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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
In 'The Prelude,' William Wordsworth embarks on an introspective journey, exploring the development of the poet's mind against the backdrop of the natural world. Written in blank verse, this autobiographical poem spans Wordsworth's life from childhood to adulthood, reflecting his profound connection with nature and the evolution of his poetic sensibilities. It situates itself within the Romantic literary tradition, portraying the tension between the individual experience and the universality of human emotions, all while capturing the beauty and sublimity of the English landscape. Wordsworth's lyrical style and philosophical depth invite readers into a contemplative exploration of memory, identity, and the transformative power of nature. William Wordsworth (1770-1850) was a central figure in the Romantic movement, deeply influenced by the political and social upheavals of his time. His early experiences in the Lake District and his friendships with other literary giants like Samuel Taylor Coleridge laid the groundwork for his contemplative, nature-infused poetry. Wordsworth's belief in the ethical and spiritual dimensions of nature propelled him to articulate his insights in works like 'The Prelude,' which serves as both a personal narrative and a manifesto of Romantic ideals. Readers seeking to delve into the complexities of self-discovery and the evocative interplay between individuality and nature will find 'The Prelude' an essential and enriching experience. Wordsworth's masterful ability to fuse personal reflection with broader themes of existence makes this work a cornerstone of English literature, inviting continual contemplation and appreciation. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - An Author Biography reveals milestones in the author's life, illuminating the personal insights behind the text. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
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The Prelude
Table of Contents
Introduction
A young mind, moving from lakeside paths to the tumult of a changing era, learns to read the world, and in that attentive reading—through nature, memory, and trial—discovers the shape, the limits, and the liberating reach of its own imagination and voice.
William Wordsworth’s The Prelude is a long autobiographical poem in blank verse that charts the growth of a poet’s mind from childhood to early maturity. Composed as an inward epic rather than a tale of wars and kings, it follows landscapes, books, friendships, and historical currents that helped form his sensibility. The poem offers a patient meditation on how perception deepens into understanding, how memory refashions experience, and how the natural world can act as teacher and measure. Without revealing episodes, it is enough to say that walking, looking, and thinking become the action, and an evolving consciousness becomes the hero.
The Prelude is often called the first great modern autobiography in verse, and its classic status rests on audacity and depth. Wordsworth adapted the epic scale to the interior life, making thought, doubt, and renewal the grand events. He also helped define British Romanticism’s central commitments: the dignity of ordinary experience, the shaping power of imagination, and a renewed covenant with nature. The poem’s influence extends through the nineteenth century and beyond, demonstrating that a life’s making can be told without theatrical plot. Its meditative cadences and ethical seriousness continue to shape how later writers conceive personal history and poetic vocation.
Wordsworth began The Prelude in the late 1790s and worked on it intensively in the first years of the nineteenth century, a period charged by the aftermath of the French Revolution and rapid social change in Britain. Alongside his collaboration with Samuel Taylor Coleridge on Lyrical Ballads, he turned inward to consider the sources of his art. The poem bears the imprint of youthful exhilaration, disillusion, and maturing judgment, but it treats these pressures as occasions for reflection rather than confession. Its landscapes—especially those of the English Lake District—are less stage settings than active participants in a sustained inquiry into perception and value.
Although drafted and revised over many years, The Prelude was not published during Wordsworth’s lifetime. An important completed version existed by 1805 in thirteen books and was shared privately, but he continued to refine the work. After his death in 1850, a fourteen-book version appeared in print, and the poem received the title by which it is known. Wordsworth had conceived it as the opening movement of a larger philosophical project called The Recluse, which he never finished. The Prelude thus stands both independently and as a gateway, setting out the intellectual and spiritual groundwork he believed necessary for that ambitious design.
Formally, the poem is written in unrhymed iambic pentameter, the English blank verse practiced by Milton and reshaped here for a more conversational, reflective music. Long, flowing sentences carry the reader across valleys of description into summits of insight, while sudden turns register moments of shock or wonder. Wordsworth’s diction favors the plain but precise, allowing philosophical argument to rise from concrete detail. The structure is episodic yet cumulative: scenes, journeys, and reading experiences accrue into a portrait of consciousness in motion. Memory provides the architecture, with recollection not merely retrieving the past but actively reinterpreting it in the present.
The book explores enduring themes that continue to resonate. Nature appears not as ornament but as interlocutor and guide, testing and enlarging perception. Childhood is treated as a reservoir of energies and feelings that shape adult capacities, while education becomes a lifelong dialogue between habit and surprise. The imagination stands at the center, neither escapist nor purely subjective, but a faculty that binds sensing, thinking, and acting into meaning. Alongside these, the poem weighs solitude and companionship, fear and fortitude, the claims of society and the claims of the self, always seeking an ethical poise grounded in attention to reality.
