The Prelude (1805) – on which this section concentrates and from which version the poem is quoted unless stated otherwise – grew out of the so‐called Two‐Part Prelude of 1799. In the longer thirteen‐book form arrived at in 1805 (though the poem was not published – or given its title – until after Wordsworth’s death, in 1850, and then in a much‐revised form), it builds on the evocation of childhood experiences to the fore in the 1799 version. It is a poem about the growth of the poet’s mind. While poetic identity is a mystery that cannot be fully explained, the plot of the poem is something like this: ‘Fostered alike by beauty and by fear’ (I.306) during childhood, by, that is, the Burkean complementarities of the beautiful and the sublime, the poet grew up, his imagination nurtured by nature.1 In three places and stages of his life there were interruptions to this nurturing: while he was a student at Cambridge (Book III); when he went to London (a kind of underworld in Wordsworth’s epic of the self, Book VII); and crucially his involvement in the French Revolution (Books IX and X) – first, as an ardent supporter; then as a continued supporter of the Revolution’s ideals but a disenchanted spectator of its descent into bloodshed and violence, and of the belligerent responses to it of liberty‐denying governments, including that of his own country; then as a would‐be Godwinian rationalist, utterly losing his way, until saved from his fall into self‐division by nature, his sister Dorothy, and his soulmate as a poet, Coleridge. Reconfirmed in his vocation as a poet, he describes himself and Coleridge as ‘joint labourers in a work’ (XIII.439) of general ‘redemption’ (XIII.441); as ‘Prophets of nature’ (XIII.442), they will preach a secularized creed based on the twin yet complexly interrelated doctrines of nature and imagination, speaking ‘A lasting inspiration’ (XIII.443) to others.
The poem traces a circular journey: if its theme is Wordsworth’s poetic growth, the evidence that he is, indeed, a poet is the poem which we are reading about his growth as a poet. From the beginning, in its echo in ‘The earth is all before me!’ (15) of the close of Paradise Lost, when, expelled from Eden, our first parents find that ‘The world was all before them, where to choose / Their place of rest, and Providence their guide’, Wordsworth challenges comparison with Miltonic epic.2 He is offering less a justification of the ways of God to men than a vindication of the importance of what Jonathan Wordsworth calls ‘inner consciousness’, a theme the poet claims is ‘heroic argument’ (III.182), echoing and competing with Milton when the older poet, comparing himself with classical predecessors, says of his Christian ‘argument’ that it is ‘Not less but more heroic’ than theirs.3
Wordsworthian epic allows for contingency, true to a work that, for many years, the Romantic poet regarded as ‘The Poem to Coleridge’,4 as the forerunner to his never‐completed Recluse, which would include, in addition to The Prelude, ‘a narrative poem of the epic kind’ (3 June 1805).5 Its structure is hospitable to the significance of external circumstances, even as it centres on the importance of the self; at one affecting moment, Wordsworth suggests the hidden quality of what spurs him on when he writes, after the assertion, ‘I am lost’ (XI.329), ‘the hiding‐places of my power / Seem open’ (XI.335–6). As Joshua Wilner argues, the poem’s episodes ‘participate in and intimate a more enigmatic mode of totality’.6
Wordsworth himself, in the immediate aftermath of completing the 1805 version of the point, expresses disappointment: ‘it seemed to have a dead weight about it, the reality so far short of the expectation’.7 Yet that statement rehearses one of the themes of the poem, the gap between ‘reality’ and ‘expectation’. Book I of The Prelude is not long under way before a note of self‐reproach enters, as Wordsworth speaks of having ‘a mind that every hour / Turns recreant to her task’ (259–60); alluding to Matthew 25:14–30, about the steward who fails to use his ‘talents’,8 he sees himself as ‘Unprofitably travelling towards the grave / Like a false steward who has much received / And renders nothing back’ (269–71). He goes on to ask, ‘Was it for this’, and, in the act of lamenting his unfulfilled promise, he apparently yet artfully stumbles on his great theme: childhood experience and the way in which it nurtured his creativity: ‘Was it for this’, the sentence unfurls, in a rearranged use of the poem’s ‘starting‐point’,9 ‘That one, the fairest of all rivers, loved / To blend his murmurs with my nurse’s song’ (I.271–3) and ‘sent a voice / That flowed along my dreams’ (275–6). That phrasing, ‘flowed along my dreams’, makes ‘my dreams’ a channel for the river’s ‘voice’, a voice that helped to sponsor the poet’s own voice.
