Study guide
The Prelude
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Overview
- Composed
- 1798–1805 (the two-part version 1798–99, the thirteen-book version finished in 1805); revised repeatedly until about 1839
- Published
- July 1850, three months after Wordsworth's death, in fourteen books; the title was supplied by his widow, Mary Wordsworth
- Genre
- Autobiographical poem in the form of a philosophical epic; Wordsworth called it 'the poem to Coleridge'
- Metre
- Blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) in long verse paragraphs, in the line of Milton
- Length
- About 7,900 lines in the 1850 text (14 books); about 8,500 in the 1805 text (13 books)
- Setting
- The Lake District (Cockermouth, Hawkshead, Grasmere), Cambridge, the Alps, London, revolutionary France (Paris, Orléans, Blois), Salisbury Plain and Snowdon
- Time span
- Wordsworth's life from early childhood (the 1770s) to about 1798, when he settles to his vocation as a poet
- Speaker
- Wordsworth himself, looking back from middle life and addressing his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- Subject
- The 'growth of a poet's mind': how nature, books, cities and history formed, damaged and restored his imagination
- Key themes
- Memory and the 'spots of time'; imagination and nature; fear and beauty as educators; the French Revolution and disillusion; vocation; friendship; the power of the mind over the senses
Context
William Wordsworth (1770–1850) was born at Cockermouth in Cumberland, lost his mother when he was seven and his father when he was thirteen, and was sent to the grammar school at Hawkshead, where he boarded with a local woman, Ann Tyson. He went up to St John's College, Cambridge, in 1787, walked across France and the Alps with his friend Robert Jones in 1790, and spent most of 1792 in revolutionary France, where he fell in love with Annette Vallon, who bore him a daughter, Caroline, in December of that year. War between Britain and France kept them apart. After years of political commitment, uncertainty and poverty he settled with his sister Dorothy, first in Dorset and Somerset and from 1799 at Dove Cottage in Grasmere (Gill 1989) (Johnston 1998).
The Prelude grew out of his partnership with Coleridge, whom he met in 1795 and with whom he published Lyrical Ballads in 1798. Coleridge urged him to write a great philosophical poem, The Recluse, on 'Man, Nature, and Society'. Wordsworth never finished it. Instead, in the cold winter of 1798–99 at Goslar in Germany, he began to write about his own childhood, apparently to find out whether he was fit for the task. This produced the two-part Prelude of 1798–99, which already contains the stolen boat, the skating and the 'spots of time'. In early 1804 he expanded it to five books, then almost at once abandoned that plan for a much longer poem, which he finished in thirteen books in May 1805 and read aloud to Coleridge in 1807 (Wordsworth 1979) (Wordsworth 1997) (Reed 1967).
He never published it. In the Preface to The Excursion (1814) he explained that the autobiographical poem stood to The Recluse as 'the ante-chapel' stands to 'the body of a gothic church': a preparatory review of his own powers before the main work. He revised the manuscript in several campaigns (around 1816–19, 1832 and 1838–39), dividing the old Book X into two and so producing fourteen books, tightening the style, and softening some political and religious statements. The poem appeared in July 1850, three months after his death, as The Prelude, or Growth of a Poet's Mind; the title was chosen by Mary Wordsworth. Readers then knew only this text until Ernest de Selincourt printed the 1805 version beside it in 1926 (Wordsworth 1959).
No English poet before Wordsworth had written a long poem whose hero was the poet himself and whose action was the development of his mind. The model the poem constantly measures itself against is Milton's Paradise Lost: it opens with an echo of Milton's ending ('The earth is all before me') and treats a private life with the seriousness of epic, replacing heroic deeds with moments of perception and loss. The poem is addressed throughout to Coleridge, the 'Friend' whose own development the speaker keeps comparing with his own, so that it is also a long verse letter and a record of friendship (Abrams 1971) (Newlyn 1986).
This guide follows the 1850 text, in William Knight's edition, which is the version on this site; line numbers follow the standard 1850 numbering (as in de Selincourt and the Norton edition). Readers who meet the poem in the 1805 text should remember that 1850 Books X and XI correspond to 1805 Book X, and that 1850 Books XII–XIV correspond to 1805 Books XI–XIII (Wordsworth 1979).
Plot overview
The poem opens with the poet freed from 'the vast city' and walking into the country, hoping to begin a great work. He lists possible epic subjects and rejects them all, then asks whether his childhood by the river Derwent was 'for this' idle failure. To answer, he turns back to that childhood: stealing birds from other boys' snares, robbing ravens' nests, rowing out in a stolen boat until a huge peak seems to stride after him, skating on the frozen lake, and the school days at Hawkshead in which nature taught him 'by beauty and by fear'. He recalls the death of his mother and the growth of a feeling of the 'one life' in all things.
At Cambridge he is restless and half-idle, though stirred by the memory of Newton and Milton. In a summer vacation, walking home at dawn after a night of dancing, he feels himself made 'a dedicated Spirit'. A book on books follows, with a dream of an Arab carrying a stone and a shell, satire on modern education, the Boy of Winander, and a drowned man rising from Esthwaite Water. In 1790 he crosses the Alps with Robert Jones and learns, to his dismay, that he has passed the summit without knowing it; this leads to a sudden hymn to the Imagination and a vision of the Simplon gorge as an 'Apocalypse'. In London he watches crowds, theatres, a blind beggar and Bartholomew Fair; looking back, he traces how his love of nature led him to love humankind.
In France in 1791–92 he becomes a 'patriot' under the guidance of the officer Michel Beaupuy, and sees a hungry peasant girl who stands for everything the Revolution is fighting against. He returns to Paris after the September Massacres, then to England. War between Britain and France, the Terror and France's wars of conquest break his hopes; he turns to abstract reasoning in the manner of William Godwin until, 'wearied out with contrarieties', he gives up moral questions in despair. The news of Robespierre's death brings a brief joy.