Wordsworth composed The Prelude partly in conversation with Coleridge and addressed it to him as a report on the foundations of his art. He aimed to clarify the sources of his poetic power and the discipline required to sustain it, believing that such groundwork was prerequisite to the more public philosophical poetry he envisioned in The Recluse. This intention shapes the work’s method: it sifts experience for patterns, tests convictions against memory, and measures inspiration against conscience. The result is not self-display but self-scrutiny, a sustained effort to articulate how a poet might live responsively in a demanding modern world.
The poem’s innovations have had long afterlives. By demonstrating that the formation of a consciousness could furnish epic matter, it opened space for later autobiographical long poems and reflective narratives. Victorian poets found in it a model for meditative structure and ethical ambition. Across the Atlantic, writers associated with Transcendentalism absorbed its confidence in ordinary perception and the moral significance of landscape. Twentieth-century critics and poets, even when questioning Romantic premises, continued to engage its strategies of memory and self-analysis. The Prelude remains a touchstone in debates about nature, culture, and the artist’s responsibility to the common reader.
Readers often discover that The Prelude works by accretion rather than spectacle. Its energies gather in quiet scenes of walking, reading, and looking, where shifts of light, season, and mood become occasions for thought. The verse invites a paced attention that mirrors the poet’s method, rewarding patience with sudden clarities. Description and reflection intertwine, so that the physical world appears charged with significance without being reduced to allegory. The effect is both intimate and expansive: the poem speaks personally while steadily enlarging the frame to include history, community, and the shared textures of place. It is a companionable, exacting book.
For contemporary readers, the work’s relevance is striking. Its probing of identity formation resonates with modern psychology; its insistence on careful noticing anticipates ecological sensibilities; its attention to crisis and recovery speaks to personal and collective resilience. In an age of speed, its measured cadences offer a counter-rhythm that honors depth over distraction. The Prelude models how to think with feeling and to feel with thought, making it a resource for ethical reflection as much as a literary achievement. It invites readers to cultivate interiority without isolation, to treat memory as a living faculty, and to value ties to place.
To approach The Prelude is to encounter a work at once foundational and continuously fresh: an epic of the inner life, a record of apprenticeship, and a meditation on what it means to make meaning. Its union of plain style and elevated purpose, of local scene and wide horizon, gives it lasting appeal. The poem endures because it honors experience while transforming it, discovering in the ordinary the seeds of insight and responsibility. Wordsworth’s undertaking remains compelling: to trace the growth of a mind in time, and to offer that tracing as a generous map for future travelers.
Synopsis
The Prelude is an autobiographical poem in blank verse by William Wordsworth, recounting the formation of his poetic mind from childhood to early adulthood. Conceived as an introduction to a larger, unfinished work titled The Recluse, it traces the interplay between inner growth and outer experience. Wordsworth wrote and revised the poem over many years, producing versions in 1799, 1805, and 1850. The work proceeds chronologically, assembling episodes of memory, travel, study, and reflection. Its focus is not on external plot but on how perception, feeling, and thought develop in relation to nature, society, and history, culminating in a statement of artistic purpose.
Early books begin in the Lake District, where the poet’s childhood unfolds among mountains, lakes, and villages. He recalls freedom of roaming, games, and solitary excursions that fostered alert senses and strong emotions. Vivid scenes include skating on frozen lakes, bird-nesting, and a nighttime rowing incident that leaves a lasting impression of nature’s power. Family losses and separation are acknowledged briefly, while local customs and labor shape his awareness of community. These memories illustrate how natural settings supplied both delight and discipline, mingling pleasure with awe and restraint, and establishing the groundwork for a moral imagination attentive to limits and consequences.
In school at Hawkshead, the poet balances lessons with outdoor life. Friendships, village festivals, and encounters with humble figures broaden his sympathies. He notes particular “spots of time,” vivid recollections that retain restorative force, reinforcing identity during later difficulty. Reading augments experience, yet he emphasizes that books matter most when joined to direct observation. Teachers and mentors encourage self-reliance rather than rigid routine. The period is marked by independence, walking, and steady acquaintance with seasonal change. By assembling these episodes, the poem shows how youthful play, fear, and wonder cohere into habits of attention that prepare for later study and travel.
