William Wordsworth’s The Prelude is a romantic rewriting of the traditional epic. The Epics of Homer feature ancient heroes and bloodthirsty warriors obsessed with honor and glory, while John Milton’s Paradise Lost, the great English epic, features great religious figures like Satan and Adam suffering from vanity and pride. Wordsworth reimagines the epic in a humbler mode, combining the autobiographical confessional of St Augustine, to tell an autobiographical epic about the birth of a poet through his life experiences and the first spawning of his imagination.

The first book begins with his childhood, covering his schooling in Cambridge, London, his journey to the Alps, his experience living in France during the Revolution, his disillusionment with the French Revolution, his reconnection with the world after such disillusionment, and the conclusion at Mount Snowdon.

As I have said before, I’m not a huge fan of long poems; this one is no exception.  There is some beautiful language and interesting ideas here, but the poem comes off as disjointed and runs on in long philosophical tangents that made it a struggle to read and not appealing to my personal tastes. To put it simply, I could appreciate parts of it, but I found it very boring. Even though this a Romantic poem teeming with love of nature and celebrating the glories of unbridled imagination, the style actually reminds me a lot of Virginia Woolf’s stream-of-conscious style with all its philosophical tangents and layering of thought-processes. Part of this difficult style feeds into the larger themes of the work. The work explores the nature of imagination, nature as a fostering power for our thoughts, and the power of memory. Wordsworth disjointed narrative reminds us that our life history are punctuated by random decisive moments that shape the person we will become; memory is selective, our greatest experiences that truly stay with us are often accidental. When I think about important moments in my own life I realize he is at least partially right; many of those moments I didn’t plan, but they just happened when I wasn’t looking for them.

When we least expect it is when we encounter these moments that change our lives forever. In particular, the episode where Wordsworth tries to visit the Alps looking for a sublime experience highlights this when he accidentally passes through the alps without knowing it. Nature affects him the most when he isn’t expecting it, when he is busy experiencing nature for ulterior motives (such as when he is a kid as a backdrop for playing a game with his friends). However, once he experiences these life-changing moments, usually associated with some awe born from a natural wonder, the memory is there to comfort him forever. In many ways, this less a poem about the glories of nature as it is a poem about the power of memory and the way it colors our future life.

Nevertheless, this is a Romantic poem and nature plays an important part throughout his life as a source of inspiration. As the poem progresses, we see Wordsworth’s stance towards nature constantly shifting, initially he has superficial reactions to nature, admiring its beauty, but eventually his entire soul, emotions, and imagination is sparked by nature. Nature is the force that speaks to his soul, not in some vague mystical sense (although he does draw on Christian language and imagery in the poem), but literally it helps him get in touch with his conscious and emotions and people. In his emotional reactions to the beauty and frightening qualities of nature (which he mentions from his youth), he recognizes his own consciousness, that he is capable of having thoughts and feelings in the first place you might say, and that everything in the world has a hidden depth beyond its surface.

Advertisement