The first book of The Prelude, after the introduction and the

"correspondent breeze" passage that we talked about in class, continues by

narrating episodes from Wordsworth's youth. We looked at a couple of them

in class--the bird-stealing and the gathering eggs episodes. Both of these

episodes illustrate an enhancement of Wordsworth's (or "the speaker's,"

though this is one of the cases where the distinction is probably moot)

perception of Nature. In the bird-stealing episode, Nature becomes the

repository of Wordsworth's guilt feelings, a kind of externalized

conscience. In the raven's nest episode the excitement of performing the

death-defying gathering of eggs transformed his perception of Nature: the

sky "seemed not a sky of heaven" and the wind put forth a "strange

utterance."

The next episode further develops Wordsworth's account of the moral

effects of Nature. After a section that describes how Nature orchestrates

many different effects which are infused on the child's developing mind

(the passage includes, by the way, the phrase "Praise to the End" that the

fine American poet Ted Roethke borrows to entitle one of his collections),

Wordsworth describes how Nature can use "severer interventions" to shape

morality. He describes "borrowing" a boat one summer evening (without the

owner's permission. [This is the orange section.] As he rows out (sitting

facing the rear of the boat, he uses one of the mountain cliffs as a guide

to keep his boat on a straight course. As he rows further out another

mountain crag--hitherto hidden by the nearer cliff--suddenly appears:

I fixed my view

Upon the summit of a craggy ridge, 370

The horizon's utmost boundary; far above

Was nothing but the stars and the grey sky.

. . .

my boat

Went heaving through the water like a swan;

When, from behind that craggy steep till then

The horizon's bound, a huge peak, black and huge,

As if with voluntary power instinct,

Upreared its head. I struck and struck again, 380

And growing still in stature the grim shape

Towered up between me and the stars, and still,

For so it seemed, with purpose of its own

And measured motion like a living thing,

Strode after me.

This peak is made into a kind of monster by Wordsworth, a

fitting punishment for his "theft" of the boat. Again, he comments on the

change of his perception, but this time the change in perceptions

continues for some days:

I left my bark,--

And through the meadows homeward went, in grave

And serious mood; but after I had seen 390

That spectacle, for many days, my brain

Worked with a dim and undetermined sense

Of unknown modes of being; o'er my thoughts

There hung a darkness, call it solitude

Or blank desertion. No familiar shapes

Remained, no pleasant images of trees,

Of sea or sky, no colours of green fields;

But huge and mighty forms, that do not live

Like living men, moved slowly through the mind

By day, and were a trouble to my dreams.

In the next episode, highlighted in green, Wordsworth remembers the many

hours he spent skating. The passage culminates in his description of going

off alone from the group (note that all of the previous episodes describe

the child as being alone). He describes the ice reflecting the stars--he

"cuts across the reflex of a star"--and talks about the skaters "giving

their bodies to the wind" and finally notes how he stops:

then at once

Have I, reclining back upon my heels,

Stopped short;

After this sudden stop a phenomenon occurs that, if you don't skate you

can approximate (and probably have) by turning around and around and

around and then trying to stand still:

yet still the solitary cliffs

Wheeled by me--even as if the earth had rolled

With visible motion her diurnal round! 460

Behind me did they stretch in solemn train,

Feebler and feebler, and I stood and watched

Till all was tranquil as a dreamless sleep.

Again, the poet suggests that he can see the very earth turn and even the

physical surroundings fade away. He sees in effect, perhaps, a vision of

time.

The passage highlighted in blue focusses on the indoor activities the poet

remembers engaging in when he was little. Tic-tac-toe is probably the

"strife too humble to be named in verse." The card game he describes

playing seem to transform into an allegory that presents a

"prophecy"--though of course written after the fact here--of the French

Revolution:

Or round the naked table, snow-white deal,

Cherry or maple, sate in close array,

And to the combat, Loo or Whist, led on

A thick-ribbed army; not, as in the world,

Neglected and ungratefully thrown by

Even for the very service they had wrought,

But husbanded through many a long campaign.

Uncouth assemblage was it, where no few 520

Had changed their functions: some, plebeian cards

Which Fate, beyond the promise of their birth,

Had dignified, and called to represent

The persons of departed potentates.

Oh, with what echoes on the board they fell!

Ironic diamonds,--clubs, hearts, diamonds, spades,

A congregation piteously akin!

Cheap matter offered they to boyish wit,

Those sooty knaves, precipitated down

With scoffs and taunts, like Vulcan out of heaven: 530

The paramount ace, a moon in her eclipse,

Queens gleaming through their splendour's last decay,

And monarchs surly at the wrongs sustained

By royal visages. Meanwhile abroad

Incessant rain was falling, or the frost

Raged bitterly, with keen and silent tooth;

And, interrupting oft that eager game,

From under Esthwaite's splitting fields of ice

The pent-up air, struggling to free itself,

Gave out to meadow grounds and hills a loud 540

Protracted yelling, like the noise of wolves

Howling in troops along the Bothnic Main.

The reference to "A thick-ribbed army; not, as in the world,/ Neglected

and ungratefully thrown by" reflects Wordsworth's interest in the plight

of soldiers and sailors--some crippled or otherwise disabled by their

service--who were simply brought back to England, given a little money,

and then turned loose and forgotten and left to live or die as best they

might. We will see one of these veterans at the end of Book IV of

The Prelude and Wordsworth uses them in many of his other poems.

