Wordsworth's Ode: Intimations of Immortality

After today's class discussion referring to Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality" I found it in an old Brit Lit book. Because today we were talking about remembering, I looked for the relevance to this within Wordsworth's ode. In 1843 Wordsworth wrote a letter to Isabella Fenwick saying, "In later periods of life I have deplored, as we have all reason to do, a subjugation of an opposite character, and have rejoiced over the remembrances, as expressed in:
For those obstinate questions
Of sense and outward things
Fallings from us, vanishings
(lines 141-43 - all about getting older and wiser)

Wordsworth goes on to say:
"To that dreamlike vividness and splendor which invest objects of sight in childhood, everyone, I believe, if he could look back, could bear testimony...in the Poem regarded it as presumptive evidence of a prior state of existence."

The introduction of the Ode begins:
The Child is Father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound to each by natural piety
(I think this speaks to the cyclical nature of existence)

Wordsworth was called the "poet of the remembrances of things past."

Wordsworth's recounting of the time of childhood, loss of innocence, and looking back at youth seems much like the climb on the ladder to knowledge and wisdom that we discussed today in class.

And to make up for my slights on dead, old, white men, I have to say some of my favorite lines of poetry, and the most beautiful, were written by Wordsworth in this Ode:

Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be,
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering;
In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind.

I do appreciate, at least to some degree, the shoulders of the men we stand upon.