Wordsworth needed time and tranquility to absorb his experiences and transform them into poetry. In his youth he throve on a visionary power which worked through nature later he found a living presence which inspired him with devotion and was the "soul of all his moral being." This difference and this contrast run through the Ode. Tintern Abbey anticipates the Ode in distinguishing between two periods in Wordsworth's life. At the height of his career Wordsworth discovered that nature, in which he had put on unquestioning trust as the inspiration of his poetry, seemed to have abandoned him and deprived him of his most cherished strength. Wordsworth lost something very special in his whole approach to nature and his relation with it. But Wordsworth was so determined not to surrender to circumstances that he made his Ode more confidant than was perhaps warranted by the mood which first set him to work. He, who had known moments of visionary splendor, found that he knew them no more, and that is a loss which no poet can take lightly, or however comforting his consolations may be, accept in a calm, philosophic spirit. Because the Ode lies outside Wordsworth's usual range, it doesn't perhaps realize its ambitious aims. Wordsworth seems to have decided that his subject was so important that it must be treated in what was for him an unusual manner, and for it he fashioned his own style. The stately metrical form is matched by a stately use of words. The Ode's unusual form is matched by its unusual language.
The three parts of the Ode deal with a crisis, an explanation, and a consolation, and in all three parts Wordsworth speaks of what is most important and most original in his poetry. When Wordsworth arranged his poems for publication, he placed the Ode entitled "Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood" at the end, as if he regarded it as the crown of his creative life.
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