My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold Man and the Natural World Quotes

From the jump we know that the relationship between man and nature in this poem is a friendly one. Our speaker doesn't tell us about the rain that likely precedes these rainbows, but instead he idealizes nature, choosing to focus on its beauty rather than its wrath. Wordsworth lived in England, where it rains a lot—but all we hear about in this poem is how wonderful it is to be able to look at rainbows.

We doubt the speaker could remember how he felt about rainbows from the time his life literally began, but the idea is that they made his heart leap up when he was young, and they still do. We bet the speaker is guessing that some people will scoff at the first two lines, finding them childish. So here he's saying: yeah, sure, I got excited about rainbows when I was a kid—but I still get excited now that I'm all grown up too!

Not only does the speaker want his audience to know that rainbows are more than just a childish joy for him, he goes so far as to say that if he stopped loving rainbows, he'd just as soon die. Why bother living, he seems to ask, if you can no longer appreciate something so beautiful? He loves nature—to the extreme!

These lines succinctly show what the speaker was talking about in the rest of the poem—that nature is something he wants in his life every day. The addition of the word "piety" makes the lines more than a summary of the rest of the poem. "Piety" means that the speaker views nature as something to be revered, just as someone who is super-religious would revere God. We can picture our speaker skipping church on a Sunday morning in favor of a long walk in the woods.