Wordsworth’s “My heart leaps up when I behold”: the rainbow poem

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.

Sit with this line → A few quiet exchanges about what it stirs in you.

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.