Opening with an apostrophe to Wordsworth as "Poet of Nature," "To Wordsworth"'s first quatrain conjures persistent themes of Wordsworth's earlier poetry, in particular his famous "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood," in which the poet mourns the loss of the sense of wonder and mystery he felt in his youth: "there hath passed away a glory from the earth." Shelley, as Wordsworth did in his Ode, uses the simile of waking up from a dream. Just as the Intimations Ode mourns the loss of youthful wonder, The Excursion deals with the loss of the political idealism that Wordsworth once felt in his radical youth. Wordsworth feels this loss, but Shelley deplores it.
Addressing the poet and man William Wordsworth had become by 1814 with the publication of The Excursion, Shelley commences an ironically calculated quatrain that slyly touches upon many of the great themes associated most closely with William Wordsworth—nature, death and loss, nostalgia for the lost innocence of childhood and youth, the bonds of friendship and the excitement of falling in love—before bringing down the blade that cuts by asserting that Wordsworth’s contemporary work lacks all these things, leaving the aging poet to become someone who now only mourns the loss of these concerns. Then, Shelley asserts his sympathy with such sentiments as those expressed in the "Intimations" ode, and more broadly with Wordsworth's early body of work as a whole. However, Shelley turns suddenly to express antipathy toward the poet that Wordsworth has become in The Excursion.
The last six lines express a similar sentiment, but through the use of a very different simile. Here, Wordsworth is compared to a refuge built high up in the rocks, a safe haven away from the endless struggles of the world below. Wordsworth's poetry here is not just a way to escape from the tawdriness of daily life, but it is also a means of access to those truths of nature that are permanent. The next two lines state clearly what it was that Shelley valued most in Wordsworth's early poems: they were devoted to the cause of "truth and liberty." True to the Shakespearean sonnet form, the closing two lines tie together everything that came previously. Because Wordsworth has deserted his commitment to "truth and liberty," expressed in such poems as the "Intimations" ode and in his "Sonnets to Liberty," Shelley is left to grieve the loss of what had been both a guiding light and a refuge from a seemingly hopeless world. To put it colloquially, Shelley is basically saying to Wordsworth: "You're dead to me."
The eulogy cuts two ways, with Shelley on the one hand describing Wordsworth as a lone star only to immediately undermine that metaphor with imagery of the light from his star shining upon a bare tree in the middle of the night during winter. Wordsworth is then compared to the sturdiness of a refuge carved into rock only for that refuge to be perched above the blind multitudes below. This image sets the stage for Shelley to move his attack on Wordsworth from the literary to the political, as he references the poems the young Wordsworth wrote honoring the radical liberalism of the underclass fighting for truth and liberty. The poem ends on the image of Wordsworth having deserted these ideals as he aged into political conservatism. It is the loss of this Wordsworth that Shelley deplores, while Wordsworth merely feels the loss of his younger self.