Restoration comes through his sister Dorothy, through Coleridge, and through nature and memory. He describes how imagination was 'impaired' by the tyranny of the eye and by analysis, and how certain 'spots of time' from childhood, such as a lonely gibbet-place and a wait for horses before his father's death, still renew him. He finds dignity in the poor wanderers of the roads and imagines Druids on Salisbury Plain. The poem ends with a night climb up Snowdon, where the moon over a sea of mist becomes an image of the imaginative mind, and with a final address to Coleridge, hoping that both will be 'Prophets of Nature' to a later age.
Book by book
Book 1: Introduction: Childhood and School-time
Summary
The poem begins with a 'glad preamble'. Released from a city where he had pined, the poet walks into the country feeling a creative breeze within him that answers the breeze outside. He hopes to start a great poem, but the inspiration fades. He reviews possible subjects, from medieval romance to the stories of Mithridates, Gustavus and Wallace, and to a philosophical song of 'Truth', and finds himself unable to begin. Ashamed, he asks whether it was 'for this' that the river Derwent sang to him as a child.
The rest of the book answers that question by memory. The child bathes in the river, sets snares for woodcocks at night and steals birds from other boys' traps, hears 'low breathings' following him, and hangs from crags while robbing ravens' nests. One summer evening he takes a shepherd's boat without leave and rows out on the lake; a huge peak rises behind the ridge and seems to stride after him, and for days 'unknown modes of being' trouble his mind. Winter skating, games of cards by the fire, and an address to Coleridge close the book.
Analysis
The preamble presents the poem as a failure that turns into its own subject. Unable to write The Recluse, Wordsworth discovers that the story of how he came to be a poet is itself the epic theme. The echo of the end of Paradise Lost ('The earth is all before me') makes his walk a new beginning after a fall, and the 'correspondent breeze' within him is an early statement of the poem's belief that mind and nature answer each other (Abrams 1971).
The childhood episodes are carefully chosen to show nature acting as a moral teacher, not through gentle lessons but through fear. Each begins with a small transgression (theft of birds, of eggs, of a boat) and ends with an experience of something vast and unexplained. The stolen boat is the masterpiece: the boy's pride in his rowing, the sudden visual illusion of the growing peak, and the long aftermath in which familiar images are replaced by 'huge and mighty forms'. Hartman reads such moments as the first signs of an imagination that will eventually reach beyond nature itself (Hartman 1964).
Fair seed-time had my soul, and I grew up Fostered alike by beauty and by fear:
The thesis of the childhood books. The agricultural image makes the mind a field and childhood its sowing; 'fear' is as necessary as 'beauty' to the harvest.
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.
After the stolen boat. Wordsworth refuses to name what the boy felt; the vague, abstract language is the point, recording an experience for which the child had no categories.
Book 2: School-time (continued)
Summary
Wordsworth recalls the Hawkshead years: boyish games, rowing races to the islands of Windermere, riding hired horses to the ruins of Furness Abbey, and evenings at an inn at Bowness, where one boy played the flute on the lake. Gradually these pleasures become less important for their own sake and more for the feelings they leave behind. He breaks off to warn that no one can divide a mind into neat sections and say where each habit began.
He then traces the source of feeling to infancy: the babe in its mother's arms who learns to love the world through her love. His mother died when he was a child, yet his love of nature survived the loss and grew more independent. He describes solitary walks, listening at dawn, and the moments when he felt 'the sentiment of Being' spread over all things. The book closes with thanks to the hills and lakes and with a tribute to Coleridge, who grew up in the city.
Analysis
This book is the most philosophical of the childhood books. The 'infant Babe' passage gives the poem a psychology: perception is creative from the start, because the child receives the world through an emotional bond, so that the mind is 'creator and receiver both'. This anticipates the poem's later claims about imagination and makes love, not reason, the origin of knowledge (Lindenberger 1963).
The book also shows how the poem handles loss. The mother's death is mentioned briefly and almost abstractly, and the speaker emphasises the survival of his love for nature after it. Critics have noticed how often the poem turns real grief into general statements about the mind, and Jacobus and others have explored the feminine figures (mother, Nature, later Dorothy) who stand behind its idea of growth (Jacobus 1989).
Blest the infant Babe, (For with my best conjecture I would trace Our Being's earthly progress,) blest the Babe, Nursed in his Mother's arms, who sinks to sleep
The beginning of Wordsworth's account of how feeling enters perception. The bracketed 'best conjecture' admits that this is speculation, not memory.
with bliss ineffable I felt the sentiment of Being spread O'er all that moves and all that seemeth still;
The 'one life' felt in all things, a belief Wordsworth shared with Coleridge in the late 1790s. The language is close to pantheism, which later readers thought the 1850 revisions tried to qualify.
Book 3: Residence at Cambridge
Summary
In October 1787 Wordsworth arrives at St John's College, Cambridge. He enjoys the novelty of new clothes, friends and college life, and from his room he can see the statue of Newton in the antechapel of Trinity. But he feels he does not belong. He wanders the countryside, turns inward, and senses that he has a strength not shared by his fellows, a feeling he describes as being 'the Dreamer' among the dream.
He takes part in college pleasures, and even drinks too much in the rooms once used by Milton. He criticises the university's routines, its compulsory chapel and its competition for honours, and imagines an ideal university of scholars living simply among nature. The book ends with a sense of a year of drift, a pageant of youth without direction.
Analysis
Book III is the first test of the boy's inner life against an institution, and it is often comic. The poet mocks his own vanity and his inability to work, but the satire has a serious purpose: Cambridge represents learning organised by rank and reward, opposed to the education by nature celebrated in Books I and II.
The famous lines on Newton, two of them added only in the poet's late revision (they are not in the 1805 text), show his revising art at its best. The silent statue becomes the 'marble index' of a mind voyaging alone, an image of intellectual heroism that the speaker both admires and resembles. The solitude of genius, here celebrated, is a theme the poem will later question when it turns to the love of other people.
The antechapel where the statue stood Of Newton with his prism and silent face, The marble index of a mind for ever Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.
The statue becomes an emblem of the solitary mind, a model for the poet's own inward voyage. The last two lines are a late addition: the 1805 text has only Newton 'with his prism and silent face'; 'The marble index …' was added in revision and first printed in 1850.