This mingling of the physical and the metaphorical is among Wordsworth’s major achievements as a poet. In the so‐called Glad Preamble, at the poem’s start, he moves from an actual wind, ‘the sweet breath of heaven’ (41) that ‘Was blowing on my body’ (42), to a figurative account of poetic inspiration (whose etymology means ‘in‐breathing’). This passage illustrates the unpredictability that animates Wordsworth’s poetry. The state of inspiration starts as a harmonious response to the external, as ‘A corresponding mild creative breeze’ (43); within a few lines, it has become ‘A tempest, a redundant energy / Vexing its own creation’ (46–7). The breeze has turned into a tempest; the creative state now vexes itself, as if overwhelmed by its own energies. What emerges is a central theme of The Prelude: is there any object adequate to explain or to accommodate the mind’s creative powers?
A key passage in this regard occurs in Book VI when Wordsworth describes crossing the Simplon Pass. More precisely, it centres on Wordsworth’s belated discovery, via ‘tidings’ given by a ‘peasant’ (618), that he and his companion had already crossed the Alps. In the process of reflection, even, it almost seems, composition (especially in 1850 with its reference to ‘here’), Wordsworth comes face to face with ‘Imagination’, apostrophized in the following way in the 1850 version, quoted here:
Imagination – here the Power so called
Through sad incompetence of human speech,
That awful Power rose from the mind’s abyss
Like an unfathered vapour that enwraps,
At once, some lonely traveller. (1850, 592–6)
Imagination asserts its all‐governing primacy for the poet; it is ‘unfathered’, a quasi‐deity, an ‘awful Power’, as Shelley’s unknown ultimate would be called in the first line of ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’. It ‘enwraps’ the poet who is, for all his love of nature, a ‘lonely traveller’ in this world, driven on, as Wordsworth will go on to say, in a passage of great eloquence, by the pursuit of ‘something evermore about to be’ (608). Imagination is the origin of the mind’s capacity for hope and expectation, which in turn is demonstrated by his continuing to suppose the Alps had still to be crossed even though he had already crossed them. Wordsworth here values the imagination’s ‘strength / Of usurpation’ (599–600), a weighty line‐ending pointing up the mind’s capacity to supplant the ‘real’, moments when ‘the light of sense’ (600), our ability to form sense‐impressions, ‘Goes out’ (601), but does so in ‘a flash’ (601) that ‘has revealed / The invisible world’ (601–2). The relationship between imagination and nature is less evidently harmonious here than in other parts of the poem (such as the Climbing of Snowdon at the start of Book XIII, discussed at the end of this section), though Wordsworth goes on to evoke, in his account of the subsequent descent down a ‘narrow chasm’ (621), a natural world revelatory of what might be called a humanist ‘Eternity, / Of first, and last, and midst, and without end’ (639). In Paradise Lost, Milton speaks of God in comparable terms (V.165). Wordsworth, as Jonathan Wordsworth notes, is ‘Dealing in the numinous, not the specifically Christian’.10
Imagination and nature are at once allies and rivals in the poem. At its core are the ‘spots of time’ to which Wordsworth first refers in the 1799 Prelude. These visionary intimations speak of Wordsworth’s longing to experience a kind of permanence that is rooted in the temporal. Significantly he prefaces explicit discussion of these spots in the 1799 Prelude by writing of tragic rural incidents to which ‘other feelings’ are later ‘attached’, along with ‘forms’ – undying mental impressions – ‘That yet exist with independent life, / And, like their archetypes, know no decay’ (1799, I.284, 285–7). The ‘archetypes’ are, one senses, ‘forms’ of nature that correlate with deep sources of strength within the poet’s mind, and the wording is sure yet riddling, inviting philosophical glosses without wholly responding to them, hinting at an underlying knowledge of poetic nourishment. As revised in 1805, the passage describing and explaining ‘spots of time’ reads:
There are in our existence spots of time
Which with distinct pre‐eminence retain
A vivifying virtue, whence, depressed
By false opinion and contentious thought,
Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight
In trivial occupations and the round
