The child knows more than the man will ever know. He is the genius that we extol, worship, and study in classes. He is the answer to all the questions about life that we ask. There is nothing more pure and unfiltered than a child. This, however, fades over time. We should take after children and how they can find happiness in whatever is around them.

This line is reminiscent of Friedrich Schiller's "Ode to Joy," which calls the title character a "Daughter of Elysium." Both poems, as part of their respective country's Romantic movements, exhibit a great appreciation for nature and its connection to our positive sentiments.

Children are literally compared to different creatures living and existing in different dimensions.

In the end, it's all about appreciating the small things. Finding your own way in life.

This is the key theme of the entire poem, the whole message that the speaker is trying to tell us.

Although nothing may bring us back to the pure state of nature, and the divine wonder that we used to see in everything around us slowly fades away, we won't grieve or be depressed. Instead, we'll find satisfaction and fulfillment in what we have, the lessons we learn from suffering, and our fundamental connection to the nature around us.

The glory of the divine is part of our life, and, like the sea, even if we're far inland, we can still make it out on the horizon, and hear the waves rolling.

No evil in this world can completely rid us of our connection to the divine. Even if we can't see it as clearly as we did when we were children, we were born from it, and nothing can take that away from us. We can find solace in this fact.

The speaker expresses appreciation that, even though the current condition of mature mankind is deplorable since it's so far removed from the glory of heaven, at least there's still some remnants left from our childhood in each of us that we can appreciate.

The speaker here asks why children want to grow up so fast, losing their divine vision and condition faster and faster. He asserts that children possess a sort of goodness that adults spend their entire working hours looking for. Why, then, do they want to give it up so fast? Is there any way that we as a species can release our burden and return to the way we were as children? It's the question that Rousseau begs of us to ask ourselves.

But after the child enjoys his life when he's young, he begins to fall into the trap of societal existence that everybody else is in. He begins to mimic what the adults around him are doing "as if his whole vocation were endless imitation." Life becomes like more of a process than a freeing experience.

Rousseau suggests solutions for this type of "corruption" in his Emile, where he outlines exactly what kind of education would lead to the most good person growing up.

Nature and Earth are portrayed in this section as simultaneously our prison warden and our mother. While Earth has many glories that we can see and appreciate, we're also trapped because by the time we grow up, we can't witness or experience the glory of the divine place that we come from. Life is both a gift and a curse.

Heaven, and the true beauty of the earth around us, is very present at our birth. However, as we grow up, we begin to lose part of that natural purity and wonder. As adolescents and young adults, we are still "Nature's priest," but as time goes on, all of it "fade[s] into the light of common day."

This is another callback to the epigraph of the poem, where it is stated that "the child is the father of the man." The child defines what the man becomes later in life, but also, the child is superior and more in touch with his divine origins than the grown man will ever be.

The speaker posits a theory of what happens at our birth. He thinks that we come from a divine origin, of which we still embody when we come to Earth. We still have "trailing clouds of glory" as children from our inception from God himself.

This theme, too, is seen in Rousseau's Emile, in the section "Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar." In this controversial work, Rousseau asserts that God is part of nature and we can find him by listening to a voice in our souls, instead of appealing to a central church. Equating God with the nature around us is a central pillar of Romantic poetry.

The speaker doesn't deny how much joy is in the nature around him. He recognizes it all. He even enjoys it to an extent, and feels the joy with the world! However, one tree, one flower out of the many constantly remind him that he sees the world through some kind of veil or sunglasses; although he can still see the wonder of the world, it's not in an unfiltered way. He wonders where the "glory and the dream" from his childhood had gone; where did that extra thing that showed him the divine glory of the Earth go?

Rousseau's answer, of course, would be that society and other people have taken it from us. By normalizing our existence depending on other people and material goods, we've lost sight of what should be truly important to us.

The key line here is "No more shall grief of mine the season wrong," which establishes the idea that man owes something to the nature that he was created in. By wallowing in self-pity and depressed thoughts, he is actively offending the greatness of nature. It is unnatural to be so unhappy. The speaker, like in Dejection, calls upon the nature around him to basically fix him and make give him back part of the innocence that he had since lost from his childhood. These are the passions that Rousseau highlights throughout his works; the natural emotions and impressions that one gets from nature, not the negative ones from the society around oneself.

NB: "cataract" is another word for "large waterfall."

Clearly, the loss of beauty in the eyes of the speaker is not due to nature itself becoming less beautiful. He extolls the rainbows, the roses, the moon, and sunshine as splendid, beautiful, lovely, and fair. The corrosion, then, must take place in the speaker himself, since "where'er [he] go[es]," the glory of the earth seems to have passed away.

