The original text reads:
my heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old.
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
and I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.
( Wordsworth, Poetical Works, ed Hutchinson, rev. de Selincourt, p. 62)
Wordsworth believed that the heightened emotions of childhood and youth could not long survive middle age. Ode: Intimations of Immortality (1805-6) marks the passing of what he terms the 'visionary gleam'. From 1815 the poem carried the present title and motto poem:
Ode:
Intimations of Immortality from
Recollections of Early Childhood
'The Child is Father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.'
In the introduction to Ode Wordsworth refers to 'that dreamlike vividness and splendour which invest objects of sight in childhood,' and Ruskin discusses the notion in similar terms in Praeterita (1885-89):
On the journey of 1837, when I was eighteen, I felt for the last time, the pure childish love of nature which Wordsworth so idly takes for an intimation of immortality... It is a feeling only possible to youth, for all care, regret, or knowledge of evil destroys it; and it requires also the full sensibility of nerve and blood, the conscious strength of heart and hope... In myself, it has always been quite exclusively confined to wild, that is to say, wholly natural places, and especially to scenery animated by streams, or by the sea. The sense of the freedom, spontaneous, unpolluted power of nature was essential in it... now, looking back from 1886 to that book shore of 1837, when I could see the whole of my youth, I find myself in nothing whatsoever changed. Some of me is dead, more of me stronger; I have learned a few things, forgotten many; in the total of me, I am but the same youth, disappointed and rheumatic ( Works, 35.218-9). (See Ruskin and Wordsworth)