The "purple passage," i.e., highlighted in purple, in Book I provides a

kind of summary to the process the episodes Wordsworth has just narrated

involves. The last part of the passage is especially important:

--And if the vulgar joy by its own weight

Wearied itself out of the memory,

The scenes which were a witness of that joy

Remained in their substantial lineaments

Depicted on the brain, and to the eye 600

Were visible, a daily sight; and thus

By the impressive discipline of fear,

By pleasure and repeated happiness,

So frequently repeated, and by force

Of obscure feelings representative

Of things forgotten, these same scenes so bright,

So beautiful, so majestic in themselves,

Though yet the day was distant, did become

Habitually dear, and all their forms

And changeful colours by invisible links 610

Were fastened to the affections.

Note how the process Wordsworth outlines here reflects the

"associationist" explanation of child development and learning that we saw

in the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads.

These episodes, by the way, belong to that class of experiences that

Wordsworth much later in The Prelude will refer to as "spots of time."

In Book II Wordsworth continues the story of his youth. Some of you might

have wondered about the lack of attention paid to his parents in Book One.

He specifically identifies his age during one of the episodes as being

about ten--but there is no mention of his Mother's death occurring about

two years earlier when he was eight. Early in Book II he returns to the

situation that starts the recording of these episodes from his youth.

Remember he asks if the River Derwent had murmured to him while he was in

his mother's arms only so he could be "a false Steward." In the blue

passage in Book II he ties the infant's experience of the mother to the

beginnings of the person's (as infant/child/adult) experience of Nature:

blest the Babe,

Nursed in his Mother's arms, who sinks to sleep

Rocked on his Mother's breast; who with his soul

Drinks in the feelings of his Mother's eye!

For him, in one dear Presence, there exists

A virtue which irradiates and exalts

Objects through widest intercourse of sense. 240

No outcast he, bewildered and depressed:

Along his infant veins are interfused

The gravitation and the filial bond

Of nature that connect him with the world.

Wordsworth goes on in this passage to again underline the Mind/nature,

external/internal relationship between the mind and the outside world that

fosters creativity and that this earliest of external influences fosters:

Emphatically such a Being lives,

Frail creature as he is, helpless as frail,

An inmate of this active universe:

For, feeling has to him imparted power

That through the growing faculties of sense

Doth like an agent of the one great Mind

Create, creator and receiver both,

Working but in alliance with the works

Which it beholds.--Such, verily, is the first 260

Poetic spirit of our human life,

By uniform control of after years,

In most, abated or suppressed; in some,

Through every change of growth and of decay,

Pre-eminent till death.

Note, however, the change that comes about in the passage highlighted in

dark red:

Yet is a path

More difficult before me; and I fear

That in its broken windings we shall need

The chamois' sinews, and the eagle's wing:

For now a trouble came into my mind

From unknown causes. I was left alone

Seeking the visible world, nor knowing why.

The props of my affections were removed,

And yet the building stood, as if sustained 280

By its own spirit!

This passage probably contains the first reference in the poem to the

death of the Poet's mother (there's a more explicit--and less authentic,

perhaps--report of it later). Richard Onorato and some other

psychologically oriented critics of Wordsworth believe that Wordsworth

repressed the feelings and full awareness of the death of his mother and

"transferred" the natural feelings and love that he had for her to Nature,

i.e., Mother Nature, itself. It's Onorato, I think, who suggests that

Wordsworth's earlier description of the "Blest Babe" as "No outcast he,

bewildered and depressed" contains a temporally displaced denial of what

the poet actually felt at the death of his mother and the

"uprooting"--The Prelude uses the term "transplant[ing]" (I. 305)--that

resulted from it.

The 'building stood,' he says, an the rest of the passages highlighted in

red here amplify the statement that we saw in "Tintern Abbey" that Nature

was "all in all" to him in his youth, and it is by and large Nature that

Wordsworth credits for his ability to continue and sustain not only his

existence but his creative sensibility. Note how many of the passages,

though, refer to the poet being alone in and with nature. In Book II,

there are mentions of comrades and later of a special "Friend," but most

of the narrated episodes show the poet by himself.

Also note in the red passages the way the senses are frequently treated.

Although they seem necessary for the initial delivery of sensation, they

frequently "phase out" or are overcome by the poet's mind. In this passage

the bodily eyes are supplanted:

Nor seldom did I lift our cottage latch

Far earlier, ere one smoke-wreath had risen 340

From human dwelling, or the vernal thrush

Was audible; and sate among the woods

Alone upon some jutting eminence,

At the first gleam of dawn-light, when the Vale,

Yet slumbering, lay in utter solitude.

How shall I seek the origin? where find

Faith in the marvellous things which then I felt?

Oft in these moments such a holy calm

Would overspread my soul, that bodily eyes

Were utterly forgotten, and what I saw 350

Appeared like something in myself, a dream,

A prospect in the mind.

In a later passage, the ear is effaced:

I was only then

Contented, when with bliss ineffable 400

I felt the sentiment of Being spread

O'er all that moves and all that seemeth still;

O'er all that, lost beyond the reach of thought

And human knowledge, to the human eye

Invisible, yet liveth to the heart;

O'er all that leaps and runs, and shouts and sings,

Or beats the gladsome air; o'er all that glides

Beneath the wave, yea, in the wave itself,

And mighty depth of waters. Wonder not

If high the transport, great the joy I felt, 410

Communing in this sort through earth and heaven

With every form of creature, as it looked

Towards the Uncreated with a countenance

Of adoration, with an eye of love.

One song they sang, and it was audible,

Most audible, then, when the fleshly ear,

O'ercome by humblest prelude of that strain

Forgot her functions, and slept undisturbed.

Still Wordsworth insists that his "transports," his absorption into his

mind, were anchored in Nature, and it was this circumstance that kept him

"normal"--at least sort of:

A plastic power

Abode with me; a forming hand, at times

Rebellious, acting in a devious mood;

A local spirit of his own, at war

With general tendency, but, for the most,

Subservient strictly to external things

With which it communed. An auxiliar light

Came from my mind, which on the setting sun

Bestowed new splendour; the melodious birds, 370

The fluttering breezes, fountains that run on

Murmuring so sweetly in themselves, obeyed

A like dominion, and the midnight storm

Grew darker in the presence of my eye:

Hence my obeisance, my devotion hence,

And hence my transport.