University years at Cambridge introduce formal learning and wider social contact. The poet records modest engagement with academic exercises, finding greater stimulus in conversation, rowing on the river, and excursions into the countryside. He portrays the collegiate world without satire or praise, noting ceremonies, examinations, and customs as part of an education in confidence rather than specialization. Summer vacations remain crucial, renewing his attachment to hills and waters after terms spent among buildings and rules. The contrast between institutional routine and open-air wandering underlines a continuing theme: development depends on alternating solitude and society, structure and freedom, memory and fresh observation.
Attention turns to reading and travel. The poet weighs the influence of literature—classical authors, modern poems, and philosophy—against the authority of things seen firsthand. He undertakes a pedestrian tour on the Continent, seeking Alpine scenery and traces of antiquity. A crossing of the Simplon Pass demonstrates how expectation and experience can misalign, yielding insights into the mind’s role in shaping perception. Glaciers, torrents, and valleys do not merely impress; they become occasions for inward movement and reflection. These episodes consolidate a belief that imagination does not passively receive the world but actively orders it, drawing strength from both books and landscapes.
A long book surveys London. The poet catalogs the city’s variety: markets, courts, theaters, churches, and crowds. He studies street performers, public spectacles, and scenes of poverty, registering novelty and distraction alongside energy and enterprise. The metropolis appears as a theatre of modern life where countless intentions intersect. Although attached to rural scenery, he treats the urban panorama as a necessary part of education, testing powers of attention amid noise and change. The section contributes a social dimension to the narrative, showing how observation of strangers complements rural memories and widens the scope of feeling beyond private or local attachments.
Residence in France coincides with the early stages of the Revolution. The poet reports sympathy for reform, admiration for civic hopes, and involvement with ordinary people affected by political change. He learns the language, travels among provinces, and forms personal ties that sharpen his interest in Europe’s future. The outbreak of war and shifting events complicate these sympathies, but at this stage the emphasis falls on expectation and generous belief. The narrative integrates public history into the story of an individual mind, indicating how political excitement can quicken moral reflection, enlarge horizons, and promise a union of private feeling with public purpose.
Later books record estrangement and recovery. Violence in France and separation from friends produce anxiety and self-distrust, leading to a period when creative powers seem impaired. A sojourn in Germany brings severe winters and concentrated reading, intensifying introspection. Returning to the Lakes, the poet finds steadier ground through habitual walks, observation, and conversation with his sister Dorothy. Friendship with Coleridge offers encouragement and a framework for long-planned work. The poem explains how memory—especially “spots of time”—and recurring contact with familiar places restore balance. Imagination reawakens not by escape from reality but by reordering experience within a durable pattern of meaning.
The conclusion gathers themes in a final ascent of a mountain, where a nocturnal view clarifies relations between mind and world. The episode affirms that imagination can illuminate reality without denying its independence. With this assurance, the poet states his intention to proceed to The Recluse, a projected philosophical poem on nature, man, and society, for which The Prelude serves as preparatory record. The overarching message is that a poet’s vocation is shaped by nature, memory, travel, reading, and history, all mediated by active consciousness. The work closes by linking personal development to a broader, enduring purpose in art and thought.
Historical Context
William Wordsworth’s The Prelude is set across the closing decades of the eighteenth century and the opening years of the nineteenth, charting a life entwined with the Lake District, Cambridge, London, revolutionary France, and the Alps. The poem’s lived geography includes Cockermouth and Hawkshead in the north of England, St John’s College, Cambridge (matriculated 1787), London’s streets and theaters, and French towns such as Orléans and Blois (1791–1792). Composition centers on Grasmere in Westmorland (Dove Cottage, 1799–1808) and later Rydal Mount. Though the 1805 version is crucial, the text reflects decades of revision, culminating in the posthumous 1850 publication.
The time is Georgian Britain under George III, when agrarian custom, common rights, and village economies faced accelerating enclosure and industrial change. Britain’s population and urban centers expanded rapidly, while war with revolutionary and Napoleonic France reshaped public life, taxation, and surveillance. The Lake District retained a pastoral economy of sheepfolds, small holdings, and packhorse routes, yet tourism and market forces pressed upon it. The poem’s places participate in this transition: Cambridge rituals and examinations, London’s teeming commerce and entertainments, and continental travel routes before and during international conflict, all provide a historical frame for Wordsworth’s moral and political self-education.
The French Revolution began in 1789 with the summoning of the Estates-General, the formation of the National Assembly in June, the fall of the Bastille on 14 July, the August Decrees abolishing feudal dues, and the Declaration of the Rights of Man on 26 August. The Fête de la Fédération (14 July 1790) symbolized constitutional hope. Wordsworth traveled to France in 1791, spending time in Orléans and Blois, and embraced republican ideals. His relationship with Annette Vallon in 1792 personalized his commitment to French reform. The Prelude memorializes this phase as a season of youthful zeal, when civic liberty seemed destined to redeem Europe.