I was the Dreamer, they the Dream;
A strong statement of youthful isolation: the undergraduate experiences the world of Cambridge as unreal, and himself as the only conscious presence in it.
Book 4: Summer Vacation
Summary
In the summer of 1788 Wordsworth returns to Hawkshead and his old landlady, Ann Tyson, whose kindness and simple piety he remembers with affection. He walks round the lake with his dog, reflects on the changes in himself, and admits that he was distracted by dancing, parties and 'trivial pleasures'.
Walking home at dawn after a night of dancing, he sees a magnificent sunrise over the mountains and the sea, and feels that vows are being made for him: he is to be 'a dedicated Spirit'. Later in the vacation, walking at night along a lonely road, he meets a tall, ghostly discharged soldier, returning from the tropics. He hears his plain story, takes him to a cottage for shelter, and is struck by his patient indifference.
Analysis
The dedication scene is the centre of the book and one of the turning points of the whole poem. Its paradox matters: the poet does not choose his vocation but receives it, passively and almost without knowing it. The dawn, 'memorable pomp' after a trivial night, makes vocation a gift of nature rather than an act of will.
The discharged soldier is the first of the poem's solitary wanderers, figures of suffering who appear suddenly on roads and seem half-human and half-emblem. He anticipates the Leech-gatherer of 'Resolution and Independence'. His calm, unexplained speech troubles the young man, and the episode raises a question the later books will pursue: how imagination relates to real human misery.
I made no vows, but vows Were then made for me; bond unknown to me Was given, that I should be, else sinning greatly, A dedicated Spirit.
The vocation is passive and binding. The religious language ('vows', 'sinning') treats poetry as a priestly calling.
Book 5: Books
Summary
The poet laments that the works of the mind, unlike nature, are fragile and could be destroyed. He tells a dream: in a desert, an Arab rides up carrying a stone (Euclid's geometry) and a shell (poetry), fleeing a deluge that will drown the world, and hurrying to bury both. (In the 1805 text the dream is a friend's; in 1850 it is the poet's own.) He then praises the books of childhood, especially fairy tales and romances, and satirises a modern child prodigy, a miniature scholar trained by systems of education.
Against him he sets the Boy of Winander, who used to blow 'mimic hootings' to the owls across the lake; when the owls fell silent, the voice of the mountain torrents entered his mind. The Boy died young, and the poet stands at his grave. Wordsworth then recalls his first week at Hawkshead, when he saw a heap of clothes by Esthwaite Water and, the next day, watched a drowned man raised from the lake. His reading of romances, he says, kept the sight from terrifying him.
Analysis
Book V is about the power of literature and the anxiety of losing it. The Arab dream, influenced by Don Quixote and by a dream reported of Descartes, shows the poet's fear that the achievements of the mind are vulnerable to catastrophe. The satire of the prodigy reflects the debate about education following Rousseau and the Edgeworths; Wordsworth's alternative is an education of wonder, through stories and freedom (Lindenberger 1963).
The Boy of Winander was first written in the first person, then turned into a story about another boy who dies. Critics have seen the change as a way of placing a part of the poet's own childhood in the grave, and the passage has become central to readings of Wordsworth's language as haunted by death and absence, especially in the work of de Man (de Man 1984). The drowned man, by contrast, shows how literature can protect the mind from a raw fact by giving it the dignity of romance.
Uplifted, he, as through an instrument, Blew mimic hootings to the silent owls, That they might answer him
The Boy plays nature like an instrument, but the decisive moment comes when nature stops answering and enters the mind unawares.
At last, the dead man, 'mid that beauteous scene Of trees and hills and water, bolt upright Rose, with his ghastly face, a spectre shape Of terror;
The drowned schoolmaster of Esthwaite (1779). The horror is held between the 'beauteous scene' and the boy's reading, which, the poem says, kept fear from debasing him.
Book 6: Cambridge and the Alps
Summary
Back at Cambridge, Wordsworth reads widely and learns from geometry a sense of abstract order. He thinks of Coleridge's own unhappy years at Cambridge. In the summer of 1790 he and Robert Jones set off on foot across revolutionary France, where they share the people's joy on the first anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, and climb into the Alps. The 1850 text adds a passage on the Grande Chartreuse, threatened with destruction by the revolutionaries.
Mont Blanc disappoints them. Crossing the Simplon Pass, they lose their way and learn from a peasant that they have already 'crossed the Alps' without noticing. At this point the poet breaks off with an address to Imagination, a power that rose from 'the mind's abyss' and showed him that our true home is with 'infinitude'. The descent through the gorge of Gondo becomes a vision of nature as a single apocalyptic text. They travel on to Lake Como and return to England.
Analysis
The crossing of the Alps is the poem's most famous anticlimax. The expected sublime moment never comes, and the poet realises its absence only afterwards. The Imagination passage, written in 1804, is not a memory of 1790 but a present event in the act of writing: the poet is overwhelmed now by a power that the disappointment once hid. Hartman made this passage central to his reading of Wordsworth: imagination is a force that can surpass and even oppose nature, though the poet continually turns it back towards nature (Hartman 1964).
The descent through the gorge then reconciles the two. The waterfalls, winds and rocks seem 'like workings of one mind', the 'Characters of the great Apocalypse'. The language is Miltonic and biblical: nature becomes a scripture to be read. Abrams saw such passages as the essence of Romantic 'natural supernaturalism', in which the Christian story of revelation is translated into the meeting of mind and world (Abrams 1971).
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
The present-tense interruption of the narrative. The power has no cause ('unfathered') and no adequate name.
Characters of the great Apocalypse, The types and symbols of Eternity, Of first, and last, and midst, and without end.
The end of the Simplon descent. The last line echoes Milton's hymn to God in Paradise Lost (5.165), transferring its praise to the landscape.
Book 7: Residence in London
Summary
After an introduction that finds the poet back in the Lake District resuming his poem, Wordsworth recalls his months in London in 1791. He describes the crowds and noise of the streets, shop signs, foreign faces, the theatres and Sadler's Wells, the story of the 'Maid of Buttermere' made into a stage show, a lovely child seen among the audience at a theatre, the oratory of Parliament and of fashionable preachers.
