What is the rhyme scheme of the poem, Ode: Intimations of Immortality From Recollections of Early Childhood?

Also typical of the ode form, the poet uses an irregular, yet deliberate rhyme scheme in order to emphasize meaning while also maintaining a sense of surprise for the reader. One of the ways in which Wordsworth achieves this is by pairing certain complementary words through the use of rhyme. For example, in the third stanza, he rhymes “Child of Joy” with “Shepherd-boy” as a means of poetically characterizing his subject and creating a more powerful image in the reader’s mind (34, 36). Later, in the eighth stanza, he rhymes “among the blind” with “eternal mind” in order to emphasize the fact that the speaker views adults as not necessarily literally blind, but mentally blind to the natural wonders that surround them (112, 114). Rhyme is also used to pair words with opposite meanings in order to create emphasis through contrast. For example, in the seventh stanza, the speaker says, “a wedding or a festival,/a mourning or a funeral” (94-95). Here the rhyming of “festival” with “funeral” accentuates the breadth of human experience by juxtaposing these two opposing life events and sonically linking them (94-95).