Wordsworth is again amplifying the account in "Tintern Abbey": the

description here suggests both the emotional impact Nature had on him and

the beginning of his super-adding "thought" to the natural scene he

perceived.

In the green passages Wordsworth once again reiterates his belief that

Nature has fostered his creativity as well as his moral being, and in the

purple passage he addresses Coleridge (as he does many times at the

conclusions of the books of the poem) and contrasts Coleridge's misfortune

of being raised in the city with his own rural Natural upbringing.

In Book III of The Prelude Wordsworth describes his time in college at

Cambridge University. Wordsworth looked on his time at Cambridge as

offering a kind of halfway-house between his rural youth and his time as

an adult living in the city. Although the excerpts I've included don't

really show it, in this book Wordsworth employs a style that features

lists and catalogs, e.g. implicit and explicit "and," (a fancy word for

this tendency in his style in this book and in Book VII: Residence in

London is "paratactic"). Here's an example:

I was the Dreamer, they the Dream; I roamed 30

Delighted through the motley spectacle;

Gowns grave, or gaudy, doctors, students, streets,

Courts, cloisters, flocks of churches, gateways, towers:

Migration strange for a stripling of the hills,

A northern villager.

Wordsworth uses this style to reflect an experience that seems to tumble

over one, that has no order or meaning. Stimuli assault the senses one

after another, but there is little apparent connection or coherence among

them. Wordsworth will point out in Book VII that if it wasn't for his

childhood in Nature and the lessons he learned about "seeing" there,

London would have been a quite literally maddening experience. Nature

however taught him to make connections and extract significances even from

the chaos that the University presented on a minor level and the City

would later present on a much greater and more dangerous scale. (The

contrasting style to a "paratactic style" is "hypotactic" style. This

style is characterized by a greater proportion of complex sentences made

up of syntactical constructions that show relationships between their

elements, e.g., a lot of "because," "therefore," and "while" clauses.)

The first excerpt from Book III mentions one of Wordsworth's predecessors

at Cambridge, the mathematician/scientist Newton. One of the main

contributions of Newton was his demonstration that one could use

mathematics in order to interpret and even predict natural phenomena--this

is one of the ideas that Wordsworth has in mind when he says in The

Prospectus to _The Recluse_ that the Mind is fitted to Nature and nature

to the Mind. Later in the book Wordsworth will mention the famous poets

who were at Cambridge, Spenser and Milton. In fact he confesses rather

abjectly and priggishly that he got a little tipsy in a room once occupied

by Milton:

Yea, our blind Poet, who in his later day,

Stood almost single; uttering odious truth--

Darkness before, and danger's voice behind,

Soul awful--if the earth has ever lodged

An awful soul--I seemed to see him here

Familiarly, and in his scholar's dress

Bounding before me, yet a stripling youth--

A boy, no better, with his rosy cheeks 290

Angelical, keen eye, courageous look,

And conscious step of purity and pride.

Among the band of my compeers was one

Whom chance had stationed in the very room

Honoured by Milton's name. O temperate Bard!

Be it confest that, for the first time, seated

Within thy innocent lodge and oratory,

One of a festive circle, I poured out

Libations, to thy memory drank, till pride

And gratitude grew dizzy in a brain 300

Never excited by the fumes of wine

Before that hour, or since. Then, forth I ran

From the assembly; through a length of streets,

Ran, ostrich-like, to reach our chapel door

In not a desperate or opprobrious time,

Albeit long after the importunate bell

Had stopped, with wearisome Cassandra voice

No longer haunting the dark winter night.

The passage highlighted in red interjects a theme we have been talking a

little bit about in class. As in "Resolution and Independence," Wordsworth

wonders how he is going to be able to support himself. The reason his

relatives have sent him to college, he believes is to give him the

requisite education to "get on" in the world. Being a poet, even at that

time, did not offer too lucrative a future.

The long blue passages reflect the further development of Wordsworth

inhabiting a Nature that was increasingly supplemented by thought--by an

internalization of the scenes and objects of the world. As he says:

I was as sensitive as waters are

To the sky's influence in a kindred mood

Of passion; was obedient as a lute

That waits upon the touches of the wind.

Unknown, unthought of, yet I was most rich-- 140

I had a world about me--'twas my own;

I made it, for it only lived to me,

And to the God who sees into the heart.

This "world" that Wordsworth felt he made opened him, he felt to charges

of madness, but he writes:

Some called it madness--so indeed it was,

If child-like fruitfulness in passing joy,

If steady moods of thoughtfulness matured

To inspiration, sort with such a name;

If prophecy be madness; if things viewed 150

By poets in old time, and higher up

By the first men, earth's first inhabitants,

May in these tutored days no more be seen

With undisordered sight. But leaving this,

It was no madness, for the bodily eye

Amid my strongest workings evermore

Was searching out the lines of difference

As they lie hid in all external forms,

Near or remote, minute or vast; an eye

Which, from a tree, a stone, a withered leaf, 160

To the broad ocean and the azure heavens

Spangled with kindred multitudes of stars,

Could find no surface where its power might sleep

Wordsworth also includes in this book statements indicating--if not many

episodes describing--more of a social existence. He had friends at

Cambridge whom he hung out with.

Books Four, Five and Six are pivotal books in The Prelude. They recount

Wordsworth's realization of and acceptance of his vocation as a poet, and

they also begin to illustrate the difficulties that being a poet involves,

not only in supporting one's self, but in taking on the ways of perceiving

and heightened self-consciousness that belong to poetic identity.

