Summary
This autobiographical epic poem begins with the speaker (a young Wordsworth) returning from a city to the rural area he calls home. Since this work is autobiographical, we can guess that this area is England's idyllic Lake District, where Wordsworth grew up. He is relieved and thrilled, even comparing the crowded city to a place of captivity. The liveliness and intensity of nature seem to awaken a similar creative aliveness within the young poet, and he feels as if the streams and branches around him are both pointing him towards a certain poetic destiny, and reflecting that which is already inside of him. In search of experiences in nature—both because he enjoys them and because they sharpen his instincts as a writer—the child Wordsworth embarks on a series of explorations. These explorations take place in the physical world, but they also symbolize and bring about the speaker's growth as a human being and as a poet. Indeed, the speaker deliberately sets goals that he thinks might help him grow as an artist. He wants to capture meaningful, important things in his work, but they don't always feel available to him. At the same time, he isn't able to bring himself to sacrifice poetry for something more mundane and respectable. When he considers his fitness to be a poet, the speaker is pretty satisfied. He feels that he has a "vital soul," a good understanding of important truths, and a solid store of images and anecdotes culled from the real world. But he's not always able to write about what he'd like. Sometimes he goes ahead and retells a famous mythical or historical narrative, and other times he writes about his own life. But what he'd really like is to write, movingly and evocatively, about universal everyday experiences. However, the speaker is still too young to really know how to do this. He can't yet separate selfish impulses from intuitive longings, or fear from wise cautiousness. He needs to separate himself from the petty ambitions of human society, embracing immersion in nature in order to write the way he wants.
The speaker describes the beloved river Derwent, flowing near his home throughout his childhood. This forms his earliest memory of nature, but, he recalls, as he grew older he became more adventurous. He wandered off among the forests and hills, occasionally getting into trouble. He remembers plundering birds' nests and once even falling off the side of a cliff, hanging on for dear life. Now, in retrospect, it seems as if nature gave him additional challenges and experiences in order to aid his artistic development. In one especially intense memory, the speaker recalls, he stole a small boat and steered it beneath some massive rock formations. These formations affected him deeply, inspiring a kind of awe, horror, and curiosity long after he returned the boat. Reflecting on that sublime experience, the speaker contrasts the mundane meaninglessness of the man-made world with the inexplicable, nearly divine grandeur of nature. At the same time, he remembers calmer, less earth-shattering moments in the natural world or in humble rural cottages, like ice-skating and playing card games. The speaker claims that he felt remarkably sensitive and connected to natural beauty as a child. Finally, the speaker apologizes for his long-windedness, saying that he hoped to attain self-improvement by reflecting on the past. Regardless, reminiscing has made him feel mentally sharper and prepared him to launch into the full story of his life.
Analysis
One important thing to keep in mind while reading the Prelude is its autobiographical nature. The work is essentially a memoir in blank verse, and while its focus is primarily artistic rather than informational, it does draw on Wordsworth's actual experiences. The poet was born in 1770 in the Lake District, a region of England known for its pastoral beauty. Indeed, the young Wordsworth would likely have spent much of his childhood playing outside, just as he describes in the poem. This idyllic childhood ended somewhat abruptly, with the successive deaths of Wordsworth's parents in 1778 and 1783. It may in part be because of these tragic, sudden losses that the first book of the Prelude is so tinged with nostalgia and so concerned with the slippery nature of time and memory.
We can watch this concern with the movement of time play out by tracking the speaker's use of past and present tense. Book First begins in the present tense, with the speaker describing his return from the city as if it is happening in the present moment—as if he narrates, not as an adult, but as his childhood self. But in line 55, we forge ahead into the future, and the speaker is revealed to be describing his childhood from a distance. For a while, he continues to narrate in past tense, using the present only when comparing his state as an adult to his distant childhood. But then the present returns in a more ambiguous way. In statements like "When...I through myself make rigorous inquisition, the report/is often cheering"—a description of the speaker's practice of artistic self-evaluation—it's not altogether clear whether he is using present tense to vividly describe his childhood, or whether he's speaking about his current, adult self. Both readings are possible, and this ambiguity makes sense in the context of the narrative arc being established. Both the young and the older versions of the speaker are engaging in acts of adventure exploration in order to heighten their sensitivities and sharpen their mental acuity, all in the service of becoming a better poet. The child speaker explores nature in order to accomplish these goals, while the adult speaker explores his own memories in order to do so.
In other words, here Wordsworth establishes a kind of triangular relationship between childhood, nature, and poetry. Childhood and the natural world are deeply linked, such that childhood is portrayed as a period of authenticity, rusticity, and connection to the earth. Such a portrayal of childhood is common in the works of Wordsworth and other Romantic poets. In fact, some critics have argued that the Romantics were instrumental in inventing now-ubiquitous archetypes of the innocent, simple child. But on the one hand, the speaker doesn't describe his love of nature as a mere side effect of his youth. Instead, he recounts being unusually sensitive to the natural world. This sensitivity, he suggests, comes from his naturally poetic temperament. The poet, Wordsworth argues, is in some ways like the child (or, as he writes in line 146, like the lover)—both are disconnected from the artificiality of urban adult life, and linked instead to the sublimity of nature. Nature here isn't a passive object to be admired. Instead, it's almost conscious, and even seems to embody the divine. For instance, the cliffs around which the speaker steers his stolen boat loom "like a living thing," judging and watching.
To be a poet, then, isn't simply a trade or a hobby. At least for this speaker, it is a near-religious vocation, and a state as all-consuming as childhood. Of course, this doesn't mean that having a poetic temperament always means writing good poems. Rather, it means that writing good poetry goes far beyond honing a craft, and involves cultivating one's wisdom, sensitivity, and receptivity to beauty starting at a young age. We can see that, between the 1805 and 1850 versions of the Prelude, Wordsworth sought to emphasize the hard work of creating poetry: he adjusts the phrase "such glorious work" to "such arduous work." The speaker's poetic temperament means he's always going to produce poetry, but without putting in that arduous work, much of it is derivative and uninteresting. Sometimes these uninteresting poems are nostalgic retellings of "some British theme," disconnected from real life. Sometimes they're self-indulgently autobiographical. But the speaker really wants to produce work that ties together universal themes and specific experiences. In order to do this, he believes, he must combine the wisdom and discipline of adulthood with the emotion and instinct of a nature-infused childhood. Furthermore, the speaker describes poetry as deeply personal. Whether it's autobiographical or not, it draws on its writer's beliefs, experiences, and ability to understand the surrounding world. These links between poetic sensitivity, childhood, nostalgia, and nature will return again and again throughout the Prelude, just as they do in so much of Wordsworth's writing.