Among the crowds he is suddenly arrested by a blind beggar wearing a paper on his chest that tells his story, an image of how little we can know of ourselves. The book ends at Bartholomew Fair, a riot of freaks, shows and machines, which he calls a 'Parliament of Monsters' and an epitome of the city itself. Only a mind trained by nature, he says, can see a whole in such confusion.
Analysis
London is the poem's great counter-image to nature: a world of spectacle, imitation and endless images without meaning. Wordsworth's descriptions are vivid and often funny, yet the book keeps returning to the fear that the city produces minds 'melted and reduced / To one identity' by trivial objects. The blind beggar is the turning point, a 'spot' within the city where the speaker's mind turns round 'as with the might of waters' (Liu 1989).
The 1850 text adds a long tribute to Edmund Burke, the critic of the French Revolution, whom the young poet had seen in Parliament. This is one of the clearest signs of the older Wordsworth's revisions toward conservative politics; the 1805 text has no such passage. Readers interested in the poem's politics often begin by comparing the two versions here (Wordsworth 1979).
Oh, blank confusion! true epitome Of what the mighty City is herself, To thousands upon thousands of her sons,
Bartholomew Fair as a miniature London. 'Blank' is a key Wordsworth word, used for both emptiness and incomprehension.
an apt type This label seemed of the utmost we can know, Both of ourselves and of the universe;
The blind beggar's label becomes an image of all autobiography, including the poem we are reading: a short written account fixed to a person who cannot see.
Book 8: Retrospect: Love of Nature Leading to Love of Man
Summary
The book opens with a country fair under Helvellyn, where simple people gather in a vast setting. The poet looks back over his life to show how his love of nature led him to love humanity. He describes the shepherds of the Lakes, free men working for themselves, and contrasts them with the shepherds of pastoral poetry. One shepherd, seen through mist or against the sky, appeared to him like a giant or a figure of sanctity.
He recalls how his imagination as a boy transformed what he saw, sometimes into false romantic images, and how his love of man was at first a by-product of his love of nature. He then remembers his first entry into London, when he felt the weight of history and of human life, and concludes that his trust in human goodness was never destroyed even by the city's vice.
Analysis
Book VIII interrupts the chronology to give a theoretical account, and its title states one of the poem's main arguments. Human beings come into the boy's love first as parts of the landscape: the shepherd glorified by the mountain light. This raises a question that critics have pressed: whether Wordsworth's humanism is built on real people or on idealised figures who fit his idea of nature (Levinson 1986).
The contrast between the Lakeland shepherds and Arcadian pastoral is also political. Wordsworth praises an independent, landowning peasantry, as he did in his letter to the Whig politician Charles James Fox in 1801 sent with 'Michael'. The book shows how his early radical sympathy for ordinary people was redirected towards a rural, traditional community (Roe 1988).
Man free, man working for himself, with choice Of time, and place, and object;
The ideal of the independent shepherd, a political and moral ideal as well as a picturesque one.
And Shepherds were the men that pleased me first;
A plain statement of the book's thesis: human love enters through the figures of the landscape.
Book 9: Residence in France
Summary
In November 1791 Wordsworth goes to France. In Paris he visits the sites of the Revolution with a tourist's excitement but little feeling. At Orléans and Blois he mixes with royalist officers, but becomes 'a patriot' through friendship with one officer who supports the Revolution, Michel Beaupuy. They walk and talk about government, liberty and the poor; Beaupuy later died fighting, the poem says, by the Loire (in fact in Germany in 1796).
One day they meet a 'hunger-bitten girl' leading a heifer and knitting, and Beaupuy says that it is against such misery 'that we are fighting'. The poet shares his hope of a world made just. In the 1850 text the book ends with a short reference to the tale of Vaudracour and Julia, lovers separated by family and class, which in 1805 was told at length here and was published separately in 1820.
Analysis
Book IX is a portrait of political education through friendship. Beaupuy is idealised as a gentle, chivalrous revolutionary, and the poem presents the young Wordsworth's radicalism as a natural extension of his love of people. Historians of his politics, especially Roe, have shown how closely this matches the real circles he moved in at Blois and later in London (Roe 1988).
What the book omits is as important. Wordsworth's love affair with Annette Vallon and the birth of their daughter Caroline happened exactly during these months, but the poem says nothing of it. The story of Vaudracour and Julia, a young man's love for a woman of lower rank, a child, a separation, is widely read as a displaced version of his own story; its reduction to a few lines in 1850 makes the silence more complete (Johnston 1998) (Gill 1989).
"'Tis against 'that' That we are fighting,"
Beaupuy's words about the starving girl. The Revolution is justified by visible human suffering, not by theory.
Became a patriot; and my heart was all Given to the people, and my love was theirs.
'Patriot' was the term for supporters of the Revolution; the line presents conversion as an act of love.
Book 10: Residence in France (continued)
Summary
Wordsworth returns to Paris in October 1792, soon after the September Massacres. Alone in a hotel room at night he imagines the city crying 'Sleep no more', like Macbeth's guilty conscience. He witnesses the struggle between factions, including a speech accusing Robespierre, and thinks that a single strong leader might have saved the Revolution. Lack of money forces him home.
In England he notes, with little grief, the failure of the first campaign against the slave trade, trusting that a free France would end such evils, but is shocked when Britain declares war on France in 1793; he sits silent in church while others pray for British victory. In France the Terror follows, and he suffers nightmares of the guillotine. The book ends with the summer of 1794: crossing the sands of Leven estuary, he hears from a passing traveller that Robespierre is dead, and exults.
Analysis
This book records the moment when private and public history become one. The poet's patriotic loyalties are divided: he is an Englishman who wants France to win. His description of the church scene, where he feels like 'an uninvited guest', makes the crisis of the poem's politics a crisis of belonging. Liu reads these books as the place where the poem's history is both present and repressed, turned into the pattern of the poet's growth (Liu 1989).
The Robespierre episode shows the poem's technique of placing historical news within a landscape: the guilt and terror of France are answered by the peaceful sands and the memory of a schoolmaster's grave nearby. The 'Sleep no more' passage, with its echo of Macbeth, introduces a recurring theme of guilt that critics connect with the abandoned Annette and with Wordsworth's own wavering allegiances (Johnston 1998).