Revolutionary France radicalized in 1792 as war commenced with Austria in April, the monarchy fell in August, and the September Massacres shook Paris. The National Convention proclaimed the Republic on 22 September and tried Louis XVI, who was executed on 21 January 1793. Britain entered war against France on 1 February 1793. Wordsworth, caught between personal ties and emerging hostilities, returned to England in December 1792. The Prelude records the disjunction between trans-channel affection and the eruption of total war, presenting a divided conscience that mirrors the wider fracture of European society as idealism collided with revolutionary violence and geopolitical necessity.
The Reign of Terror (1793–1794), administered by the Committee of Public Safety under Robespierre, instituted the Law of Suspects (September 1793) and Revolutionary Tribunals that sent roughly 16,000 to the guillotine, with many more dying in civil war and prisons. The fall of Robespierre on 9 Thermidor Year II (27 July 1794) ended the Terror and initiated the Thermidorian Reaction. In The Prelude, Books IX and X convert this chronology into an inner history: the collapse of doctrinaire faith, the moral exhaustion of witnessing extremity, and the subsequent search for steadier ethical ground. Political cataclysm becomes the matrix of a spiritual and intellectual crisis.
Napoleon Bonaparte’s coup of 18 Brumaire (9 November 1799) inaugurated the Consulate; he crowned himself Emperor on 2 December 1804. The Napoleonic Wars defined Europe to 1815: Trafalgar (21 October 1805) secured British sea power at the cost of Admiral Nelson’s life; Austerlitz (2 December 1805) displayed French mastery on land; later campaigns spanned the Peninsular War and culminated at Waterloo (18 June 1815). Britain armed volunteers and constructed Martello towers along the Channel. The Prelude’s later books reflect a turn from cosmopolitan revolution to a disciplined, patriotic liberty, internalizing a nation-at-arms ethos while resisting the seductions of conquest and charismatic autocracy.
The Treaty of Amiens (25 March 1802) briefly ended hostilities between Britain and France, restoring commerce and travel until war resumed in May 1803. Seizing the interlude, Wordsworth crossed to Calais in July 1802 to meet Annette Vallon and their daughter, Caroline, born in December 1792, arranging financial support and reconciliation. The fragile peace made possible this personal diplomacy at the Channel’s edge. The Prelude, while not a memoir of that meeting, registers the ethical labor of reconciliation and the contingency of peace, translating a diplomatic pause into a meditation on divided loyalties, responsibility, and the sea as both frontier and bridge.
Wartime Britain intensified domestic controls. William Pitt the Younger’s ministry suspended habeas corpus in 1794; the Treason Trials of 1794 (Thomas Hardy, John Horne Tooke, John Thelwall) ended in acquittal yet chilled dissent; the Seditious Meetings and Treasonable Practices Acts (1795) curbed assembly and speech; the Combination Acts (1799–1800) restricted trade unions. Home Office surveillance expanded. In 1798, a government agent investigated Wordsworth and Coleridge at Alfoxden, Somerset, after locals reported their coastal walks and note-taking as suspicious. The Prelude reflects this climate: political withdrawal, inward renovation, and a turn toward the Lake District as a moral refuge amid state anxiety.
Enclosure transformed the countryside. Between roughly 1760 and 1830, about 6.8 million acres of English commons and open fields were enclosed by nearly 4,000 Parliamentary Acts, anchored by the General Enclosure Act of 1801. Enclosure consolidated holdings, rationalized agriculture, and heightened productivity, but eroded customary rights to pasture, fuel, and gleaning, accelerating rural poverty and migration. In Westmorland and Cumberland, access to fells and transhumance patterns changed. The Prelude’s vignettes of shepherds, pedlars, and free-ranging childhood walks function as a social archive, quietly registering how legal landscapes reorder memory, community, and the ethical claims of the poor upon common land.
Industrialization reconfigured labor and space. Innovations in steam technology by James Watt and Matthew Boulton in the 1780s multiplied factory output; cotton production rose from some 40 million pounds in 1780 to over 100 million by 1815. Canals and turnpikes federated markets; London surpassed 1 million inhabitants by 1801, while Manchester and Leeds surged. Urban pollution, lighted streets, and spectacles of commodity display recast everyday experience. The Prelude’s London book portrays the metropolis as a phantasmagoria of crowds, imposture, and distraction, diagnosing the psychological costs of modernity and the vulnerability of attention and conscience in the new economy of sensation.