Of ordinary intercourse, our minds
Are nourished and invisibly repaired— (XI.257–64)
‘Such moments’ (273), Wordsworth continues, ‘in which / We have had deepest feeling that the mind / Is lord and master’ (269–71), are seen as ‘taking their date / From our first childhood’ (274–5). These moments of imaginative restoration bring to mind the revelations of ‘Tintern Abbey’ when ‘the heavy and the weary weight / Of all this unintelligible world / Is lightened’ (40–2); in both cases, through a mood of austere affirmation created by diction and rhythm, the poetry evokes all that is antagonistic to the imagination (one notices the unignorable weight of ‘unintelligible’, for example), even as it asserts the epiphanic power of rekindled memory. Often, as in the two passages that follow – the experience of ‘visionary dreariness’ (310) when the young Wordsworth was ‘Disjoined’ (285) from his ‘encourager and guide’ (283), and the so‐called ‘Waiting for the Horses’ episode – the content of the memory is close to trauma; what consoles the adult poet is the imaginative intensity and power of which his mind was and is capable.
In the second passage, Wordsworth associates a particularly bleak day when he waited for the horses which would take him home from school with the subsequent death of his father. Feeling chastised for his ‘anxiety of hope’ (371) by the father’s death, Wordsworth evokes, as though strangely restorative, a composite blend of sights and sounds from which he ‘would drink / As at a fountain’ (383–4). Wordsworth at once catalogues and solemnly invokes
the wind and sleety rain
And all the business of the elements,
The single sheep, and the one blasted tree,
And the bleak music of that old stone,
The noise of wood and water, and the mist
Which on the line of each of those two roads
Advanced in such indisputable shapes … (375–81)
In his ‘Letter to Lord Byron’, W. H. Auden describes Wordsworth as a ‘most bleak old bore’,11 but even his insult bears involuntary witness to the unusual way in which Wordsworth uses words. Caught up in the ‘business of the elements’, Wordsworth’s language is elemental, able to value what is ‘single’ and solitary, at the core of our diurnal existence yet seeming to encroach upon it from another world. The passage amounts to an unanalysable, symbolic hymn to what, elsewhere, Wordsworth calls ‘the mystery of words’ (V.621).
In the first ‘spot of time’ in the passage in Book XI under discussion, Wordsworth stumbles into a scene of terror, a place where ‘in former times / A murderer had been hung in iron chains’ (288–9). Described in the utterly bare way typical of Wordsworth when he is trying to drill down to the bedrock of his imagination, a combination of sights composes what Thomas De Quincey calls memory’s ‘involutes’. ‘I have been struck with the important truth’, De Quincey writes, ‘that far more of our deepest thoughts and feelings pass to us through perplexed combinations of concrete objects, pass to us as involutes (if I may coin that word) in compound experiences incapable of being disentangled, than ever reach us directly and in their own abstract shapes.’12 Wordsworth presents such ‘perplexed combinations of concrete objects’ with an uncanny force; ‘ordinary’ words conduct an electric charge:
It was in truth
An ordinary sight, but I should need
Colours and words that are unknown to man
To paint the visionary dreariness
Which, while I looked all round for my lost guide,
Did at that time invest the naked pool,
The beacon and the lonely eminence,
The woman and her garments vexed and tossed
By the strong wind. (XI.307–15)
The ‘visionary dreariness’ is an entranced ghostliness that is able to ‘invest’ – to clothe and to endow – an ‘ordinary sight’ that defeats representation. Sublimity boldly declares itself; the poet would ‘need / Colours and words that are unknown to man’. It persuades us, too, of its presence through the way in which the poetry’s repetition with variations imbues pool, beacon, and woman with significance. Mixing predominantly simple words with a few that are more complicated (‘visionary dreariness’, ‘invest’, ‘eminence’, ‘garments’), the diction directs us to the work of the ‘investing’ mind as well as to the irreducibly ‘naked’ thisness of what lies outside the mind. The final image of the ‘strong wind’ takes us back to the opening of the poem and the image of the ‘corresponding mild creative breeze’ discussed above.