Until I seemed to hear a voice that cried, To the whole city, "Sleep no more."
Paris after the September Massacres, through the words of Macbeth (2.2): the city itself becomes a guilty murderer.
Cried, "Robespierre is dead!"
News arriving in the Lake District, July 1794. The poet's joy shows that he still hoped for the Revolution after the Terror.
Book 11: France (concluded)
Summary
Wordsworth looks back on the hopes of the early Revolution, when it seemed that reason was establishing a better world: 'Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive'. He explains that he and others believed this new world could be realised 'not in Utopia' but in the real world. Even when France moved from self-defence to wars of conquest, he tried to keep faith.
He then describes how he sought certainty in abstract reasoning, in the manner of William Godwin's Political Justice, judging all human affections at the bar of reason, until he lost all conviction and 'Yielded up moral questions in despair'. His sister Dorothy kept him in touch with his true self, and nature restored him. The book ends with the coronation of Napoleon by the Pope, a betrayal of the Revolution's hopes, and an address to Coleridge, then in Sicily.
Analysis
The 'Bliss' passage is the best-known statement of the Romantic generation's revolutionary hope, but it is also retrospective and ironic. The 1850 reader knows it describes a mistake, yet the poetry still communicates the excitement. Wordsworth separates the hopes of the young from the false methods of the theorists; the error lay not in loving humanity but in trying to reach truth by pure logic (Roe 1988).
The account of the crisis is the poem's centre of gravity: the old self dies and a new one is born. Abrams placed it within a large pattern in which Romantic writers turned from political revolution to a revolution of the mind, a pattern that some later historicist critics have seen as an evasion of politics (Abrams 1971) (Liu 1989).
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very Heaven!
Often quoted out of context, these lines are retrospective: the older poet recalls a hope he no longer holds, without disowning its joy.
But in the very world, which is the world Of all of us,--the place where, in the end, We find our happiness, or not at all!
The Revolution's promise was to make happiness real on earth, not in a dream world. The poem keeps this ideal even after the politics fail.
Sick, wearied out with contrarieties, Yielded up moral questions in despair.
The crisis of Godwinian reason, presented as an illness to be cured.
Book 12: Imagination and Taste, How Impaired and Restored
Summary
Wordsworth describes how his imagination was weakened: by the habit of analysis, by applying rules of taste to nature, and above all by the 'tyranny' of the eye, the most despotic of the senses, which made him a seeker of picturesque views. He contrasts himself with Mary Hutchinson (later his wife), whose love of nature was simple and whole.
Restoration came through the memory of certain 'spots of time'. As a small child riding with a servant, he became lost and found the site of a gibbet where a murderer had been hanged, with the name carved in the turf; then he saw a girl with a pitcher on her head struggling against the wind, a scene of 'visionary dreariness'. In another, while waiting on a crag for horses to take him and his brothers home at Christmas, he saw a sheep, a hawthorn and a wall; within days his father died, and the scene became linked to his grief.
Analysis
The 'spots of time' passage, written for the two-part Prelude, is Wordsworth's theory of memory. Certain moments, often trivial in themselves, retain a 'renovating virtue' that repairs the mind when it is depressed by the world. They are memorable not for what happened but because they reveal the mind as 'lord and master' of the senses. The examples, however, are not cheerful: they involve fear, death, guilt and loss (Bloom 1961) (Hartman 1964).
De Man and others have stressed that what returns in these memories is often something lost or dead, so that writing them is a way of confronting mortality and the limits of self-knowledge. The gibbet scene, where a name is carved in the earth, can be read as an image of the poem itself, an inscription standing for a vanished person (de Man 1979) (Jacobus 1989).
There are in our existence spots of time, That with distinct pre-eminence retain A renovating virtue,
The key definition. 'Renovating' means renewing; 'virtue' here means power, as in medicine.
Colours and words that are unknown to man, To paint the visionary dreariness
The girl with the pitcher. The oxymoron 'visionary dreariness' captures the mixture of desolation and imaginative intensity.
Book 13: Imagination and Taste, How Impaired and Restored (concluded)
Summary
Wordsworth explains how he came to see the dignity of ordinary people. Walking public roads, he found in wanderers and labourers the 'very heart of man', and decided that his poetry would speak of humble life. He criticises books and theories that ignore the poor and argues that true feeling is found in common experience.
He recalls his walk across Salisbury Plain in 1793, where he imagined ancient Britons and Druids, and Coleridge's praise of his early poem on that subject. He ends by reaffirming that poetry arises from a balance between the mind and the world, 'the object seen, and eye that sees'.
Analysis
Book XIII completes the movement from nature to human beings and gives the theory behind Lyrical Ballads: the poet is a man speaking to men, finding in rustic life the essential passions. The Salisbury Plain vision shows how history, imagination and suffering combine: the Druids represent both the barbarism and the grandeur of the past (Gill 1989).
The book's final balance between 'action from without and from within' qualifies the more extreme claims of Book VI. Imagination is not a power over nature alone but a meeting of the two. This is close to Coleridge's thinking, and the poem's ending shows how much the friends shared their philosophy (Newlyn 1986).
A balance, an ennobling interchange Of action from without and from within; The excellence, pure function, and best power Both of the object seen, and eye that sees.
The final lines of the book state the reciprocal theory of perception that the whole poem has been testing.
my theme No other than the very heart of man,
The programme of Lyrical Ballads, phrased as a vocation.
Book 14: Conclusion
Summary
In 1791, with a friend (Robert Jones), Wordsworth climbs Snowdon at night to see the sunrise. Walking in silence through fog, he suddenly finds himself above the mist in full moonlight: a sea of cloud stretches to the Atlantic, and through a gap rises the roar of many waters. He reads the scene as an emblem of the mind 'that feeds upon infinity', and of the imagination of great poets, which can transform the world.
