Old Man Travelling

Old man travelling.
Animal tranquility and decay, a sketch.

The poem is about an old man who is travelling on his own to take leave of his son.
However, at a deeper level, Wordsworth ishighlighting the loneliness which men suffer in the course of their life.
First of all, one of the main ideas of the poem is that men are born alone and we remain alone during our lifetime.
This idea,connected to the romantic conception of the man, being himself in contact with nature is patently obvious in the first four verses of the poem, where the poet is using the image of “little birds” andabove all, the explanation of the traveler’s expression, the way he walks and even the fact that he is not moving with pain, but absorbed in his own thoughts.
A second remarkable idea is the one that thepoet expresses in the title: “Animal, Tranquility and decay”. This is, our condition as human beings allows us to be conscious of the fact that we decay in the same way nature does, but thedifference is that birds and nature cannot be conscious of it (so, they are just what they are, they cannot feel) and we are conscious of our limitations as human beings.
Furthermore, it is not by chance thatthe protagonist is exactly an old man, one “by whom all the efforts seem forgotten”.
The traveler is completely quiet walking and he is completely aware of (es consciente de) the fact that heaccepts his son dying in a short period of time, in the same way he is going to die as well someday, because our condition as human beings allows us to appreciate the pleasure of being part of the wonderfulnature, but also implies that our irremediable final fate is going to be our death.

The old man travelling seems to assume perfectly this intrinsic human condition because he answers normally whenthe poet himself as a narrator asks him about the objective of his travel (in the second stanza)
The traveler tells the poet that he is going to “take the last leave of his son because he is dying...