Summary
The speaker grieves on behalf of humankind. This isn't because of their sorrows or pains. Instead, it's because of their triumphs: he is distressed by the knowledge that even man's greatest works of literature and intellect will be forgotten. He envies the eternity of nature, beside which man's accomplishments are laughably ephemeral. He then describes confessing these concerns to a friend, who says that he shares such worries sometimes. The speaker's friend describes a bizarre dream. The friend describes falling asleep while reading Don Quixote at the beach. He dreams that he is in a desert and that an Arab man, who may be Don Quixote himself, rides up to him on a camel holding a stone and a shell. The Arab man says that both objects are actually books and that he is on his way to bury them for their protection. The stone is Euclid's Elements. Rather than describe the shell's contents, the man hands it to the speaker's friend, who puts it to his ear. He hears a prophecy about the world being swallowed by the sea. Just then, he realizes that the sea is rising towards him: the world's end has come. The other man speeds off to bury the books before the flood, and the friend wakes in terror. The speaker then says that he almost thinks of this man from the dream as a real person, and admires him for having such a dispassionate, meaningful task to accomplish when faced with the world's end. The speaker muses that he would, if he could, do something similar to preserve the works of Milton and Shakespeare.
Nature is mighty for its ability to dispel thoughts of despair with its grandeur. As a child, the speaker says, he was simply grateful and happy with the gifts of nature and literature. In a moment of renewed gratitude, the speaker praises poets and writers for bringing joy and meaning to all walks of life and all ages. These men deserve to be praised for eternity, and through their works have manifested and expressed the vitality of God and nature. However, today's children aren't necessarily able to enjoy the kind of childhood the speaker had. The speaker was raised in a carefree way that allowed him to wander and discover. This new generation is restricted. In the speaker's childhood, his mother—who had a simple, unpretentious wisdom—ensured that he appreciated the natural world and let him do as he wished. Today's children are expected to act like small, perfect adults. They are polite, educated, and kind—but their uncanny perfection is evidence that they are being kept from an authentic and carefree childishness. Furthermore, today many people are obsessed with an empirical, scientific outlook that aims to know everything. This affects children, who are stifled by unimaginative education. The speaker reflects that the world isn't supposed to be totally knowable. It should be played with and enjoyed, not quantified. In contrast, the speaker describes a boy he once knew who liked to go to the lake's bank and mimic owls' calls. He would listen as the surrounding owls called back to him, or else enjoy nature's silence when they did not. That boy died when he was only ten (or, in the 1850 revision, twelve). Today, the speaker sometimes sits on that same bank, remembering his childhood friend and hoping that the children of the next generations can enjoy a childhood more similar to his own.
Next, the speaker recalls his first arrival at that very lake, where he saw a pile of clothing sitting on the bank at nightfall, but didn't see its owner. The next day he watched adults recover the grotesque corpse of a drowned man from the water, but he didn't feel afraid. His imagination had long provided him with similarly dramatic and fantastical images. In this time, he prized an abridged collection of the Arabian Nights, and he learned from friends that the full Arabian Nights was much longer. He and a friend vowed to save money to buy the full version, but lacked the willpower. However, his love for literature increased as he read on the shores of the Derwent river throughout his childhood summers. Poetry, he notes, can bring a kind of universal grace and comfort to all people: it is one of the constants of the human experience and has been one of the constants of his life. In childhood, as people come to terms with the inevitable limitations of their lives, it is verse that offers them solace and connects them to something greater and more enduring. Later, people learn to appreciate humbler reality—but this process is linked to, not counter to, a childhood need for imagination and fancy. In his own youth, the speaker would walk with a friend and swap lines of verse for hours. They were full of feeling and passion. Much of it was silly or misdirected, but that hardly mattered: they were full of the important and deeply human longing for something eternal and beautiful. This immersion in nature and in poetry has made him sensitive to beauty and mystery, and great poets help plumb the depths of that mystery.