At the beginning of Book IV: Summer Vacation Wordsworth describes returning

to his rural home in the North of England. His summer vacation is the

typical summer break from school, but it also may suggest something more.

A vacation is an intermission in one's regular duties and life; the

"summer" may suggest a kind of return to Innocence and at least

the scene of his childhood.

At the beginning of the Book Wordsworth reports arriving at a "bare ridge"

overlooking Lake Windermere. The simile he uses is interesting; he

compares the lake to a river. We'll talk a little in class about what this

similes accomplishes and suggests. (Think of the differences between a

lake and a river.) The time is noon--might that be important?

In the passage highlighted in blue, Wordsworth tells us he ran down the

hill shouting for the ferryman; he refers to this ferryman as "Charon." Is

this a rather surprising allusion? Charon is the mythological character

who ferries the dead from this world across the river Styx into the

underworld. Yet Wordsworth is returning to the place of his youth where he

experienced the thrills and adventures we read about in Book One and where

he learned to love and learn from Nature. Is the allusion to Charon then

just a product of the poet's showing off his knowledge of classical myth?

Probably not. The book contains many images and episodes which suggest

that something has changed: that the rural place of his boyhood is no

longer sufficient to the poetic identity that Wordsworth is taking on.

For instance, in the next passage highlighted in red, Wordsworth describes

a section of the river that has been shunted off its main flow and

directed to the garden to drive--in times past perhaps--a little mill.

Wordsworth says that "sarcastic Fancy" might see in the little stream

separated from its main flow "`An emblem . . . of thy own life;/

In its late course of even days with all/ Their smooth enthralment.'"

But the Imagination might well suggest a different significance for the

image of the stream which caught in a garden, even the garden of the

poet's childhood:

Nor that unruly child of mountain birth, 50

The famous brook, who, soon as he was boxed

Within our garden, found himself at once,

As if by trick insidious and unkind,

Stripped of his voice and left to dimple down

(Without an effort and without a will)

A channel paved by man's officious care.

The little brook may suggest that if the poet stays in "the garden" he

too, like the brook will be "stripped of his voice"; in order to get to

where he believes he is called to go, the poet must move onwards out of

the safety of his past and even out of the secure "channels" that his

relatives are paving for him by sending him to Cambridge to fit him for

the life of a small-town solicitor or schoolteacher.

In the long unhighlighted passage that come next, Wordsworth talks about

walking _around_ the lake--would that be as doable if it were a

river?--and again expresses some uneasiness about people thinking he was a

bit mad. He credits his dog this time for saving him from people hearing

him talking to himself. In the yellowish passage, Wordsworth talks about

feeling renewed and invigorated by his contact with Nature and remarks

that he felt this restoration without even knowing he needed it. He

reports an moment when he could sort of hear "Nature's breathing life"--so

clearly that he thought it was the dog.

After the climbing of the Alps and its aftermath in Book VI,

Wordsworth describes his living in London, for the most part during the

period after he returned from France (his stay in France is narrated in

Books 9-11) Book VII begins with a passage that reminds the reader that

this is the point at which s/he virtually came in; remember that

The Prelude begins with the Poet celebrating his escape from the City

Six years have passed since that escape, Wordsworth tells us, and he has

generally been productively engaged in writing, but recently his

productivity has slowed.

In the passage highlighted in green, Wordsworth describes his encounter

with a beggar among the crowds of London. The sign he wears, to win

sympathy and contributions from passers-by, greatly affects the Poet:

. . . lost

Amid the moving pageant, I was smitten

Abruptly, with the view (a sight not rare)

Of a blind Beggar, who, with upright face,

Stood, propped against a wall, upon his chest 640

Wearing a written paper, to explain

His story, whence he came, and who he was.

Caught by the spectacle my mind turned round

As with the might of waters; and apt type

This label seemed of the utmost we can know,

Both of ourselves and of the universe;

And, on the shape of that unmoving man,

His steadfast face and sightless eyes, I gazed,

As if admonished from another world.

In the next blue-highlighted passage, Wordsworth describes Bartholomew

Fair, which he refers to as a "true epitome" of the City itself. After a

long, long catalog of all of "out-o'-the-way, far-fetched, perverted

things" that appear in the Fair, Wordsworth characterizes the chaos of

London sensations:

Oh, blank confusion! true epitome

Of what the mighty City is herself,

To thousands upon thousands of her sons,

Living amid the same perpetual whirl

Of trivial objects, melted and reduced

To one identity, by differences

That have no law, no meaning, and no end--

Oppression, under which even highest minds

Must labour, whence the strongest are not free. 730

But though the picture weary out the eye,

By nature an unmanageable sight,

It is not wholly so to him who looks

In steadiness, who hath among least things

An under-sense of greatest; sees the parts

As parts, but with a feeling of the whole.

Wordsworth credits Nature--and his early contact with its various

beauties--for this ability to look "in steadiness":

This did I feel, in London's vast domain.

The Spirit of Nature was upon me there;

The soul of Beauty and enduring Life

Vouchsafed her inspiration, and diffused,

Through meagre lines and colours, and the press

Of self-destroying, transitory things, 770

Composure, and ennobling Harmony.

Book VIII is a retrospective book. In it Wordsworth reflects how he was

lucky to approach the human world through first learning about people in

a natural setting where he felt they were ennobled by their beautiful

surroundings. He primarily focusses on shepherds. In the

orange-highlighted passage, Word worth opens his discussion of shepherds by

referring to their presence in pastoral literature. In the second part of

the highlighted passage, he describes his experiences with the real

shepherds of northern England. In a famous passage, he reports how he

encountered shepherds as a schoolboy:

suddenly mine eyes

Have glanced upon him distant a few steps,

In size a giant, stalking through thick fog,

His sheep like Greenland bears; or, as he stepped

Beyond the boundary line of some hill-shadow,

His form hath flashed upon me, glorified

By the deep radiance of the setting sun: 270

Or him have I descried in distant sky,

A solitary object and sublime,

Above all height! like an aerial cross

Stationed alone upon a spiry rock

Of the Chartreuse, for worship. Thus was man

Ennobled outwardly before my sight,

And thus my heart was early introduced

To an unconscious love and reverence

Of human nature; hence the human form

To me became an index of delight, 280

Of grace and honour, power and worthiness.