Subsistence crises framed daily politics in the 1790s. Poor harvests in 1795 and 1799 sent grain prices soaring; bread riots flared in London, the North, and the West Country. In Berkshire, magistrates inaugurated the Speenhamland system (May 1795), supplementing wages according to bread prices and family size, a precedent that influenced later Poor Law reform debates. Discharged soldiers and distressed laborers traversed rural roads seeking relief. The Prelude’s compassionate portraits of vagrants and marginal figures emerge from these pressures, reading poverty not as moral failure but as the visible consequence of economic shocks and the uneven protections of parish-based relief.
Wordsworth’s 1790 Alpine tour unfolded in a Europe not yet closed by war. He traveled through Switzerland and northern Italy, crossing the Simplon region by mule path from the Valais toward Domodossola, long before Napoleon’s engineered Simplon Road (constructed 1801–1805) regularized the pass. He visited Geneva and Chamonix, sites central to scientific and travel debates about glaciers, geology, and the sublime. The Prelude converts this itinerary into an education of the senses, staging encounters with precipices and torrents as historical as well as natural events, inscribing specific passes and towns into a map of personal formation.
The shipwreck of the East Indiaman Earl of Abergavenny on 5 February 1805 off Portland, Dorset, killed Captain John Wordsworth and more than 250 passengers and crew. The vessel struck the Shambles sandbank and sank within sight of Weymouth. The financial and emotional blow to the Wordsworth family was profound, extinguishing prospects of security. Composed in the same year, the 1805 Prelude bears the impress of this loss: sea imagery, meditations on fate, and brotherly remembrance deepen its elegiac tone. The catastrophe also illuminates Britain’s imperial trade routes and their hazards during wartime convoy and commerce.
The Peterloo Massacre on 16 August 1819 in Manchester exposed the volatility of postwar Britain. Some 60,000 assembled at St Peter’s Field to demand parliamentary reform; local yeomanry and troops charged, killing at least 15 and injuring hundreds. The event followed the Corn Laws (1815), inflation, and unemployment, and it preceded the Six Acts (1819), which further restricted public meetings and the press. Wordsworth opposed insurrection yet deplored official excess. While The Prelude narrates earlier decades, its revisions in the 1820s show sharpened wariness about mass politics and a preference for gradual moral reform over sudden constitutional rupture.
The Reform Act of 1832 reshaped representation, abolishing many rotten boroughs and adding industrial towns like Manchester, Leeds, and Birmingham to the electoral map. The electorate expanded by roughly one fifth, and later measures, including the Municipal Corporations Act (1835) and the Poor Law Amendment Act (1834), reorganized local governance and relief. Wordsworth sympathized with moderate reform but feared radical destabilization. The 1850 text of The Prelude emerged in this reconstituted polity, and its stress on conscience, locality, and the education of judgment may be read as an implicit response to an era of institutional redesign and civic recalibration.
The Prelude operates as social and political critique by dramatizing how militarization, enclosure, and industrial urban life deform attention, fellowship, and moral agency. Its London scenes anatomize spectacle, commodification, and credulity; its Lake District recollections defend place-based economies and communal memory against legal and market abstractions. The poem’s compassion for the itinerant poor contests stigmatizing discourses that accompanied the policing of vagrancy and the tightening of relief. It exposes the unaccounted costs of progress by showing how policy and profit unsettle the young, the laboring, and the displaced, and by proposing disciplined imagination as a civic faculty.
Politically, the poem interrogates revolutionary hope and reactionary fear alike. It condemns terror and charismatic empire while refusing to equate liberty with tumult, thereby critiquing both state repression and unreflective crowd power. The education it models—through nature, memory, and conscience—implicitly rebukes a system that prizes utility over wisdom, and land conversion over stewardship. By registering surveillance, wartime mobilization, and the disciplining of public assembly, it discloses the reach of the modern state. By mourning the privatization of commons, it rebukes class privilege’s quiet violence, offering instead an ethics of restraint, gratitude, and humane responsibility.
Author Biography
William Wordsworth (1770–1850) was a central figure of English Romanticism, whose poetry reshaped the aims and language of verse in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Celebrated for elevating ordinary experience and rural life, he advocated a diction grounded in common speech and a meditative attention to nature, memory, and the growth of the mind. With Samuel Taylor Coleridge, he helped inaugurate British Romantic poetry through Lyrical Ballads, and he later refined a large body of reflective lyrics, sonnets, and blank-verse narratives. His long autobiographical poem The Prelude and his Lake District settings made him an emblem of nature-centered, introspective art.
