WILLIAM WORDSWORTH fell in love with his childhood. He loved it at the time—well, almost all of it—but he loved it even more as he grew older. When he was twenty-eight, and sitting rather cold and homesick in a small town in Germany, he started to write a poem about his life. This vast autobiographical poem, which was later called The Prelude, is the account of a man and his mind growing up. It is mainly about his schooldays and early manhood, and in it he recalls in great detail and with great emotion his early experiences and impressions. It is often philosophical, as he tries to interpret and analyse some very strange, almost mystical experiences.
Many of us have had strange experiences as children, strange in the sense that, for no apparent reason, they stick in our minds long after they have happened, long after they have ceased to make any real sense to us. Most of them don’t bear repeating. They only have any meaning for ourselves. As we get older, we find it hard to believe that they ever happened, and wonder if perhaps we shaped them to suit ourselves because we were told they happened to us. As we age, they all fade.
Two things distinguish Wordsworth in his obsession with childhood. Firstly, his visions, his moments of mysticism, were unusually deep and clear. He felt not just a communion with nature and the world of the Spirits, but that he was a part of them, beyond normal life, and that he had left his human frame. He often had to touch himself afterwards, or feel a solid wall, to reassure himself that he was back in the real world. These visions were so strong that he could remember them vividly ever afterwards, recall them in tranquillity, re-create at will his original childhood sensations. Secondly, his visions were not restricted to his childhood. These spots of time, as he called them, continued to recur, or so he thought, well into adulthood. They were a mark of his poetic inspiration, and when they started to go, so some would say, his muse began to fade.
Wordsworth knew that his childhood, and his childhood visions, were important to him, which was why he wanted to capture and define them in The Prelude. But The Prelude is more than simply a list of his mystical experiences. Few poets have ever been so practical, so sane, so healthy, so down-to-earth. In The Prelude, he also describes all his everyday, common-or-garden, school and growing-up experiences, the sort we can all identify with, the facts of the matter, such as he remembered them.
Without The Prelude, we would know very little about the details of Wordsworth’s early years. The Prelude is a basic source. It is all written from Wordsworth’s point of view, which is to be expected. No-one else was bothering to make notes on an unknown young man growing up in a remote area of the north of England, so we have to rely on it. The mass of letters and diaries and memories, so dense that they can overwhelm an unsuspecting biographer, do not appear till much later. It means, therefore, that the facts of Wordsworth’s early life can be simply stated.…