A bit later in the passage Wordsworth again returns to how his experiences

in Nature as a youth formed the basis of his moral life:

Starting from this point

I had my face turned toward the truth, began

With an advantage furnished by that kind

Of prepossession, without which the soul

Receives no knowledge that can bring forth good,

No genuine insight ever comes to her.

From the restraint of over-watchful eyes

Preserved, I moved about, year after year,

Happy, and now most thankful that my walk 330

Was guarded from too early intercourse

With the deformities of crowded life,

And those ensuing laughters and contempts,

Self-pleasing, which, if we would wish to think

With a due reverence on earth's rightful lord,

Here placed to be the inheritor of heaven,

Will not permit us; but pursue the mind,

That to devotion willingly would rise,

Into the temple and the temple's heart.

In the blue passage Wordsworth echoes the stages of his growth that he

sets forth in "Tintern Abbey." He also talks about the beginning of his

poetic efforts. When he first

Ventured, at some rash Muse's earnest call,

To try her strength among harmonious words;

And to book-notions and the rules of art 370

Did knowingly conform itself; there came

Among the simple shapes of human life

A wilfulness of fancy and conceit;

And Nature and her objects beautified

These fictions, as in some sort, in their turn,

They burnished her. From touch of this new power

Nothing was safe: the elder-tree that grew

Beside the well-known charnel-house had then

A dismal look: the yew-tree had its ghost,

That took his station there for ornament: 380

The dignities of plain occurrence then

Were tasteless, and truth's golden mean, a point

Where no sufficient pleasure could be found.

Then, if a widow, staggering with the blow

Of her distress, was known to have turned her steps

To the cold grave in which her husband slept,

One night, or haply more than one, through pain

Or half-insensate impotence of mind,

The fact was caught at greedily, and there

She must be visitant the whole year through, 390

Wetting the turf with never-ending tears.

In the green passages Wordsworth remembers a wet rock that shone in the

sunlight and served as an imaginative source for him. He notes that he

could never bring himself to "disenchant / The spectacle, by visiting the

spot." When the green passage continues, Wordsworth uses a cave image to

describe again the tumult his mind and senses went through in the apparent

chaos of London:

The curious traveller, who, from open day, 560

Hath passed with torches into some huge cave,

The Grotto of Antiparos, or the Den

In old time haunted by that Danish Witch,

Yordas; he looks around and sees the vault

Widening on all sides; sees, or thinks he sees,

Erelong, the massy roof above his head,

That instantly unsettles and recedes,--

Substance and shadow, light and darkness, all

Commingled, making up a canopy

Of shapes and forms and tendencies to shape 570

That shift and vanish, change and interchange

Like spectres,--ferment silent and sublime!

That after a short space works less and less,

Till, every effort, every motion gone,

The scene before him stands in perfect view

Exposed, and lifeless as a written book!--

But let him pause awhile, and look again,

And a new quickening shall succeed, at first

Beginning timidly, then creeping fast,

Till the whole cave, so late a senseless mass, 580

Busies the eye with images and forms

Boldly assembled,--here is shadowed forth

From the projections, wrinkles, cavities,

A variegated landscape,--there the shape

Of some gigantic warrior clad in mail,

The ghostly semblance of a hooded monk,

Veiled nun, or pilgrim resting on his staff:

Strange congregation! yet not slow to meet

Eyes that perceive through minds that can inspire.

Even in such sort had I at first been moved, 590

Nor otherwise continued to be moved,

As I explored the vast metropolis . . .

Beyond this immediate application, though, the passage might be seen as

another description of how the Mind and the outside world work together

to create the special kind of perception that is the poem.

In Books IX-XI, Wordsworth focusses on the events of the French Revolution

and their effect upon his life. Book IX starts out with a river image

which is used to provide another retrospective glance at the part of

Wordsworth's history that he has covered so far in The Prelude. The

river image is interesting because it suggests that part of the dwelling

on the past is a "delaying action"--the river--or the person--winds back

and around because it/he may

fear to shape a way direct,

That would engulph him soon in the ravenous sea . . .

Wordsworth follows this personified river image with another image of a

human traveler who, upon reaching the top of a hill, turns and surveys the

land he has just crossed to see if he has missed anything. Wordsworth has

just crossed the Alps and described the shepherds who dwelt in the

mountains of the north of England. For the next three books at least the

experiences Wordsworth recounts will not be "mountaintop" experiences or

emotional highs. Books Nine to Eleven generally describe a very traumatic

and painful period in Wordsworth's life.

In the passage highlighted in bright red, Wordsworth remembers his first

feelings about the revolution of the people in France. He approves of it,

and even considers it something that was inevitable in the scheme of

Nature:

It could not be

But that one tutored thus should look with awe

Upon the faculties of man, receive

Gladly the highest promises, and hail, 240

As best, the government of equal rights

And individual worth. And hence, O Friend!

If at the first great outbreak I rejoiced

Less than might well befit my youth, the cause

In part lay here, that unto me the events

Seemed nothing out of nature's certain course,

A gift that was come rather late than soon.

