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.
Credits
William Wordsworth was an English Romantic poet whose work helped launch the Romantic Age in English literature. Written in 1802, this nine-line poem contains one of Wordsworth's most quoted lines — "The Child is Father of the Man" — a phrase he later used as an epigraph to his monumental autobiographical work, Ode: Intimations of Immortality.
