My Heart Leaps Up

“My heart leaps up” (Line 1) is an idiom not meant to be taken literally but expresses a truth: When a person is suddenly filled with joy, their heart—often thought of as the seat of emotions—feels like it is rising upward. The converse may also be true, as the expression “my heart sank” demonstrates.

The cause of the sudden elevation in the speaker’s mood is the sight of a “rainbow in the sky” (Line 2). This commonplace natural phenomenon—a beautiful multicolored arc stretching across the sky—can appear suddenly, as if from nowhere, capturing the imagination of the observer. Often, the sight of a rainbow produces wonder and even awe—a feeling Wordsworth emphasizes.

Wordsworth often celebrated his own past; he was especially drawn to his childhood, when his love of nature was purest and most uncomplicated. In Line 3, he looks back to these early days “when life began”; he remembers how much his heart jumped then whenever he saw a rainbow. He still reacts the same way in the present, “now [he is] a man” (Line 4). Despite the many transformations that come with the growth from boy to man, Wordsworth finds the continuity of his response to rainbows in particular and nature in general reassuring. As an adult, he still feels the same wonder he felt as a child; he has not lost the capacity to feel awe about natural phenomena. In Line 5, he looks to the future, hoping that "when [he] shall grow old," he will still respond to the rainbow in the same way that he has always done.

The pacific nature of the continuity between youth, maturity, and old age the poem has drawn is dramatically interrupted with vehemence when the speaker demands death rather than the cessation of the familiar feeling of sublimity in the face of the rainbow: “Or let me die!” (Line 6), he exclaims, with the indent and the exclamation mark working to sever the peaceful flow of the previous lines. The precious connection with nature, symbolized by the rainbow, means so much to him that without it he feels there would be no point in going on living without it.

Line 7 contains one of the most famous phrases that Wordsworth ever wrote—a paradoxical expression that has since become an idiom. In describing the way that early experiences play a key role in shaping the self, the speaker claims that “[t]he Child is father of the Man” (Line 7). The phrase is at first glance illogical—children cannot be parents by definition. However, this biological metaphor is a way of once again connecting times of life—its seemingly contradictory strangeness is necessary to smooth over the disruption of Line 6. The speaker argues that a man is the product of his childhood—childhood is not simply something to be outgrown and forgotten. In Lines 8-9, he offers a wish for his future; he wants all his days to unfold with the same joyful connection to nature, without any break at all, with the common element in all of them being an attitude of “natural piety” (Line 9). This suggests reverence and trust in nature as a moral presence to which one owes respect and even duty.

Wordsworth emphasizes “natural piety” (Line 9) rather than religious piety even though he would have been aware that in the Book of Genesis from the Old Testament of the Bible, the rainbow represents God’s promise to never again flood the Earth after Noah’s ordeal. Wordsworth instead imbues the rainbow with personal associations, eliding the obvious biblical reference his readers would have seen in favor of the individualistic deism that inspired other Romantic poets to come.