In a passage I have not included, he introduces his friend Beaupuy, a

noble French officer who embraced the Revolution's cause. The latter part

of the passage I have quoted from Book IX reports the substance of their

conversations about the remedies they hope the Revolution would bring in

eradicating poverty and curing other social and political ills. The last

few lines of Book IX mention a "tale /Of sad events" that Wordsworth cut

from the final version of The Prelude. The story was "Vaudracour and

Julia," a story of separated lovers that Wordsworth may have felt too

close to a situation that he was involved in at the time.

In Book X, Wordsworth recounts the establishment of the French Republic

with the deposing of the King. This is the time of the September

Massacres, as he remembers, and he reports staying in a lonely room "near

the roof / Of a large mansion or hotel," perhaps another image of the

over-dependence on intellect and reason that he is soon to complain about

in more explicit terms. He remembers the massacres, and even perhaps

anticipates more violence, but at this point he seems to rationalize it as

an effect of the violence the Old Regime had inflicted on the people for

so long; violence was a habit not easy to break:

I kept watch, 70

Reading at intervals; the fear gone by

Pressed on me almost like a fear to come.

I thought of those September massacres,

Divided from me by one little month,

Saw them and touched: the rest was conjured up

From tragic fictions or true history,

Remembrances and dim admonishments.

The horse is taught his manage, and no star

Of wildest course but treads back his own steps;

For the spent hurricane the air provides 80

As fierce a successor; the tide retreats

But to return out of its hiding-place

In the great deep; all things have second birth;

The earthquake is not satisfied at once;

And in this way I wrought upon myself,

Until I seemed to hear a voice that cried,

To the whole city, "Sleep no more." The trance

Fled with the voice to which it had given birth;

But vainly comments of a calmer mind

Promised soft peace and sweet forgetfulness.

In the next unhighlighted passage, Wordsworth reiterates the confidence he

felt at that time that all would work out for the best [note I have

inadvertently copied one section twice]; however, in the passage later on

highlighted in red, Wordsworth "explains" why he returned home after

spending two years in France:

In this frame of mind,

Dragged by a chain of harsh necessity,

So seemed it,--now I thankfully acknowledge,

Forced by the gracious providence of Heaven,--

To England I returned, else (though assured

That I both was and must be of small weight,

No better than a landsman on the deck

Of a ship struggling with a hideous storm)

Doubtless, I should have then made common cause

With some who perished; haply perished too, 230

A poor mistaken and bewildered offering,--

Should to the breast of Nature have gone back,

With all my resolutions, all my hopes,

A Poet only to myself, to men

Useless, and even, beloved Friend! a soul

To thee unknown!

During those two or so years, Wordsworth had found a girlfriend and had a

child with her. In leaving France, he was also abandoning both mother and

daughter. Although this circumstance was not known--even to Coleridge's

family, though Coleridge was a bit suspicious--into the early decades of

this century, the guilt that Wordsworth must have felt exacerbated the

pain of the maelstrom of feelings he endured both when the British

government joined the League of Kings and actively fought against the

French Republic and when the French returned to a despotic and imperial

and aggressive form of government with Napoleon.

On his return to England, Wordsworth took up residence first in London. He

reports being only casually interested in the British abolitionist

movement:

For myself, I own

That this particular strife had wanted power

To rivet my affections; nor did now

Its unsuccessful issue much excite

My sorrow; for I brought with me the faith

That, if France prospered, good men would not long

Pay fruitless worship to humanity,

And this most rotten branch of human shame, 260

Object, so seemed it, of superfluous pains

Would fall together with its parent tree.

In the passage highlighted in purple, Wordsworth records how he was

tormented by Britain's active entrance into the war against the French:

As a light

And pliant harebell, swinging in the breeze

On some grey rock--its birth-place--so had I

Wantoned, fast rooted on the ancient tower

Of my beloved country, wishing not 280

A happier fortune than to wither there:

Now was I from that pleasant station torn

And tossed about in whirlwind. I rejoiced,

Yea, afterwards--truth most painful to record!--

Exulted, in the triumph of my soul,

When Englishmen by thousands were o'erthrown,

Left without glory on the field, or driven,

Brave hearts! to shameful flight. It was a grief,--

Grief call it not, 'twas anything but that,--

A conflict of sensations without name, 290

Of which 'he' only, who may love the sight

Of a village steeple, as I do, can judge,

When, in the congregation bending all

To their great Father, prayers were offered up,

Or praises for our country's victories;

And, 'mid the simple worshippers, perchance

I only, like an uninvited guest

Whom no one owned, sate silent, shall I add,

Fed on the day of vengeance yet to come.

In the blue-highlighted passage Wordsworth's recalls his reaction to the

death of Robespierre. Note how the last part of the passage strongly

echoes and even repeats a passage in Book II.

In Book XII, Wordsworth reports that things in France were better after

Robespierre's death, and he was happy that France seemed to be progressing

again toward a democratic government. He comments:

O pleasant exercise of hope and joy!

For mighty were the auxiliars which then stood

Upon our side, us who were strong in love!

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

But to be young was very Heaven! O times,

In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways 110

Of custom, law, and statute, took at once

The attraction of a country in romance!

When Reason seemed the most to assert her rights

When most intent on making of herself

A prime enchantress--to assist the work,

Which then was going forward in her name!

Not favoured spots alone, but the whole Earth,

The beauty wore of promise--that which sets

(As at some moments might not be unfelt

Among the bowers of Paradise itself) 120

The budding rose above the rose full blown.

That Wordsworth found himself opposed to England's government and to

English popular sentiment was bad enough (see the red passage), but even

worse was what happened in France itself

But now, become oppressors in their turn,

Frenchmen had changed a war of self-defence

For one of conquest, losing sight of all

Which they had struggled for . . .