Finally, he says, this book has only been a quick look at what books mean to him. They have meant even more as he has aged. But he felt that he needed to stop and voice appreciation for them before continuing.
Analysis
As discussed previously, one of Wordsworth's signature narrative techniques involves fluid movement between different levels of narrative. This means that he regularly portrays his speaker as existing both in a present, from which he narrates, and in a past, about which he narrates. Sometimes he even adds an additional narrative layer, in which, for instance, his speaker reminisces about remembering—we witnessed a lot of that in Book Fourth, where the speaker remembered the nostalgia for his childhood that he felt upon returning home from Cambridge. In all of these cases, Wordsworth seems to enjoy making readers aware of the immersive capacities of narration. He plunges readers into one narrative, and then pushes them steadily further and further into it as they go back in time or deeper into the speaker's psyche. Here, he does just that, but in a way we haven't yet seen: by using a dream. Actually, it's a dream within an anecdote within the broader narrative. The speaker begins on the surface, telling us about his feelings of despair in the face of eternity. He then dips into a deeper narrative layer, relaying a friend's narrative in quotes. And then he enters the deepest layer of all: the friend's dream. As slowly as he took us into this dream, Wordsworth takes us out. Still quoting the friend, he describes the process of waking from the dream and reentering reality. Then, finally, he slips back up from the friend's reality into his own, describing how he feels about and thinks about this dream. Through this slow, multistep process, the poet is able to completely immerse us in a surreal narrative. We might have had trouble accepting that narrative without such a transition. But, by stacking it with intervening layers of varied immediacy, Wordsworth helps us buy into it and accept its relevance to the wider narrative.
In this section, we see a theme that has cropped up before: the problems with contemporary education. In Book Third, the speaker complains about the pretentiousness and anti-intellectualism of his university. Here, he dives in more deeply to a diagnosis of the entire intellectual and cultural climate of the era. This book of the Prelude is direct and unsparing in its condemnation of Enlightenment thought. Wordsworth does not deny that Enlightenment values are realistic or possible to implement, but rather critiques the emphasis placed on them. Yes, he concedes—his contemporaries are rearing intelligent, curious, kind, and refined children. They are successfully solving intellectual puzzles and ensuring that young people are aware of those solutions. The problem, says the speaker, is that the world isn't a puzzle to be solved, and children aren't flawed beings in need of refinement and maturity. Rather, he suggests, the world is a kind of gift—a playground whose mysteries should be enjoyed and appreciated. To insist that those mysteries can and should be understood isn't just arrogant; it's downright ungrateful. Wordsworth personifies the earth as he makes this claim, arguing that "old grandame earth" will be hurt by human vanity. This isn't a mere rhetorical gesture; as we've seen, Wordsworth views nature through an almost pantheistic lens, and considers it conscious in its own way.
The argument that children should be given freedom, and allowed to appreciate nature and narrative without overanalyzing it, is linked to two ideas prominent throughout the Prelude and throughout Wordsworth's work as a whole. The first of these two connected ideas is authenticity. The second is passion. While bemoaning the repression of modern childhood, Wordsworth recalls the "race of real children" he was once part of. To be "real" here is implicitly tied to youth, imperfection, spontaneity, and nature. In contrast, the urban, the institutional, the adult, and the cultivated aren't merely distasteful: they are, in a sense, performative or fake. As for passion, Wordsworth here makes an argument that passion is in itself valuable. The content or direction of that passion is secondary to the emotional intensity of its existence. We see this claim most prominently in his recollection of walking and reciting poems with a friend. Yes, he admits, they were often in love with "false" things—but the unfettered, "untutored," authentic nature of their love was valuable. These ideas of authenticity and passion today seem so ubiquitous that they are universal. But, to an extent, that's only because the Romantic movement was so successful at mainstreaming them. That's not to say that they didn't exist before, but the influence of Wordsworth and other Romantics when it comes to engaging and disseminating those ideals is difficult to overestimate.
