My Heart Leaps Up, also known as The Rainbow, is a poem by the British Romantic Poet

Romantic poetry

Romanticism, a philosophical, literary, artistic and cultural era which began in the mid/late-1700s as a reaction against the prevailing Enlightenment ideals of the day , also influenced poetry...

 William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth was a major English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with the 1798 joint publication Lyrical Ballads....

. Noted for its simplicity of structure and language, it describes the joy that he feels when he sees a rainbow and notes that he has felt this way since his childhood. He concludes the poem by noting how his childhood has shaped his current views and stating that "the child is father of the man".

Writing the poem

Wordsworth wrote "My Heart Leaps Up" on the night of March 26, 1802. Earlier that day, he wad written "To The Cuckoo". He was in Dove Cottage

Dove Cottage

Dove Cottage is a house on the edge of Grasmere in the Lake District. It is best known as the home of the poet William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy Wordsworth from December 1799 to May 1808, where they spent over eight years of "plain living, but high thinking"...

, Grasmere

Grasmere

Grasmere is a village, and popular tourist destination, in the centre of the English Lake District. It takes its name from the adjacent lake, and is associated with the Lake Poets...

 with his wife, Mary. After he wrote it he often thought about altering it, but decided to leave it as it was originally written. It was published as part of Poems in Two Volumes

Poems in Two Volumes

Poems in Two Volumes was an 1807 publication by the poet William Wordsworth .It included many notable Wordsworth poems, including:* "Resolution and Independence"...

 in 1807.

The day after he wrote "My Heart Leaps Up" Wordsworth began to write his larger and better known Ode: Intimations of Immortality

Ode: Intimations of Immortality

Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood is a poem by William Wordsworth, completed in 1804 and published in Poems, in Two Volumes . The poem was completed in two parts, with the first four stanzas written among a series of poems composed in 1802 about childhood...

. The last three lines from "My Heart Leaps Up" are used as an epigraph to Intimations of Immortality. Some scholars have noted that "My Heart Leaps Up" indicates Wordsworth's state of mind while writing the larger poem and provide clues to its interpretation.

Critical analysis

Some commentators have speculated that Wordsworth felt such joy because the rainbow indicates the constancy of his connection to nature throughout his life. Others have said that it celebrates "the continuity in Wordsworth's consciousness of self". Many commentators also draw parallels to the rainbow of Noah

Noah

Noah was, according to the Hebrew Bible, the tenth and last of the antediluvian Patriarchs. The biblical story of Noah is contained in chapters 6–9 of the book of Genesis, where he saves his family and representatives of all animals from the flood by constructing an ark...

 and the covenant that it symbolised. Wordsworth's use of the phrase "bound each to each" in the poem also implies the presence of a covenant. Some commentators have drawn further parallels with the story of Noah. Harold Bloom

Harold Bloom

Harold Bloom is an American writer and literary critic, and is Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. He is known for his defense of 19th-century Romantic poets, his unique and controversial theories of poetic influence, and his prodigious literary output, particularly for a literary...

 has suggested that Wordsworth casts the rainbow as a symbol of the survival of his poetic gift, just as the rainbow symbolised to Noah the survival of mankind. Bloom suggests that Wordsworth's poetic gift relied on his ability to recall the memories of his joy as a child.

William Blake

William Blake

William Blake was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age...

disliked Wordsworth's use of the phrase "natural piety". Blake believed that man was naturally impious and therefore Wordsworth's phrase contradicted itself.