life, and he wants to pass all the days to be tied together by reverence and piety towards nature.

8. The rainbow which thrills the speaker throughout his life, is an natural piety, his sense of joy and wonders at natural world. That sense is what he hopes to experience for rest of his days, his times on earth

9. Some comments by Critics To Harold Bloom “the rainbow as a symbol of the survival of his poetic gift, just as the rainbow symbolized to Noah the survival of the mankind” William Blake disliked Wordsworth use of the phrase like “Natural piety.” Blake believed that man naturally impious and therefore Wordsworth’s phrase contradicted itself.

10. Thank you….