Originally that ‘spot of time’ was close to others that are widely distributed in 1805. A famous instance is the boat‐stealing episode from the first book. The poetry depends for its effectiveness on its ability to reproduce the physical reality of the experience. So the rhythms dip and heave in sympathy with the boy’s rowing in the lines: ‘And as I rose upon the stroke the boat / Went heaving through the water like a swan’ (403–4). As the boy rows, the ‘huge cliff’ (409) begins to loom, chastisingly, into view; the further away from the shore he rows, the more the horizon changes, bringing into prominence more distant objects. Hence the almost nightmarish quality of lines in which the boy struggles to flee from the menacing cliff which strides towards him:
I struck, and struck again,
And, growing still in stature, the huge cliff
Rose up between me and the stars, and still
With measured motion, like a living thing
Strode after me. (I.408–12)
Wordsworth is at once experiencing child and remembering adult. As the cliff materializes, its presence is more than nightmarish: an august presence, it strides ‘With measured motion, like a living thing’, two Coleridgean echoes (from Kubla Khan and ‘This Lime‐Tree Bower My Prison’) underscoring a sense of design and pantheism.
The idea of nature as ‘living’ gives power to the writing; we see Wordsworth’s concern with what F. R. Leavis calls ‘the living connexions between man and the extra‐human universe’.13 This universe remains both ‘extra‐human’ and vitally akin to the human, a blend caught in the lines which conclude the episode. Wordsworth writes: ‘after I had seen / That spectacle, for many days my brain / Worked with a dim and undetermined sense / Of unknown modes of being’ (I.417–20). The lines eloquently struggle to comprehend difficult experience. Wordsworth’s language lets us witness the struggle. The strong verb, ‘Worked’, and the receding syntax of the phrases that follow, seem arduously to pursue barely articulable feeling. A phrase such as ‘dim and undetermined’ is not simply vague; it means that something has challenged what Wordsworth calls a state ‘In which the eye was master of the heart’ (1805, XI.171) and that the experience has brought the poet into contact with the illimitable (that which cannot be given an end or defined, cannot be ‘determined’). William Empson comments on the part played by ‘The apparently flat little word sense’, placed suggestively at the end of the line, meaning ‘intuition’ but reminding us of the role performed by sensation.14 As he points out, Wordsworth’s ‘whole position depends on some rather undeveloped theory about how the mind interprets what it gets from the senses’.15 The very lack of philosophical precision allows Wordsworth to be faithful to the experience of groping for ‘sense’. In pinning down the way in which those ‘unknown modes of being’ make themselves felt, Wordsworth goes on to evoke how ‘huge and mighty forms that do not live / Like living men moved slowly through my mind / By day, and were the trouble of my dreams’ (425–7). The line‐endings, used superbly, create a wealth of suggestions: the forms do not live; they do not live like living men (implying that they live in some way appropriate for ‘huge and mighty forms’); and though they do not live, they still move like living men. Uncannily they do and do not exist within the boy’s mind.