Wordsworth felt betrayed, humiliated, and disillusioned. Though he still

believed in the goals that he and Beaupuy expected the Revolution to

deliver, it became clearer and clearer that the Revolution was not going

to accomplish them. He turned to reason and abstraction in order to

explain to himself what happened:

Enough, 'tis true--could such a plea excuse

Those aberrations--had the clamorous friends 260

Of ancient Institutions said and done

To bring disgrace upon their very names;

Disgrace, of which, custom and written law,

And sundry moral sentiments as props

Or emanations of those institutes,

Too justly bore a part. A veil had been

Uplifted; why deceive ourselves? in sooth,

'Twas even so; and sorrow for the man

Who either had not eyes wherewith to see,

Or, seeing, had forgotten! A strong shock 270

Was given to old opinions; all men's minds

Had felt its power, and mine was both let loose,

Let loose and goaded. After what hath been

Already said of patriotic love,

Suffice it here to add, that, somewhat stern

In temperament, withal a happy man,

And therefore bold to look on painful things,

Free likewise of the world, and thence more bold,

I summoned my best skill, and toiled, intent

To anatomise the frame of social life; 280

Yea, the whole body of society

Searched to its heart. Share with me, Friend! the wish

That some dramatic tale, endued with shapes

Livelier, and flinging out less guarded words

Than suit the work we fashion, might set forth

What then I learned, or think I learned, of truth,

And the errors into which I fell, betrayed

By present objects, and by reasonings false

From their beginnings, inasmuch as drawn

Out of a heart that had been turned aside 290

From Nature's way by outward accidents,

And which was thus confounded, more and more

Misguided, and misguiding. So I fared,

Dragging all precepts, judgments, maxims, creeds,

Like culprits to the bar; calling the mind,

Suspiciously, to establish in plain day

Her titles and her honours; now believing,

Now disbelieving; endlessly perplexed

With impulse, motive, right and wrong, the ground

Of obligation, what the rule and whence 300

The sanction; till, demanding formal 'proof',

And seeking it in every thing, I lost

All feeling of conviction, and, in fine,

Sick, wearied out with contrarieties,

Yielded up moral questions in despair.

This was close to the nadir of Wordsworth's depression. He credits his

renewed companionship with his sister Dorothy as helping to return him to

health (in the read passage), but there is still one more blow he has to

endure:

She, in the midst of all, preserved me still

A Poet, made me seek beneath that name,

And that alone, my office upon earth;

And, lastly, as hereafter will be shown,

If willing audience fail not, Nature's self, 350

By all varieties of human love

Assisted, led me back through opening day

To those sweet counsels between head and heart

Whence grew that genuine knowledge, fraught with peace,

Which, through the later sinkings of this cause,

Hath still upheld me, and upholds me now

In the catastrophe (for so they dream,

And nothing less), when, finally to close

And seal up all the gains of France, a Pope

Is summoned in, to crown an Emperor-- 360

This last opprobrium, when we see a people,

That once looked up in faith, as if to Heaven

For manna, take a lesson from the dog

Returning to his vomit; when the sun

That rose in splendour, was alive, and moved

In exultation with a living pomp

Of clouds--his glory's natural retinue--

Hath dropped all functions by the gods bestowed,

And, turned into a gewgaw, a machine,

Sets like an Opera phantom.

Books XII-XIII describe Wordsworth's recovery.

We talked about Book XII's "spots of time" episodes in class. The two

episodes, the first narrating a childhood horseback excursion when he was

separated from an "ancient servant of his father's house" who guided the

child on the ride in place of his father and the second telling about how

he was so eager to return home from school for the Christmas holidays that

God "corrected his desires" through the death of his father. There is

perhaps some repressed resentment towards the father present in these

passage and maybe some oedipal issues, too, especially if one disassembles

the various elements of both passages, e.g., the murderer's place of

execution, the speaker's later walks with the "loved one" where the

"visionary dreariness" that accompanied the earlier experience adds a

"radiance more sublime" to "youth's golden gleam" of the subsequent visit,

the actual death of the father, and the speaker's guilt (his impatience to

be taken "to his father's house" caused the death. The end of the second

episode is rather strange. The feelings of guilt (is there much grief?)

and the images that anchor them are almost seen as toys:

Ere we to school returned,--

That dreary time,--ere we had been ten days

Sojourners in my father's house, he died;

And I and my three brothers, orphans then,

Followed his body to the grave. The event,

With all the sorrow that it brought, appeared 310

A chastisement; and when I called to mind

That day so lately past, when from the crag

I looked in such anxiety of hope;

With trite reflections of morality,

Yet in the deepest passion, I bowed low

To God, Who thus corrected my desires;

And, afterwards, the wind and sleety rain,

And all the business of the elements,

The single sheep, and the one blasted tree,

And the bleak music from that old stone wall, 320

The noise of wood and water, and the mist

That on the line of each of those two roads

Advanced in such indisputable shapes;

All these were kindred spectacles and sounds

To which I oft repaired, and thence would drink,

As at a fountain; and on winter nights,

Down to this very time, when storm and rain

Beat on my roof, or, haply, at noon-day,

While in a grove I walk, whose lofty trees,

Laden with summer's thickest foliage, rock 330

In a strong wind, some working of the spirit,

Some inward agitations thence are brought,

Whate'er their office, whether to beguile

Thoughts over busy in the course they took,

Or animate an hour of vacant ease.

Despite the references to a "strong wind" and "inward agitations," the

passage concludes with they are used to "beguile" or to fill up a time of

"vacant ease."

In Book XIII, the red passage returns us with its focus on the roads to

the "road that glittered to the moon" passage in Book IV. There is a

similar concern with exploring the unknown; roads have

wrought

On my imagination since the morn

Of childhood, when a disappearing line,

One daily present to my eyes, that crossed

The naked summit of a far-off hill

Beyond the limits that my feet had trod,

Was like an invitation into space 150

Boundless, or guide into eternity.

