The Rainbow comes and goes,
And lovely is the Rose.

These lines open William Wordsworth’s short lyric “My Heart Leaps Up” (also known by its first line), written in 1802 during the early Romantic period and first published in 1807 in Poems, in Two Volumes. The poem reflects Wordsworth’s characteristic interest in how encounters with nature shape the mind across a lifetime. In a few compact images—rainbow and rose—he evokes the fleeting yet recurring beauties of the natural world and uses them to frame a meditation on continuity between childhood feeling and adult moral being. The lyric is also notable for the famous concluding maxim about the child as “father of the man.”

The couplet contrasts transience (“comes and goes”) with enduring loveliness (“lovely is the Rose”), suggesting that nature’s beauty is both momentary in appearance and constant in value. Wordsworth uses these simple observations to argue that the proper human response—joy, wonder, reverence—should persist from childhood into maturity. The rainbow becomes a test of spiritual continuity: if the adult no longer feels the child’s spontaneous “leap” of the heart, something essential has been lost. The lines thus introduce a larger Romantic claim that emotional responsiveness to nature is not childishness to outgrow but a foundation for ethical and imaginative life.