Wordsworth grew up in England’s Lake District, a landscape that became the imaginative ground of his work. He attended Hawkshead Grammar School, where extensive walking and close observation of the natural world complemented classical and English reading. At St John’s College, Cambridge, he read widely but formed his poetic identity more through independent wandering and reflection than through formal distinction. Travel on the Continent in the early 1790s, especially in France during the Revolution, stirred powerful political hopes and a sympathy for liberty that suffused his early verse. That enthusiasm later complicated into doubt as violence and war reshaped European life.
By the late 1790s, Wordsworth had formed a transformative friendship with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Their discussions about the aims of poetry—immediacy, sincerity, and a renewed attention to common life—culminated in Lyrical Ballads (1798), a joint volume that altered British literary expectations. Wordsworth’s contributions included narrative ballads and meditative pieces, culminating in the concluding poem commonly called "Tintern Abbey." In the expanded 1800 edition, his Preface articulated a program: poetry should be composed in a language really used by men, and arise from emotion recollected in tranquility. This statement became a foundational Romantic manifesto and framed his subsequent practice.
Settled for much of the first decade of the nineteenth century in the Lake District, Wordsworth developed a distinctive meditative lyric mode. Poems in Two Volumes (1807) gathered many of his most familiar works, among them "I wandered lonely as a cloud," the "Ode: Intimations of Immortality," and the so-called Lucy poems. He refined the sonnet into a vehicle for public reflection as well as private feeling, and he pursued longer philosophical projects in blank verse. The Excursion (1814) presented part of an ambitious design, while The Prelude—composed and revised over decades—traced the formation of the poet’s mind.
Across these writings, Wordsworth advanced a coherent vision: nature as a source of moral insight; childhood and memory as keys to identity; imagination as a shaping power. He sought a poetry that dignified humble lives and rural labor, resisting the artificiality he associated with some neoclassical convention. Early revolutionary hopes gave way, after the 1790s, to a more cautious, often conservative outlook shaped by war and national crisis, yet he retained a belief in inward renovation through communion with the natural world. His political sonnets and occasional pieces address contemporary events, while remaining rooted in the meditative lyric.
From the 1810s, Wordsworth secured financial stability through government employment and settled at Rydal Mount, continuing to write, revise, and publish. Sequences such as the Ecclesiastical Sonnets appeared in the early 1820s, and his reputation steadily grew despite earlier controversies over simplicity and subject matter. By the 1830s and early 1840s he was regarded as an elder statesman of letters, and he accepted the post of Poet Laureate in 1843. The Prelude, long a private project addressed to Coleridge, was published after his death, revealing the full scope of his autobiographical endeavor and cementing his status as a major Romantic.
Wordsworth’s legacy is enduring. He, Coleridge, and Robert Southey became associated with the Lake Poets, though his influence extended far beyond regional identity. Victorian writers drew on his meditative mode and ethical seriousness, and modern critics have continued to explore his ideas of consciousness, memory, and the "spots of time." His poems remain central to English-language curricula, valued for their clarity of diction and philosophical depth. The Lake District landscapes he celebrated have become cultural touchstones for ecological and aesthetic reflection. Today he is read as a poet who transformed how personal experience and the natural world enter art.
The Prelude
INTRODUCTION.—CHILDHOOD AND SCHOOL-TIME
BOOK FIRST.
INTRODUCTION—CHILDHOOD AND SCHOOL-TIME.
O there is blessing in this gentle breeze, A visitant that while it fans my cheek Doth seem half-conscious of the joy it brings From the green fields, and from yon azure sky. Whate'er its mission, the soft breeze can come To none more grateful than to me; escaped From the vast city, where I long had pined A discontented sojourner: now free, Free as a bird to settle where I will[1q]. What dwelling shall receive me? in what vale Shall be my harbour? underneath what grove Shall I take up my home? and what clear stream Shall with its murmur lull me into rest? The earth is all before me[2q]. With a heart Joyous, nor scared at its own liberty,I look about; and should the chosen guide Be nothing better than a wandering cloud, I cannot miss my way. I breathe again! Trances of thought and mountings of the mind Come fast upon me: it is shaken off, That burthen of my own unnatural self, The heavy weight of many a weary day Not mine, and such as were not made for me. Long months of peace (if such bold word accord With any promises of human life), Long months of ease and undisturbed delight Are mine in prospect; whither shall I turn, By road or pathway, or through trackless field, Up hill or down, or shall some floating thing Upon the river point me out my course?
Dear Liberty! Yet what would it avail But for a gift that consecrates the joy? For I, methought, while the sweet breath of heaven Was blowing on my body, felt within A correspondent breeze, that gently moved With quickening virtue, but is now become A tempest, a redundant energy, Vexing its own creation. Thanks to both, And their congenial powers, that, while they joinIn breaking up a long-continued frost, Bring with them vernal promises, the hope Of active days urged on by flying hours,— Days of sweet leisure, taxed with patient thought Abstruse, nor wanting punctual service high, Matins and vespers of harmonious verse!
