ished 1807

[Written at Town-end, Grasmere.--I.F.]

One of the "Poems referring to the Period of Childhood." In 1807 it was
No. 4 of the series called "Moods of my own Mind."--Ed.

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, 5
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man; [A]
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.

* * * * *

FOOTNOTE ON THE TEXT

[Footnote A: Compare Milton's phrase in 'Paradise Regained' (book iv. l.
220):

'The childhood shews the man,
As morning shews the day.'

Dryden's 'All for Love', act IV. scene I:

'Men are but children of a larger growth.'

And Pope's 'Essay on Man', Ep. iv. l. 175:

'The boy and man an individual makes.'

Also Chatterton's 'Fragment' (Aldine edition, vol. 1. p. 132):

'Nature in the infant marked the man.'

Ed.]

"March 26, 1802.--While I was getting into bed he" (W.) "wrote 'The
Rainbow.'"

"May 14th.--... William very nervous. After he was in bed, haunted
with altering 'The Rainbow.'"

(Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere Journal.) This poem was known familiarly
in the household as "The Rainbow," although not printed under that
title. The text was never changed.

In 'The Friend', vol. i. p. 58 (ed. 1818), Coleridge writes:

"Men laugh at the falsehoods imposed on them during their childhood,
because they are not good and wise enough to contemplate the past in
the present, and so to produce that continuity in their
self-consciousness, which Nature has made the law of their animal
life. Men are ungrateful to others, only when they have ceased to look
back on their former selves with joy and tenderness. They exist in
fragments."

He then quotes the above poem, and adds:

"I am informed that these lines have been cited as a specimen of
despicable puerility. So much the worse for the citer; not willingly
in _his_ presence would I behold the sun setting behind our
mountains.... But let the dead bury their dead! The poet sang for the
living.... I was always pleased with the motto placed under the figure
of the rosemary in old herbals:

'Sus, apage! Haud tibi spiro.'"

Compare the passage in 'The Excursion' (book ix. l. 36) beginning:

'... Ah! why in age
Do we revert so fondly, et