This line of Wordsworth from his "Ode: Intimations of Immortality," appears to be contradictory, but within the context of the poem, it is not, which, of course, is what a paradox is. Physically, the boy cannot be the father of a man, but emotionally, and spiritually, he can.
As he aged, Wordsworth became concerned about the loss of "secret sharers," parent-substitutes from whom and with whom a person creates. However, he later realized that he was not deprived of his sharers, for he could draw from youth with whom he also had immortal ties:
Ye blessed Creatures, I have heard the call/Ye to each other make.../My heart is at your festival.../The fulness of your bliss. I feel--I feel it all
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting/The Soul that rises with us,our life's Star/Had had elsewhere its setting...
O joy! that in our embers/Is something that doth live.../Of the eternal Silence truths that wake/To perish never...
Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea....
Thanks to the human heart by which we live.
In his ode, Wordsworth realizes that Youth can be inspiration to Age, and through Youth, man acquires the immortality of his ideas and truths.
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