Imitation - Analysis

A mind remembering itself as weather

This poem’s central claim is that the speaker’s early inner life was less a set of memories than a powerful, dangerous current—and that what once felt like visionary promise now feels like something he must keep private, even let die. The first lines don’t begin with a scene but with a force: A dark unfathomed tide of interminable pride. Pride here isn’t simple arrogance; it’s an element as deep as the sea, something the speaker can’t measure or fully explain. From the start, the tone is awed and wary, as if he’s describing his own consciousness as a natural phenomenon that could drown him.

Even when he calls his early life a mystery and a dream, he doesn’t treat it as soft or comforting. The dream is fraught—loaded, tense—with a wild and waking thought. That collision (dreaming, yet waking) suggests a mind that can’t keep its visions safely in sleep. It’s as if his imagination is too alert, too intense, to be merely fanciful.

The dream’s “beings” and the fear of missing them

The most haunting image is the one that arrives almost quietly: beings that have been, which his spirit hath not seen. The phrase points to presences—people, selves, possibilities, perhaps even the dead—that exist in some past tense but still press on him. He implies he could have seen them if he’d allowed it: Had I let them pass me by, With a dreaming eye. That conditional is a small heartbreak. It suggests his consciousness interfered with its own vision. Instead of letting experience pass through him and become revelation, he watched in the wrong way—too consciously, too self-protectively, perhaps too proud.

So the poem holds a key tension: the speaker both longs for visionary contact with these beings and admits he may have blocked it. The same interior intensity that could open a door also slams it shut. The dreaming eye sounds passive and receptive, yet he frames it as a choice he did not make.

The turn: from confession to secrecy

A clear shift happens at Let none of earth inherit. The poem turns from describing an early condition to issuing a command—almost a protective curse. He doesn’t want his vision passed down, as if it were property, an heirloom, or a genetic trait. That choice of inherit makes his inner life feel fated and transmissible, and the speaker refuses to burden anyone else with it. His tone tightens into something stern, guarded, and slightly grandiose: he will not merely keep silent; he will forbid inheritance.

Then he intensifies the idea of control: Those thoughts I would control, As a spell on another’s soul. The word spell is doing double work. It evokes enchantment—the seductive power of his thoughts—but also containment, like binding something volatile. He’s admitting that his inner visions have influence, and he is uneasy about that influence: better to control them than to let them take hold of his soul (a generic his that could mean any reader, any inheritor, any other self).

Bright hope receding, and a choice to let it perish

The final movement mourns an ending: that bright hope and that light time have past. Against the opening dark tide, this memory of light is almost painfully simple. What’s gone isn’t just happiness; it’s rest: my worldly rest hath gone With a sigh. The sigh makes the loss feel quiet and bodily, not theatrical—an exhaustion more than a catastrophe. Yet the speaker’s pride hasn’t vanished; it reappears as a hardening of attitude.

He ends not with rescue but with refusal: I care not though it perish, referring to what he once did cherish. This is another tension: he claims not to care about the perishing of something he explicitly cherished. The poem doesn’t ask us to believe he’s indifferent; it shows a person trying to make himself indifferent because caring has become unbearable or dangerous. In that sense, control is the poem’s substitute for comfort: if he cannot return to the light time, he will at least govern the afterlife of his own thoughts.

A sharper question the poem leaves behind

If the speaker truly believes his vision is a kind of spell, then his final indifference sounds less like peace and more like an act of containment: the cherished thought must perish so it cannot possess him again. The poem quietly asks whether the speaker is protecting others from his inner life—or protecting himself from the unbearable power of what he once almost saw.