Thus far, Friend! did I, not used to make A present joy the matter of a song, Pour forth that day my soul in measured strains That would not be forgotten, and are here Recorded: to the open fields I told A prophecy: poetic numbers came Spontaneously to clothe in priestly robe A renovated spirit singled out, Such hope was mine, for holy services. 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.
Content and not unwilling now to give A respite to this passion, I paced on With brisk and eager steps; and came, at length, To a green shady place, where down I sateBeneath a tree, slackening my thoughts by choice, And settling into gentler happiness. 'Twas autumn, and a clear and placid day, With warmth, as much as needed, from a sun Two hours declined towards the west; a day With silver clouds, and sunshine on the grass, And in the sheltered and the sheltering grove A perfect stillness. Many were the thoughts Encouraged and dismissed, till choice was made Of a known Vale, whither my feet should turn, Nor rest till they had reached the very door Of the one cottage which methought I saw. No picture of mere memory ever looked So fair; and while upon the fancied scene I gazed with growing love, a higher power Than Fancy gave assurance of some work Of glory there forthwith to be begun, Perhaps too there performed. Thus long I mused, Nor e'er lost sight of what I mused upon, Save when, amid the stately grove of oaks, Now here, now there, an acorn, from its cup Dislodged, through sere leaves rustled, or at once To the bare earth dropped with a startling sound. From that soft couch I rose not, till the sun Had almost touched the horizon; casting thenA backward glance upon the curling cloud Of city smoke, by distance ruralised; Keen as a Truant or a Fugitive, But as a Pilgrim resolute, I took, Even with the chance equipment of that hour, The road that pointed toward the chosen Vale. It was a splendid evening, and my soul Once more made trial of her strength, nor lacked Æolian visitations; but the harp Was soon defrauded, and the banded host Of harmony dispersed in straggling sounds, And lastly utter silence! "Be it so; Why think of any thing but present good?" So, like a home-bound labourer I pursued My way beneath the mellowing sun, that shed Mild influence; nor left in me one wish Again to bend the Sabbath of that time To a servile yoke. What need of many words? A pleasant loitering journey, through three days Continued, brought me to my hermitage. I spare to tell of what ensued, the life In common things—the endless store of things, Rare, or at least so seeming, every day Found all about me in one neighbourhood— The self-congratulation, and, from mornTo night, unbroken cheerfulness serene. But speedily an earnest longing rose To brace myself to some determined aim, Reading or thinking; either to lay up New stores, or rescue from decay the old By timely interference: and therewith Came hopes still higher, that with outward life I might endue some airy phantasies That had been floating loose about for years, And to such beings temperately deal forth The many feelings that oppressed my heart. That hope hath been discouraged; welcome light Dawns from the east, but dawns to disappear And mock me with a sky that ripens not Into a steady morning: if my mind, Remembering the bold promise of the past, Would gladly grapple with some noble theme, Vain is her wish; where'er she turns she finds Impediments from day to day renewed.
And now it would content me to yield up Those lofty hopes awhile, for present gifts Of humbler industry. But, oh, dear Friend! The Poet, gentle creature as he is, Hath, like the Lover, his unruly times;His fits when he is neither sick nor well, Though no distress be near him but his own Unmanageable thoughts: his mind, best pleased While she as duteous as the mother dove Sits brooding, lives not always to that end, But like the innocent bird, hath goadings on That drive her as in trouble through the groves; With me is now such passion, to be blamed No otherwise than as it lasts too long.