He reflects that this power, which he calls 'intellectual Love', has been the true theme of the poem. He thanks his sister Dorothy, who softened his nature, and Coleridge, and remembers Raisley Calvert, whose legacy gave him the freedom to write. Finally he hopes that he and Coleridge, though the world may fall back into servitude, will be 'Prophets of Nature', teaching others how the mind of man can become more beautiful than the earth.
Analysis
The Snowdon vision is the poem's climax and its interpretation of itself. The moon, the mist and the roaring waters become a picture of the mind: the moon a figure of the dominating intellect, the mist the transformed world, the voice of the waters the unconscious power beneath. The poem thus ends with an image of imagination at work on nature, not alone (Hartman 1964).
The conclusion turns the poem from autobiography into prophecy. Its religious vocabulary ('faith', 'reason') is much stronger in 1850 than in 1805, a change readers have taken as evidence of the poet's later Christian orthodoxy. Yet the essential hope remains the same: that the mind of man is 'more divine' than the world it inhabits (Wordsworth 1979) (Abrams 1971).
The Moon hung naked in a firmament Of azure without cloud, and at my feet Rested a silent sea of hoary mist.
The sudden revelation above the clouds. The scene is visual and still, a contrast with the roar of waters that follows.
what we have loved, Others will love, and we will teach them how;
The final hope of the poem: the poets as teachers of a later generation.
Characters
Figures of the poem
- The poet (William Wordsworth)
- Speaker and hero, seen both as a child or young man and as the older writer looking back. The poem traces his growth from a boy taught by nature through fear and beauty to a poet confident in the power of imagination. The double perspective, past experience and present interpretation, is the poem's basic structure.
- The Boy of Winander
- A boy who whistled to the owls across Windermere and died young (Book V); originally written in the first person, he is a figure for part of the poet's own childhood.
- The drowned man
- A schoolmaster drowned in Esthwaite Water in 1779, whose body the young Wordsworth saw recovered (Book V).
- The Arab of the dream
- The half-Quixote rider of Book V who carries a stone and a shell (geometry and poetry) to save them from a flood.
- The discharged soldier
- A gaunt soldier home from the tropics, met on a night road in Book IV; the first of the poem's solitary wanderers.
- The blind beggar
- A London beggar wearing a written label telling his story (Book VII), who becomes for the poet an emblem of the limits of self-knowledge.
- The hunger-bitten girl
- A peasant girl leading a heifer near Blois, whom Beaupuy points to as the reason for the Revolution (Book IX).
- Vaudracour and Julia
- Lovers separated by rank and family, whose tale Beaupuy is said to have told. In 1805 it fills the end of Book IX; in 1850 it is reduced to a short reference. Often read as a displaced version of Wordsworth's affair with Annette Vallon.
Family and friends
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- The 'Friend' to whom the poem is addressed. Coleridge encouraged Wordsworth to write The Recluse; the poem was written for him and read to him in 1807, when he responded with 'To William Wordsworth'. He is presented as a city-bred contrast to the poet, and in 1804 as a sick man travelling to Sicily.
- Dorothy Wordsworth
- The poet's sister, who lived with him from 1795. In Books XI and XIV she is credited with preserving his true self during his crisis and with softening his nature. Her journals record many experiences that became poems.
- Mary Hutchinson
- A friend from childhood and later Wordsworth's wife, praised in Book XII for her simple love of nature. After the poet's death she gave the poem its title.
- Ann Tyson
- The Hawkshead dame with whom Wordsworth boarded as a schoolboy, remembered in Book IV for her kindness and piety.
- Robert Jones
- Wordsworth's Cambridge friend and companion on the walk across the Alps in 1790 (Book VI) and on the night climb of Snowdon (Book XIV).
- Wordsworth's parents
- His mother, Ann, died in 1778, and his father, John, in December 1783. Their deaths are mentioned briefly (Books II and XII); the father's death colours the 'spot of time' in which the boy waits for horses.
- Raisley Calvert
- A young friend who left Wordsworth a legacy of £900 in 1795, giving him freedom to write; thanked in Book XIV.
Others
- Michel Beaupuy
- A French officer at Blois who made the young Wordsworth a 'patriot' (Book IX), though he is not named in the poem. Idealised as a chivalrous revolutionary who loved the poor.
- Annette Vallon
- The Frenchwoman Wordsworth loved at Orléans and Blois in 1792, mother of his daughter Caroline. She is never mentioned in the poem, an omission much discussed by biographers and critics.
- Maximilien Robespierre
- Leader of the Jacobins during the Terror; his accusation and his death in July 1794 frame Book X.
- Edmund Burke
- Statesman and critic of the Revolution, praised in a passage added to Book VII in the later revisions.
- Isaac Newton and John Milton
- The great Cambridge minds of Book III. Newton's statue becomes an image of the solitary mind; Milton is the poet whose epic the poem keeps echoing.
Themes
The growth of the mind
The subtitle given in 1850, 'Growth of a Poet's Mind', names the poem's real subject. Instead of a hero's deeds, it tells how a consciousness is formed: by nature, by fear and pleasure, by books, by love, and by mistakes. Growth is not steady. The poem moves forward through crises, losses and restorations, and its own structure, with repeated returns to childhood, imitates the work of memory.
Wordsworth insists that the mind cannot be divided into neat parts or causes. He calls the account of growth a 'conjecture', and he often admits that he cannot tell which feelings belong to the past and which to the present writer. The poem is therefore as much about the difficulty of autobiography as about its results (Lindenberger 1963).
Nature as teacher
In the childhood books nature disciplines the boy through 'beauty and fear'. It frightens him after his thefts, gives him moments of calm, and slowly teaches him to love the world for its own sake. This is not a sentimental view: nature in the poem is often stern, ghostly and inhuman.
The later books complicate the idea. Imagination can be impaired by the wrong attitude to nature (the tyranny of the eye) and restored by memory. By the end, nature is less a teacher than a mirror in which the mind recognises its own power (Hartman 1964).
Imagination
Imagination is the poem's highest faculty, celebrated in Book VI and in the Snowdon vision. It is creative, transforming what is perceived, and it connects the finite with the infinite. Wordsworth sometimes describes it as a power that overwhelms the senses, sometimes as a cooperation between mind and world.