The next sentence extends the "explorer" idea by comparing the traveler

on a road to a mariner who "sails the roaring sea." The passage continues

by talking about roads as "schools" where the poet learned much about "the

passions of mankind."

The passage highlighted in green is perhaps one of the strangest in

The Prelude. If you remember that passage in the Intimations Ode where

Wordsworth gives thanks for

Those shadowy recollections,

150 Which, be they what they may

151 Are yet the fountain-light of all our day,

152 Are yet a master-light of all our seeing;

153 Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make

154 Our noisy years seem moments in the being

155 Of the eternal Silence: truths that wake,

156 To perish never;

157 Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour,

158 Nor Man nor Boy,

159 Nor all that is at enmity with joy,

160 Can utterly abolish or destroy!

the description Wordsworth hierarchy of the audiences Wordsworth describes

at the end of the green passage may seem less surprising. At the beginning

of the passage, Wordsworth celebrates his vocation as a poet:

Here might I pause, and bend in reverence

To Nature, and the power of human minds,

To men as they are men within themselves.

How oft high service is performed within,

When all the external man is rude in show,--

Not like a temple rich with pomp and gold,

But a mere mountain chapel, that protects 230

Its simple worshippers from sun and shower.

Of these, said I, shall be my song; of these,

If future years mature me for the task,

Will I record the praises, making verse

Deal boldly with substantial things;

. . .

--my theme 240

No other than the very heart of man,

As found among the best of those who live--

Not unexalted by religious faith,

Nor uninformed by books, good books, though few--

In Nature's presence: thence may I select

Sorrow, that is not sorrow, but delight;

And miserable love, that is not pain

To hear of, for the glory that redounds

Therefrom to human kind, and what we are.

Be mine to follow with no timid step 250

Where knowledge leads me: it shall be my pride

That I have dared to tread this holy ground,

Speaking no dream, but things oracular . . .

Wordsworth goes on to describe the audiences which, he feels, will embrace

his poetry. First are the sophisticated educated men and women of good

will:

Matter not lightly to be heard by those

Who to the letter of the outward promise

Do read the invisible soul; by men adroit

In speech, and for communion with the world

Accomplished; minds whose faculties are then

Most active when they are most eloquent,

And elevated most when most admired.

A second group, presumably "higher" than these sophisticated readers(see

the "still higher" a bit later) are made up of apparently more

self-reliant, perhaps self-educated people who are closer to Nature

(remember Wordsworth's ideas on rural language expressed in the "Preface

to the Lyrical Ballads):

Men may be found of other mould than these,

Who are their own upholders, to themselves

Encouragement, and energy, and will,

Expressing liveliest thoughts in lively words

As native passion dictates.

The "still higher" third group which Wordsworth mentions don't use

language at all:

Others, too,

There are among the walks of homely life

Still higher, men for contemplation framed,

Shy, and unpractised in the strife of phrase;

Meek men, whose very souls perhaps would sink

Beneath them, summoned to such intercourse: 270

Theirs is the language of the heavens, the power,

The thought, the image, and the silent joy:

Words are but under-agents in their souls;

When they are grasping with their greatest strength,

They do not breathe among them:

The implications of this hierarchy perhaps underscores one of the

paradoxes of Romantic poetry. Earlier in The Prelude, in Book I in fact,

Wordsworth writes:

My own voice cheered me, and, far more, the mind's

Internal echo of the imperfect sound;

To both I listened, drawing from them both

A cheerful confidence in things to come.

The division here between the "poem of the mind" and the imperfect "poem

of the voice" is a theme we will see in Shelley and Keats, too.

Wordsworth's division of his audience seems to culminate in a group that

is "beyond" poetry--who don't need poetry because they have immediate

access to themselves and Nature. Their daily perceptions are themselves

poems beyond language.

Wordsworth's reaffirmation of his poetic calling leads him to a discussion

of his particular gift. He wants to be a prophet as well as a poet, and he

wants his poetry to have a power like Nature:

Dearest Friend!

If thou partake the animating faith 300

That Poets, even as Prophets, each with each

Connected in a mighty scheme of truth,

Have each his own peculiar faculty,

Heaven's gift, a sense that fits him to perceive

Objects unseen before, thou wilt not blame

The humblest of this band who dares to hope

That unto him hath also been vouchsafed

An insight that in some sort he possesses,

A privilege whereby a work of his,

Proceeding from a source of untaught things, 310

Creative and enduring, may become

A power like one of Nature's.

(Compare this idea to Wordsworth's discovery at the end of Book IV that

there is a Nature that exists in the works of mighty poets.) Wordsworth

follows this passage up by describing his experience on a trip to

Stonehenge (note how the movement of this passage compares with the Grotto

of Antiparos passage earlier in the work). He sees in these prehistorical

inhabitants of Britain the sources of grisly violence that led to human

sacrifice and the intellectual creativity--and here Wordsworth's interest

in mathematics and geometry re-emerges--that inspired and made possible

their astronomical discoveries. This combination of violent

destructiveness and productive creativity are still basic constituents of

the human. Shelley, in "Mount Blanc" will use a glacier as another image

of this human duality.

The book ends with yet another evidence of his poetic power. Note that the

interaction between the human mind and Nature is stressed in this

description of Wordsworth's discovery of a "new world":

I remember well

That in life's every-day appearances

I seemed about this time to gain clear sight

Of a new world--a world, too, that was fit 370

To be transmitted, and to other eyes

Made visible; as ruled by those fixed laws

Whence spiritual dignity originates,

Which do both give it being and maintain

A balance, an ennobling interchange

Of action from without and from within;

The excellence, pure function, and best power

Both of the objects seen, and eye that sees.

The new world--the world of his poetry--gets its power both from without

and from within, from the eye and the objects the eye sees.