As he grows up, the speaker realizes that the glow of wonder that surrounded everything he looked at as a child is gone. Wherever he looks, he can no longer find the same stimulation that the world gave him as a youth. This, too, is a common experience; as people are exposed to greater and greater degrees to the corrupt society and its values, they start to lose their purity and innocence.

The epigraph for this poem is taken from the first three lines of another of Wordsworth's own poems, namely, "My Heart Leaps Up." It sets the tone for the rest of the work, with the line "The child is the father of the man" describing how people are shaped by their childhoods more than anything else.

Rousseau clearly would concur, as his Emile explains the importance of educating a child during their formative years (specifically, before the age of 12) so that they grow up to be good people.

The speaker describes a time during his youth when he saw everything as if it had a certain divine glow about it, a certain liveliness about the world. We would describe that now with the phrase "childlike wonder," and it's an experience that many share. The state of the child is the one in which people are least corrupted by the false ideals of society, and are thus closest to the state of nature that Rousseau advocates for.

This entire stanza (VII) could be a work of art by itself. The speaker's description of the ever-changing wind, personifying it in a truly fantastic and vivid manner, is incredible. It is almost as if I were in his place, watching the wind blow and feeling its rush on my skin.

I, for one, would bee incredibly honored to make a friend who can say something like this about me.

Throughout this stanza, the speaker wishes for his Lady's happiness, hoping that she will find the joy in life that he has struggled to find in the past. The tone is one of hope, both for his Lady (which he clearly expresses in this final stanza) and, indirectly, for himself, since he is now well enough mentally to begin caring about the well-being of other people.

This also hints at what Rousseau thinks about the relationships that we should be forming in life. Nothing that the speaker says about his Lady seems possessive or is about him; it's more about his wishes that his Lady have her own pure relationship with nature. Wouldn't this be a great example of a good relationship between people to Rousseau? A relationship where, instead of constantly thinking about what benefits another person can bring to you, you can genuinely wish for their happiness whether it is found with you or without?

The wind shifts in nature, and the speaker seems to be immediately in tune with the changes. He describes the new wind as telling "another tale, with sounds less deep and loud" that even includes some elements of "delight." Now, this is a clear shift in tone from the desperation found in the earlier stanzas; the speaker seems to be finding some happiness, or joy, in the world around him again.

Thomas Otway was a Restoration-era dramatist whose Venice Preserv'd was considered a masterpiece of literature both then and now.

Besides the obvious meaning of these lines, where the speaker personifies the wind as an Actor and a Poet whose works are wild and unpredictable, a wonder in and of itself, there is a deeper connection to Rousseau here. Rousseau believed that many forms of the arts were good ways for us to reclaim our humanity and connect with our souls, an idea that he expounded upon in his First Discourse.

The speaker compares the wind to a "mad lutanist," whose presence might be more suitable in a lonely house or a witches' home or a bare crag. He cries out to the wind, extolling its mercurial, crazy movements. What's key here, though, is that he doesn't seem to be begging it to stop. The speaker just seems to immerse himself in the feeling of the wind, describing it with vivid imagery.

Is this part of his "imagination" coming back, allowing him to reclaim his natural relationship with nature?

The speaker recounts how he tried to engage in "abstruse research" in order to stop his natural feeling of pain, but eventually what he used as a distraction from the pain became a way of life, and he is no longer able to feel the real feelings that he felt before.

From the soul comes the bright brilliance of nature.

The sky being a "peculiar tint of yellow green" is a sign of a tornado or a violent storm coming, according to modern science. The speaker is stating how he recognizes that a huge, earthshattering storm is coming, but even that is not enough to make him feel anything but dejected. His depression is a deep, dark hole that not even a storm can lift him out of.

This epigraph is taken from the Ballad of Sir Patrick Spence, a popular, oft-anthologized Scottish Ballad. It tells the tale of a king sending the titular talented sailor on an errand to Norway, during which the sailor notices signs that indicate that a large storm is coming. He accepts his duty in anguish, knowing that the trip may very likely be his last. Just as he predicted, a large winter storm overpowers his ship and he and his crew succumb to the powers of nature.

Coleridge uses this reference to set the tone for his Ode. It highlights the part of the ballad in which the sailor's fear is at its peak, and emphasizes how much dominance the power of nature has over mankind (a theme prevalent in Rousseau); even the most talented sailor in all the lands cannot face the forces of nature head-on and emerge victorious.

An Aeolian lute is an instrument situated in the outdoors that makes noise as the wind passes through its strings. The speaker implies that the winds of the storm that are coming will be far "busier" or stronger than the ones that "moan and rake" on the strings of the lute.