Critics have long debated whether the poem's imagination finally depends on nature or rises above it. Hartman argued that Wordsworth feared the 'apocalyptic' power of an imagination that could cut him off from nature, and repeatedly bound it back (Hartman 1964) (Bloom 1961).
Memory and the spots of time
Memory in the poem is not just recollection but renewal. The 'spots of time' preserve a power that repairs the mind. Yet many of these memories involve fear, guilt or death, and the poem's way of remembering often turns loss into strength (de Man 1979).
The two consciousnesses of the poem, the remembered self and the remembering self, are often hard to separate: 'I seem / Two consciousnesses', Wordsworth writes in Book II. The poem's power comes partly from this gap.
Revolution and disillusion
Books IX to XI tell how the young Wordsworth embraced the French Revolution, and then lost hope through war, terror and rationalist despair. The story is told by a man who has rejected his earlier politics, but who still honours his early hopes.
The poem presents the crisis as a turning point in the growth of the mind: political hope is transformed into faith in imagination and in human nature. Whether this is a deepening or a retreat is one of the main questions in modern criticism (Roe 1988) (Liu 1989).
Vocation and friendship
The poem tells how the poet became 'a dedicated Spirit', but it is also an act of vocation itself: by writing it, Wordsworth proves to himself and to Coleridge that he can be a poet. The dedication of Book IV and the hope at the end frame the whole.
Friendship is the poem's mode of address. Coleridge is the ideal reader, and the poem constantly turns to him. Dorothy, Mary and Calvert are thanked in turn, so that the 'egotistical' poem is also a record of debts to others (Newlyn 1986).
Motifs
Wandering and roads
The poem is full of walks: the poet's walk at the beginning, the journey across the Alps, the roads of Book XIII. On the roads he meets solitary figures, the soldier, beggars and wanderers, who interrupt his self-absorption and connect him with suffering.
Theft and guilt
The boy's small thefts (birds, eggs, a boat) are followed by experiences of fear. Guilt returns in the adult books, in the 'Sleep no more' of Paris and the silence in church. The motif suggests that conscience and imagination grow together.
Breezes and breath
The 'correspondent breeze' of Book I, the winds of the Alps and the 'breathing-place' on Snowdon link the inner inspiration of the poet with the movements of nature.
Sound and silence
Many key moments depend on sound: the low breathings in Book I, the owls and silences of the Boy of Winander, the roar of waters on Snowdon. Silence often precedes a revelation, as when the owls stop answering.
Addresses to the Friend
Regular addresses to Coleridge break the narrative, recall the moment of writing, and make the poem a dialogue. They are a sign of its conversational, essayistic form.
Symbols
The stolen boat and the peak
The boat is the boy's pride and skill; the 'huge peak' that rises behind the ridge is the moral and natural power that checks him. Together they stand for the education of fear.
The stone and the shell
In the Arab dream, the stone is Euclid's geometry and the shell is poetry, which speaks of a coming deluge. They represent the two kinds of human knowledge that the poet fears may be lost.
The blind beggar's label
A written account worn on a man who cannot see it, it symbolises all autobiography, including this poem: a text that stands for a person but cannot contain him.
The moon over the mist on Snowdon
The final emblem of the poem: the imaginative mind presiding over a transformed world, with the roar of waters rising from the abyss below.
Critical debates
1805 or 1850?
Until 1926 readers knew only the 1850 text. De Selincourt's edition, printing the 1805 text opposite, revealed how much Wordsworth had revised: the style became more formal, some passages were added (the Grande Chartreuse, the praise of Burke), and some radical or pantheistic phrases were softened. Many critics came to prefer 1805 as fresher and closer to the young poet (Wordsworth 1959).
The Norton edition of 1979, by Jonathan Wordsworth, Abrams and Gill, printed the 1799, 1805 and 1850 texts together and encouraged the view that there are several Preludes, not one. Others defend the 1850 version as Wordsworth's final intention and as often better poetry; the debate now concerns what an 'authentic' text of a constantly revised poem means (Wordsworth 1979) (Gill 2006) (Wordsworth 1997).
The 'egotistical sublime' and the self
In a letter of October 1818 Keats contrasted his own 'camelion' poetic character with 'the wordsworthian or egotistical sublime'. The phrase has stuck to The Prelude, a poem whose subject is its author's mind. For some readers the poem's achievement is precisely its new seriousness about the self; for others its confidence in the poet's importance is a limit (Keats 1958).
Modern criticism has asked what kind of self the poem creates. Lindenberger studied its rhetoric and its time structure; feminist critics such as Jacobus have explored how it constructs a masculine poetic identity through female figures of nature, mother and sister (Lindenberger 1963) (Jacobus 1989).
Imagination and nature
Hartman's Wordsworth's Poetry 1787–1814 argued that the poet's imagination was potentially 'apocalyptic', able to break free of nature, and that Wordsworth was both drawn to and afraid of this power. The crossing of the Alps is the key passage: imagination rises when nature fails (Hartman 1964).
Bloom read The Prelude as an internalised quest romance, in which the poet struggles with his own imagination as the heroes of romance did with external enemies. Both readings challenged the older picture of Wordsworth as a simple poet of nature (Bloom 1961).
The French Revolution and the poem's politics
Roe's Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years reconstructed the poets' real involvement in radical circles in the 1790s, which the poem presents in softened form (Roe 1988).
New historicist critics argued that the poem displaces history into private experience. Liu's Wordsworth: The Sense of History and Levinson's work on the great period poems read the poem's landscapes and silences as signs of political events it does not name; others reply that the poem confronts history more directly than this view allows (Liu 1989) (Levinson 1986).
The spots of time and memory
The 'spots of time' have been central to theoretical readings. De Man's essay 'Autobiography as De-facement' argued that autobiography produces the self it claims to describe, through figures such as prosopopoeia (giving a face and voice to the absent); Wordsworth's epitaphic scenes are his examples (de Man 1979) (de Man 1984).
Bloom and Hartman read the spots of time as moments in which the poet's imagination discovers its independence and its connection with death. The debate turns on whether memory restores the self or reveals its fragility (Bloom 1961) (Hartman 1964).