In one of its aspects, the huge cliff is a projection from a guilty child’s mind of a stern parent. Wordsworth speaks of ‘The self‐sufficing power of solitude’ (II.78) as a strength. Yet, at times, solitude seems close to alienation. In the woodcock‐snaring episode, Wordsworth anticipates his use of ‘trouble’ in the boat‐stealing passage, when he describes his former childish self as conspicuously alone in and at odds with a surrounding scene of natural harmony: ‘Moon and stars / Were shining o’er my head; I was alone, / And seemed to be a trouble to the peace / That was among them’ (I.321–4). The child discovers his isolation, his ‘aloneness’, as he grows sensitive to ‘Moon and stars’ that were, in both senses, ‘o’er my head’. In retrospect, Wordsworth is able to give thanks to Nature for being a willing accomplice in this experience of being a ‘trouble’ to her. Nature has helped him discover a power within himself at odds with simple submission to natural beauty. As often in the poem, there is a strong impression, never wholly confronted in the commentary that follows the spots of time, of a transgressive, guilt‐ridden quality in the poet’s dealings with nature. This impression is vivid at the close of the woodcock‐snaring episode:
and when the deed was done
I heard among the solitary hills
Low breathings coming after me, and sounds
Of undistinguishable motion, steps
Almost as silent as the turf they trod. (328–32)
Earlier, Wordsworth has made fun of his childhood self as a self‐dramatizing fantasist, a ‘fell destroyer’ (318).16 Now the heightened diction slows down the line in the long word ‘undistinguishable’, making us pause over this state of charged awareness, before we are moved on by the tiptoe‐like lightness of ‘steps’, placed at the line’s end. The passage takes us from an account of ordinary if intense experience to ‘Low breathings’ that are at once wholly explicable (projections from the child’s guilt‐ridden mind) and semi‐supernatural (imagining nature as though it were humanly alive).
Throughout The Prelude, Wordsworth modulates between evocation and meditation. The most intense passages tend to be evocations. But Wordsworth’s commentary makes the heightened moments more convincing; above all, it is often acutely aware that the growth of a poet’s mind which, in one sense, it tries to explain, cannot be explained. So, a little after the woodcock‐stealing episode, Wordsworth remarks in a passage in which abstract meditation assumes dramatic force:
The mind of man is framed even like the breath
And harmony of music; there is a dark
Invisible workmanship that reconciles
Discordant elements, and makes them move
In one society. (I.351–5)
Wordsworth might be describing other Romantic‐period masterpieces apart from his own here: given the reference to ‘the breath / And harmony of music’, one might think of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in its winning of ultimate victory out of turbulent orchestrations. Here the poetry preserves a sense of mystery even as it seeks to explain. The ‘workmanship that reconciles / Discordant elements’ is ‘dark’ and ‘Invisible’. The Prelude as a whole tries to reconcile ‘Discordant elements’ while remaining aware of darker forces.
Even when politics and history are his subject, Wordsworth is always foregrounding the work of his imagination, and compelling our interest through the imaginative force of the writing. This force can result from the way in which narrative order is subverted. The famous lines recounting Wordsworth’s delight in the onset of the Revolution – ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven’ (X.692–3) – ironize their delight by occurring after the traumatic inner upheaval that Wordsworth suffered as a result of the violence and slaughter into which the Revolution descended. The sense of ‘Bliss’ is still undeniable, but so, too, is the tragic awareness that the dawn proved to be a false dawn. The reader has already encountered a passage such as the following when, a month after the September massacres, Wordsworth experiences a near‐apocalyptic nightmare in which ‘I wrought upon myself, / Until I seemed to hear a voice that cried / To the whole city, “Sleep no more”’ (X.75–7). Echoing Macbeth, Wordsworth experiences guilt, terror, and something close to prophetic vision; the circularity of history makes itself evident to him as a voice takes him over, impressing upon him a darker meaning of revolution, and he finds himself chanting:
‘The horse is taught his manage, and the wind
Of heaven wheels round and treads in his own steps;
Year follows year, the tide returns again,
Day follows day, all things have second birth;
The earthquake is not satisfied at once!’ (X.70–4)
The lines are an incantation that summons up a vision of history as cyclical portent and fulfilment. Few passages convey as effectively as this and others in The Prelude what living through the Revolution must have been like at the time. Wordsworth was in France for much of 1792, where he met and had a daughter by Annette Vallon, returning to England in November of that year. As England fought against France, Wordsworth experienced divided loyalties, ‘A conflict of sensations without name’ (X.265), as he calls it in one place. The ebb and flow of feeling, Wordsworth struggling to remain loyal to the ideal of the Revolution even as he sees it besmirched and assaulted by alleged supporters and hostile antagonists, is sustained throughout; there are switchbacks of emphasis, subversions of narrative linearity, a constant ricocheting between positions. The result is among the finest instances of the fidelity to what experience feels like as it is re‐entered through recollection that characterizes The Prelude.