The "grief" that the speaker of the poem describes here is a particular one; unlike many other pains, it does not come with a sharp "pang," but instead is a constant "void, dark, and drear." Rather than an illness or an instance of injury, the state of dejection as described by Coleridge is long-lasting and constantly cuts down who we are.

This characterizes man in the state of society according to Rousseau. His statement of "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains" in The Social Contract defines man not only politically, but socially and emotionally. Man cannot escape the reality of the human condition that results in the dejection that Coleridge describes as long as they exist in the state of society, which is home to "crimes, wars, and murders... horrors and misfortunes."

And here is where Rousseau's man collapses, giving in to the whims of an uncaring society. The speaker says that he does not even care if said afflictions of depression simply robbed him of his mirth, but they're so much worse in that they cripple him, taking away the humanity that nature gave him at his birth. He no longer possesses the ability to find joy in grief, happiness in darkness. He loses a part of himself permanently.

The speaker recalls a time in his life in the past where he felt practically invincible. All of the distress that he felt simply acted as a plaything for his unbridled joy, and misfortunes were just the ingredients of daydreams.

This is Rousseau's man in the state of nature; we cannot feel depressed or too terrible about our lives since there is nothing else to compare it to. There are no luxuries of our own making and artificial possessions to make us feel insecure or "not enough," there is only us and the world and what we made of it. Doesn't this sound like a true utopia? It's not that sadness or bad things are nonexistent; the purity of our souls just prevents the bad things from cutting us down to mere shells of our true selves.

Another reference here to the degenerate masses of society, members of which cannot ever feel the pure joy described by the speaker. They are far too removed from Rousseau's state of nature to ever feel something as real as said joy.

Being in society fundamentally makes us sensual and proud, thus prohibiting us from reaching our true personhood.

According to the speaker, joy is the "music in the soul," but it cannot be experienced by just anyone; only the "pure" can feel said joy, and thus only the pure can feel that raw, natural connection to the world that the masses of society cannot. Even the pure can't always feel this natural joy, for they only feel it "in their purest hour."

The speaker seems to be setting a very high bar for what it takes to see the goodness of the world for what it is, suggesting that it is only available to the purest of the pure souls. This mirrors Rousseau's idea of perfectibility; the potential for it is present in each and every person, but only the select few ever reach its heights.

The speaker here asserts that the experience of life is truly what we ourselves make of it. We are the lens through which life is experienced, and without us, the universe would be no more than a backdrop to a story that will never be told. We ourselves dress nature in a beautiful wedding garment, and we ourselves dress her in a dark, dreadful shroud.

These lines reflects Rousseau's humanist philosophy; although he spites the society that man has established, he truly believes in the purest relationship being that between man and nature. We are what defines the world around us, which in turn gives us the power (if we can only recognize that we have it) to make the world a beautiful place.

Here, the speaker understands that the emotions and stimulation that he is seeking cannot come from any external experience anymore, but must come from himself.

Rousseau agrees. His proposed state of nature, during which mankind was fulfilling its role as asocial, "noble savage"-like creatures, might not be possible anymore, but we can still find remnants of the natural state of mankind by listening to our soul. This idea is expounded upon in Rousseau's Profession of the Savoyard Vicar, where the title figure encourages the reader to stay true to the passions of his soul, which is where he will find the true God and his calling.

The speaker understands the great beauty of the sight that he lays his gaze on, but the beauty does not make him feel anything. He is so far removed from the natural state because of the depressive effect that society has had on him that he cannot appreciate the amazing scene before him.

This is Rousseau's greatest fear: that we as a species will submit ourselves to the artificial passions of society to such an extent that we will no longer be able to appreciate the natural passions.

The speaker asserts that his dejection will not go away no matter how hard he tries. He cannot talk about it, sigh about it, or cry about it to lessen the pain. Again, this is what Rousseau considers to be the worst state of man in society: constantly at the mercy of your emotions, unable to escape or find meaning in your suffering.

The speaker here calls on the very thing that he associated with dread and destruction (the weather) to come, hoping that it will help distract him from his "dull pain." This claim is a testament to the corrosive nature of the human condition as it exists today, and is especially relevant now, as rates of depression and anxiety are at an all-time high. The speaker seeks what he knows will be a destructive event, if only it makes him feel something, anything at all.

Immediately, the speaker likens his own situation to that of Sir Patrick Spence; he claims that if the author of aforementioned ballad in face was "weather-wise," the weather where he is as well will soon turn to storm. In this way, the speaker immediately sets the tone for a dark, dreary, dreadful narrative.