Full of wonder
Wordsworth’s “My heart leaps up when I behold”: the rainbow poem
For when something has stopped you in your tracks, in a good way.
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; …
In plain words
Wordsworth says that the sight of a rainbow makes his heart leap, that it did when he was a child, and that it still does now he’s a grown man. What he notices is that the delight hasn’t worn out: the same sight gets the same jump, years apart.
Worth knowing
Only the first four lines are shown. The last five say he wants the feeling to last into old age, and end with “The Child is Father of the Man.” In the 1807 book the poem has no title; the first line does that job.
If something of your own is sitting heavy — /talk is a quieter room.
The quote is checked against the original text. The plain-words note is an AI-assisted draft. How AI is used