That fidelity is present in the Climbing of Snowdon passage, placed climactically at the start of the epic’s final book. The poetry’s effectiveness owes much to its rootedness in believably rendered experience as the climbers negotiate their ascent on ‘a summer’s night, a close warm night’ (10), ‘Hemmed round on every side with fog and damp’ (16). There is ‘a touch of mock‐heroic humour’ in the evocation of the dog finding a hedgehog and making a Miltonic ‘barking turbulent,’17 before the writing uses its fluid rhythms, precise words, and images to recreate the speaker’s ordinary yet visionary apprehension when ‘instantly a light upon the turf / Fell like a flash!’ (39–40). Wordsworth cunningly manipulates vowel sounds to lend force to the alliterative crescendo of ‘Fell’ (a strong stress reversal) ‘like a flash’ (picking up and consolidating the dawning sense conveyed by ‘instantly a light’). The poet moves from ‘turf’ to universe; he experiences, in a single moment of poetic seeing and sensing, the moon ‘Immense above my head’ (42) and, ‘at my feet’ (44), ‘a huge sea of mist’ (43). This image of the mist as a sea then passes into an interplay between the metaphorical sea and the ‘sea – the real sea, that seemed / To dwindle and give up its majesty, / Usurped upon as far as sight could reach’ (49–51). With serious wit, Wordsworth suggests how notions of the ‘real’ can be transformed, and, through associations with power, majesty, and usurpation, he prepares for the subsequent allegorizing gloss that interprets the physical scene as an analogy for the mind’s transformative powers: ‘it appeared to me’, writes Wordsworth, ‘The perfect image of a mighty mind, / Of one that feeds upon infinity’ (68–70). The blank verse is eloquently expressive here: the rhythms are regular, and yet each line sounds a new note, the balanced phrasing of line 69 giving way to the inexhaustible feeding of line 70 that keeps the poem open to ‘infinity’.
Throughout, Wordsworth suggests that nature is alive and animate, and that that life is, in part, responsive to and an echo of the imaginative life we experience in the writing. All comes to a focus and yet to a vanishing point in the final discovery of ‘a blue chasm, a fracture in the vapour’ (56). This ‘chasm’ tears a rent in the poetry’s verbal texture, even as it supplies a ‘breach / Through which the homeless voice of waters rose’ (62–3). There is power and a subdued plangency here, as though the ‘homeless voice’ arose, not in protest, but in insistence that it should be acknowledged, since it bears witness to and is an analogue of the poet’s shaping imagination. Homelessness is ultimately the imagination’s abiding city in The Prelude, which often thrives on unexpected movements beyond the describable, the known, and the local in the direction of ‘infinity’. Yet mind and world seem rapturously in touch with one another’s deepest longings in the passage; it is in ‘That deep dark thoroughfare’, Wordsworth asserts, that ‘nature’ had ‘lodged / The soul, the imagination of the whole’ (63–4). Nature lodges the imagination, even as the poet’s imagination supposes that nature is capable of such a lodging. The gloss that follows lays emphasis on the scene as a revelation of the mind’s power; the scene itself sustains a balance between what can be discerned and intuited, and the poetic faculty that articulates such a process of discernment and intuition. And the control of image, stress, word‐choice all ensure that the poetry embodies what it describes: the imagination’s delighted discovery of its own workings, a major theme of one of Romantic poetry’s major works.