21 pages 42 minutes read

William Wordsworth

My Heart Leaps Up

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1807

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Themes

Memory

Wordsworth depended on memory of past events and experiences to nourish his life as an adult and also to fuel his poetry. Many of these memories were of his childhood and adolescence, when he reveled in exploring England’s Lake District.

In the poem, memory first surfaces in Line 3, “So it was when my life began.” Here, Wordsworth refers to the explosion of joy he felt when he caught sight of a rainbow as a boy. Wordsworth loves that this experience has become much more than a memory. Because he continues to have the same jolt of awe at the sight of rainbows as an adult, he cherishes the connection with his childhood innocence, youthful insight, and uncomplicated awe at the beauties of nature. He values the continuity of the past with the present—so much so that the imagined loss of that continuity of memory prompts him to demand death (“Or let me die!” [Line 6]).

The feeling that the past was somehow always better can be felt in much of Wordsworth’s poetry, even though he also tries hard to convince himself that what he has gained is at least equal to what he has lost. In this poem, memory of the past is reassuring because his present experience as an adult (in this instance, of the rainbow) is just as enriching and joyful as it was when he was much younger.

Related Titles

By William Wordsworth

Study Guide
Guide cover image

A Complaint

William Wordsworth

Plot Summary
Guide cover placeholder

A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal

William Wordsworth

Study Guide
Guide cover image

Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802

William Wordsworth

Study Guide
Guide cover image

Daffodils

William Wordsworth

Study Guide
Guide cover image

I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

William Wordsworth

Study Guide
Guide cover image

Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey

William Wordsworth

Study Guide
Guide cover image

London, 1802

William Wordsworth

Plot Summary
Guide cover placeholder

Lyrical Ballads

William Wordsworth, Michael Schmidt, Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Study Guide
Guide cover image

Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood

William Wordsworth

Study Guide
Guide cover image

Preface to Lyrical Ballads

William Wordsworth

Study Guide
Guide cover image

She Dwelt Among The Untrodden Ways

William Wordsworth

Study Guide
Guide cover image

She Was a Phantom of Delight

William Wordsworth

Plot Summary
Guide cover placeholder

The Prelude

William Wordsworth, Jonathan Wordsworth, M.H. Abrams, Stephen Gill

Study Guide
Guide cover image

The Solitary Reaper

William Wordsworth

Study Guide
Guide cover image

The World is Too Much with Us

William Wordsworth

Study Guide
Guide cover image

The World's Best Poetry, Volume 5 (Part 1): Nature

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Mary Mapes Dodge, George Darley, William Motherwell, George Eliot, John Milton, Clement Scott, George Arnold, Robert Browning, James Thomson, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., William Ernest Henley, Denis Florence MacCarthy, William Cullen Bryant, John Sterling, John Clare, Izaak Walton, Matthew Arnold, James Whitcomb Riley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Edward Jenner, William Gilmore Simms, Charles G.D. Roberts, Henry Timrod, William Cox Bennett, Bliss Carman, Archibald Lampman, George MacDonald, William Shakespeare, Matthias Claudius, Alexander Hume, James Beattie, Thomas Gray, Craig Franklin, John Cunningham, Norman Rowland Gale, James Gates Percival, Joel Benton, Thomas Heywood, Richard Hovey, Anna Boynton Averill, Charles Sangster, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Dora Hill Read Goodale, Joanna Baillie, Thomas Nashe, Henry Wotton, Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, John Howard Bryant, John G.C. Brainard, Thomas Campbell, Eduard Mörike, Algernon Charles Swinburne, William Morris, David Gray, William Cowper, W.B. Yeats, William Prescott Foster, Richard Henry Dana Jr., Thomas Carew, William Howitt, John B. Tabb, Jones Very, Henry Fielding, Barry Cornwall, Samuel Daniel, John Keats, Homer, George Francis Savage-Armstrong, John Leyden, Tomas Peter, Thomas Hood, Philip Pendleton Cooke, Richard Watson Gilder, Ethelwyn Wetherald, William Wordsworth, Euripides, Joseph Blanco White, Edmund Clarence Stedman, G.W. Pettee, Robert Tannahill, Ebenezer Jones, John Chalkhill, Abraham Cowley, Paul Hamilton Hayne, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, James Russell Lowell, Andrew Marvell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Lisle Bowles, Leanne Yau, Charles Harpur, Sonia, Edith M. Thomas, Charles Kingsley, Lord Byron, Ebenezer Elliott, Benjamin Franklin Taylor, Richard Henry Horne, Jason in Panama, Walter Scott, Hartley Coleridge, Duncan Campbell Scott, Alfred Tennyson, John Davies, Aristophanes, Charles G. Eastman, Elizabeth Roberts MacDonald, William Browne, Robert Burns, Samuel Rogers, Ludwig H.C. Hölty, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, Celia Laighton Thaxter

Study Guide
Guide cover image

To the Skylark

William Wordsworth

Plot Summary
Guide cover placeholder

We are Seven

William Wordsworth