When, as becomes a man who would prepare For such an arduous work, I through myself Make rigorous inquisition, the report Is often cheering; for I neither seem To lack that first great gift, the vital soul, Nor general Truths, which are themselves a sort Of Elements and Agents, Under-powers, Subordinate helpers of the living mind: Nor am I naked of external things, Forms, images, nor numerous other aids Of less regard, though won perhaps with toil And needful to build up a Poet's praise. Time, place, and manners do I seek, and these Are found in plenteous store, but nowhere such As may be singled out with steady choice;No little band of yet remembered names Whom I, in perfect confidence, might hope To summon back from lonesome banishment, And make them dwellers in the hearts of men Now living, or to live in future years. Sometimes the ambitious Power of choice, mistaking Proud spring-tide swellings for a regular sea, Will settle on some British theme, some old Romantic tale by Milton left unsung; More often turning to some gentle place Within the groves of Chivalry, I pipe To shepherd swains, or seated harp in hand, Amid reposing knights by a river side Or fountain, listen to the grave reports Of dire enchantments faced and overcome By the strong mind, and tales of warlike feats, Where spear encountered spear, and sword with sword Fought, as if conscious of the blazonry That the shield bore, so glorious was the strife; Whence inspiration for a song that winds Through ever changing scenes of votive quest Wrongs to redress, harmonious tribute paid To patient courage and unblemished truth, To firm devotion, zeal unquenchable, And Christian meekness hallowing faithful loves.Sometimes, more sternly moved, I would relate How vanquished Mithridates[3] northward passed, And, hidden in the cloud of years, became Odin, the Father of a race by whom Perished the Roman Empire: how the friends And followers of Sertorius, out of Spain Flying, found shelter in the Fortunate Isles, And left their usages, their arts and laws, To disappear by a slow gradual death, To dwindle and to perish one by one, Starved in those narrow bounds: but not the soul Of Liberty, which fifteen hundred years Survived, and, when the European came With skill and power that might not be withstood, Did, like a pestilence, maintain its hold And wasted down by glorious death that race Of natural heroes: or I would record How, in tyrannic times, some high-souled man, Unnamed among the chronicles of kings, Suffered in silence for Truth's sake: or tell, How that one Frenchman,(1) through continued force Of meditation on the inhuman deeds Of those who conquered first the Indian Isles, Went single in his ministry across The Ocean; not to comfort the oppressed,But, like a thirsty wind, to roam about Withering the Oppressor: how Gustavus sought Help at his need in Dalecarlia's mines: How Wallace fought for Scotland; left the name Of Wallace to be found, like a wild flower, All over his dear Country; left the deeds Of Wallace, like a family of Ghosts, To people the steep rocks and river banks, Her natural sanctuaries, with a local soul Of independence and stern liberty. Sometimes it suits me better to invent A tale from my own heart, more near akin To my own passions and habitual thoughts; Some variegated story, in the main Lofty, but the unsubstantial structure melts Before the very sun that brightens it, Mist into air dissolving! Then a wish, My best and favourite aspiration, mounts With yearning toward some philosophic song Of Truth that cherishes our daily life; With meditations passionate from deep Recesses in man's heart, immortal verse Thoughtfully fitted to the Orphean lyre; But from this awful burthen I full soon Take refuge and beguile myself with trustThat mellower years will bring a riper mind And clearer insight. Thus my days are past In contradiction; with no skill to part Vague longing, haply bred by want of power, From paramount impulse not to be withstood, A timorous capacity from prudence, From circumspection, infinite delay. Humility and modest awe themselves Betray me, serving often for a cloak To a more subtle selfishness; that now Locks every function up in blank reserve, Now dupes me, trusting to an anxious eye That with intrusive restlessness beats off Simplicity and self-presented truth. Ah! better far than this, to stray about Voluptuously through fields and rural walks, And ask no record of the hours, resigned To vacant musing, unreproved neglect Of all things, and deliberate holiday. Far better never to have heard the name Of zeal and just ambition, than to live Baffled and plagued by a mind that every hour Turns recreant to her task; takes heart again, Then feels immediately some hollow thought Hang like an interdict upon her hopes.This is my lot; for either still I find Some imperfection in the chosen theme, Or see of absolute accomplishment Much wanting, so much wanting, in myself, That I recoil and droop, and seek repose In listlessness from vain perplexity, Unprofitably travelling toward the grave, Like a false steward who hath much received And renders nothing back.Was it for this That one, the fairest of all rivers, loved To blend his murmurs with my nurse's song, And, from his alder shades and rocky falls, And from his fords and shallows, sent a voice That flowed along my dreams? For this, didst thou, O Derwent![1] winding among grassy holms Where I was looking on, a babe in arms, Make ceaseless music that composed my thoughts To more than infant softness, giving me Amid the fretful dwellings of mankind A foretaste, a dim earnest, of the calm That Nature breathes among the hills and groves. When he had left the mountains and received On his smooth breast the shadow of those towers That yet survive, a shattered monumentOf feudal sway, the bright blue river passed Along the margin of our terrace walk; A tempting playmate whom we dearly loved. Oh, many a time have I, a five years' child, In a small mill-race severed from his stream, Made one long bathing of a summer's day; Basked in the sun, and plunged and basked again Alternate, all a summer's day, or scoured The sandy fields, leaping through flowery groves Of yellow ragwort; or when rock and hill, The woods, and distant Skiddaw's lofty height, Were bronzed with deepest radiance, stood alone Beneath the sky, as if I had been born On Indian plains, and from my mother's hut Had run abroad in wantonness, to sport A naked savage, in the thunder shower.