An epic of the mind
Abrams's Natural Supernaturalism placed The Prelude at the centre of a wider Romantic pattern: the secularisation of Christian narratives of fall and redemption into stories of the mind's crisis and renewal. In this view the poem is a 'theodicy of the private life' and an epic that replaces Milton's theme with the marriage of mind and nature (Abrams 1971).
Critics have tested the model, asking whether the poem is really unified by such a design or remains, as Wordsworth said, a preparation for a poem never written (Gill 2006).
Annette Vallon and what the poem omits
The poem never mentions Annette Vallon or their daughter. Biographers since the affair was first made public, in 1916, have read Vaudracour and Julia as a disguised version of it. Its reduction to a few lines in the 1850 text has been seen as a further act of concealment (Gill 1989) (Johnston 1998).
Such omissions raise broad questions about the poem's truthfulness as autobiography. Wordsworth chooses experiences that fit the story of the growth of a poet's mind; what does not fit, whether love, politics or guilt, often appears only indirectly (Jacobus 1989).
Key passages
Fair seed-time had my soul, and I grew up Fostered alike by beauty and by fear:
The central statement of the childhood books. Nature educates through both pleasure and terror; the metaphor of seed-time makes the mind a field whose harvest is poetry.
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.
After the stolen boat, the boy cannot name what he felt. The vague language records an encounter with something beyond the categories of a child.
I made no vows, but vows Were then made for me; bond unknown to me Was given, that I should be, else sinning greatly, A dedicated Spirit.
The dedication at dawn. Vocation is presented as a gift and an obligation, not a choice.
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
The apostrophe that interrupts the Alps narrative. Imagination appears in the moment of writing, not in the past event; it has no origin and no adequate name.
Oh, blank confusion! true epitome Of what the mighty City is herself, To thousands upon thousands of her sons,
Bartholomew Fair stands for London: endless images without order, against which the poet sets the unity of nature.
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very Heaven!
The early Revolution as experienced by the young. The past tense and the irony of 'very Heaven' show the distance of the older poet, but the joy is still felt.
Sick, wearied out with contrarieties, Yielded up moral questions in despair.
The crisis of reason. Despair is the end of the attempt to judge everything by logic; the cure will come from feeling, nature and friendship.
There are in our existence spots of time, That with distinct pre-eminence retain A renovating virtue,
The definition of the spots of time, moments that keep a renewing power. The poem's examples show that they are often scenes of fear or loss.
The Moon hung naked in a firmament Of azure without cloud, and at my feet Rested a silent sea of hoary mist.
The moment on Snowdon when the climbers emerge above the clouds; the scene becomes the emblem of the imaginative mind.
what we have loved, Others will love, and we will teach them how;
The poem's last hope: the poets as prophets and teachers of love to future readers.
Questions for study
Why does The Prelude begin with the poet's failure to begin a different poem?
Think about The Recluse and the idea of the 'ante-chapel'; how does the failure become the subject?
How does nature educate the child in Books I and II? Why does fear matter as much as beauty?
Compare the stolen boat, the woodcock snares and the skating; consider the moral and imaginative effects.
What is a 'spot of time'? Discuss the examples in Book XII.
Consider why trivial scenes become powerful, and the role of death and loss in them.
Why is the crossing of the Alps an anticlimax, and what does the Imagination passage suggest about the poem's idea of the mind?
Look at the present tense of the apostrophe and the vision of the Gondo gorge.
How does London (Book VII) contrast with the Lake District? Is the city simply negative?
Consider the blind beggar, Bartholomew Fair and the poem's humour.
How does the poem present the French Revolution and the poet's disillusion?
Compare Beaupuy, the 'Bliss' passage and the Godwinian crisis; ask what the older poet values in the young one.
What does the poem leave out, and why might that matter?
Think about Annette Vallon, Vaudracour and Julia, and the brief treatment of the parents' deaths.
Compare a passage in the 1805 and 1850 texts. What do the revisions show?
Try the Chartreuse passage, the Burke tribute or the conclusion; consider style as well as politics and religion.
How does the Snowdon vision serve as a conclusion to the whole poem?
Analyse the moon, the mist and the roar of waters as an emblem of the mind.
In what sense is The Prelude an epic?
Consider its echoes of Milton, its length and structure, and Abrams's idea of an 'epic of the mind'.
Further reading
- Abrams, M. H. Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature. New York: W. W. Norton, 1971.
- Bloom, Harold. The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1961.
- de Man, Paul. 'Autobiography as De-facement.' MLN 94, no. 5 (1979): 919–30.
- de Man, Paul. The Rhetoric of Romanticism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984.
- Gill, Stephen. William Wordsworth: A Life. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989.
- Gill, Stephen, ed. William Wordsworth's The Prelude: A Casebook. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
- Hartman, Geoffrey H. Wordsworth's Poetry 1787–1814. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964.
- Jacobus, Mary. Romanticism, Writing, and Sexual Difference: Essays on The Prelude. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989.
- Johnston, Kenneth R. The Hidden Wordsworth: Poet, Lover, Rebel, Spy. New York: W. W. Norton, 1998.
- Keats, John. The Letters of John Keats, 1814–1821. Ed. Hyder Edward Rollins. 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958.
- Levinson, Marjorie. Wordsworth's Great Period Poems: Four Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
- Lindenberger, Herbert. On Wordsworth's Prelude. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963.
- Liu, Alan. Wordsworth: The Sense of History. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989.
- Newlyn, Lucy. Coleridge, Wordsworth, and the Language of Allusion. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986.
- Reed, Mark L. Wordsworth: The Chronology of the Early Years, 1770–1799. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967.
- Roe, Nicholas. Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988.
- Wordsworth, William. The Five-Book Prelude. Ed. Duncan Wu. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997.
- Wordsworth, William. The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850. Ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams and Stephen Gill. New York: W. W. Norton, 1979.
- Wordsworth, William. The Prelude, or Growth of a Poet's Mind. Ed. Ernest de Selincourt. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926; 2nd edn, rev. Helen Darbishire, 1959.
Written by the Poetry Codex editors. Updated 2026-10-19.