My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold Identity Quotes

The poem starts by telling us something about the speaker: he gets really super-happy whenever he sees a rainbow. Right away we know that he finds this part of his identity very important. (We doubt our speaker would start a poem off with something unimportant, like the fact that he likes to brush his teeth.) Throughout the poem, we keep in mind that the person we're reading about really loves nature.

The speaker is walking us through his identity from birth to adulthood here. That's a long walk in a short poem. He got excited about rainbows as a child, and he still does as a man. So we know that his personality is fairly constant, at least in terms of his love of nature.

The speaker considers rejoicing in nature so integral to his identity that, if he stopped loving nature, he would want to die. That's intense. We've now followed the speaker through his entire lifespan, or at least the lifespan he projects for himself.

The speaker puts a lot of stock in childhood. This line is a paradox, taking what we normally think about identity and setting it firmly on its head. We tend to think that children get their identity from their parents, but this suggests that as adults we are shaped by our childhood selves. Our speaker's love of nature as a child turned him into a nature-loving adult.

The speaker sums up the poem with a statement about what he wants his identity to be: he wants every day of his life to be connected with nature. The word "pious" implies that our speaker wants to be dutiful and reverent toward nature. He digs it so much that he defines his entire identity around nature and his ability to experience joy through it.