21 pages • 42-minute read
My Heart Leaps Up
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Symbols & Motifs
The Rainbow
The rainbow has many different shades of meaning in the poem. On one level, this phenomenon symbolizes the wonder of nature in all its many beautiful manifestations. While commonplace and frequently observed, the rainbow never loses its specialness because of its iconic shape and coloring—and because its appearance is unpredictable. In the poem, the speaker holds on to the awed delight that rainbows inspired in him as a child, treasuring their similar effect on him in adulthood. The speaker’s heart “lifts up” in response to nature’s sublimity.
For Wordsworth’s contemporaries, the rainbow’s biblical meaning would also have been top of mind. In the Old Testament Book of Genesis, after wiping out all of humanity with a flood save Noah on his Ark, God creates a rainbow as a symbolic promise never to destroy the inhabitants of the Earth in this way again. The rainbow is thus connected with divine grace, safety, and the continuity of the human race—something Wordsworth evokes in the parallel constructions in Lines 3-5, which echo biblical commandments.
Continuity
The continuity of human life in past, present, and future is a leading idea in the poem. This continuity is affirmed and anticipated. The speaker does not want to experience any radical breaks or discontinuities in his life. The thought of such a thing, in relation to his joyful relations with nature, makes him demand death: “Or let me die!” (Line 6).
Continuity is referenced in the poem not just directly, when the speaker describes himself experiencing the same response to rainbows that he felt as a child and hopes to as an old man. Wordsworth also builds the idea of continuity into the poem’s two striking metaphors. “The Child is the father of the Man” (Line 7) links continuity with the biological process of procreation. Nothing can disrupt the fact of paternity, so this paradoxical declaration declares that the relationship between young and mature selves is unbreakable. Similarly, the second metaphor positions the inescapable flow of time itself as the bridge between childhood and adulthood. The speaker sees his life as a cause-and-effect chain of days inexorably linked together and hopes that the rest of his life continues in the same way: “I could wish my days to be / Bound each to each by natural piety” (Lines 8-9).
Reverence
A reverential attitude toward nature as a whole is another motif in the poem. The Romantics believed strongly in the idea of the sublime—they valued the experience of being emotionally and psychologically subsumed by something perceived to be an overwhelming power. Typically, this kind of power was seen in nature, the contemplation and veneration of which was often assumed to bring on the feeling of the sublime.
In this poem, Wordsworth’s almost automatic response toward the natural world is joy and wonder. Rainbows are hardly an uncommon event, but he has never stopped reacting to them with the physical sensation of uplift that gives the poem its title. Reverence is implied throughout this short lyric and becomes explicit in the last line in the phrase “natural piety” (Line 9), a phrase that has two meanings. The first is that religious faith in the face of phenomena like rainbows is “natural”—that is, innate and universal to mankind. The second is that the kind of “piety” Wordsworth most values and hopes to retain is one toward nature rather than the dogmatic faith of the Church. His deism here is of a kind similar to that of the founders of the United States.
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