The Child is Father of the Man.

The line is the seventh of a nine-line poem, which Wordsworth placed at the head of his “Poems Referring to the Period of Childhood” in the 1815 edition. The poet’s heart leaps up when he sees a rainbow: so it was when his life began, so it is now that he is a man, and so may it be when he grows old, “Or let me die!” Then comes the paradox, and a wish: that his days may be “Bound each to each by natural piety”.

Wordsworth wrote the poem in 1802 and published it in 1807. The child is the father of the man because the adult grows out of the boy’s feelings, and the poem’s fear is to lose the joy of childhood. Wordsworth returned to that fear in his ode “Intimations of Immortality”, and used the poem’s last three lines as its epigraph.

The line has become proverbial, often used to say that character is formed in childhood.

My heart leaps up, line 7 (Poems, 1815), 1807

Checked word for word in the work itself.

Read the passage in the work