Summary
The Prelude's final book begins with the speaker recalling a nighttime, seaside hike in Wales with a friend and a shepherd, who served as a guide. The quiet summer night was suddenly illuminated by a bright moon and obscured by a dramatic "sea of mist." This sea of mist contained an opening, through which the speaker was able to discern the violent rushing of the actual sea. He felt that the very voice of nature was audible through that opening. Reflecting upon what he saw, the speaker concluded that the best minds are not merely sensitive to nature—they are parallel to, and even an extension of, nature's transcendent power. Even a dull mind can be affected by this power, even if it lacks that particular connection to nature. Great minds, in fact, are like nature precisely because they have this power to affect others through literature, art, and other forms of expression. Genius is also distinct in that it can be called to action by relatively minor, modest influences—it doesn't need showiness to feel inspired. People with great minds know themselves and are never bored or lost, because they are constantly affected by beauty, and constantly creating it. However, the speaker says, nobody is actually lucky enough to live up to this ideal all the time. In the 1850 revision, the speaker explicitly notes that he himself didn't easily achieve this level of harmony with himself and with nature: what we've just read is a recounting of his difficulties. His process has been difficult, but he notes with pride that he's never fallen prey to pettiness or a desire for power. Even when he was misguided, he always fought against crude, petty instincts in himself and society.
Love has been the primary force keeping him in check throughout his life: it has urged him towards noble, artistic pursuits and prevented him from falling prey to selfish instincts. He compares two kinds of love. One is interpersonal devotion, and he is enthusiastic about this kind. But the other, "higher" love receives more focus. The higher love is not only between people, but is a divine, transcendent force. It's connected to imagination, a virtue that, the speaker reminds us, we have discussed at length already—from its first appearance in his life to its loss and recovery. Imagination cannot be separated from "intellectual love," and the two together combine to form every other form of love and inspiration. While individuals must be self-reliant in order to propel themselves to a final, fully-realized form, they also require friendship and love. Having explained his philosophy of love in general, Wordsworth then specifically addresses a few people in his life. He starts with his sister Dorothy, explaining that she helped him reclaim his imaginative life when it was nearly lost, and that she has generally offered a softer contrast to some of his ways of thinking. He then addresses Coleridge, describing him as a person with a remarkable capacity for love and care. Wordsworth reflects that he has achieved what he wanted to with the Prelude, successfully telling his own story and laying the groundwork for new, more ambitious works of poetry. A great deal remains to be said in future works—celebration of some of nature's more superficial, outward beauty, for one, as well as an analysis of human nature. He reflects that his time in school, witnessing the friction between people in day-to-day life, has served him well by helping him understand human relationships better. It's also given him the ability to observe and describe without letting his feelings overwhelm him.
The speaker notes that, in the later books of the Prelude, he has neglected to say much about the actual biographical facts of his life. For years, he was a wanderer, living mostly in London until settling with his sister. A friend named Calvert, who was not a poet himself but who understood that poets must work without financial worry, was kind enough to offer Wordsworth funds while he worked. As the work comes to a close, he addresses Coleridge again, asking him to cast his mind back to the start of the work: when he began writing, he says, he felt that he was rising above his life like a lark, and singing his story like a bird. The speaker can only hope that he will produce great enough work to justify this lengthy autobiography. He reminds Coleridge of a day they spent together, when Coleridge spoke about some of his own work. Wordsworth remembers his own interest in his friend's poetry, and hopes that his friend will feel similarly interested in this work, and will not find it self-indulgent or arrogant. The speaker explains that he is writing in a state of sadness mixed with hope, voicing his yearning for an improvement in Coleridge's health. He tells his friend that the two of them can take pride in their work—they have both tried to transmit a love of nature and a faith in the beauty of the human mind, and no matter how history plays out, they know that this has been a worthy project.
Analysis
This final book of the Prelude begins with an immersive, transformative experience in nature—one in which the speaker seems to commune directly with the natural world. This is an echo of an earlier, similarly transcendent experience from a much earlier moment in both this work and in the speaker's life: his encounter, from a small boat, with looming cliffs. These paralleled scenes offer insight into both what has and what has not changed in our speaker. On the one hand, he has not lost his love of the natural world or his sensitivity to it. In fact, after periods of alienation or distraction, he has reclaimed this core part of himself. A passage dense with exclamation points and packed with breathless, long lists shows that the speaker has by no means become jaded, and that he remains as affected by nature's beauty as ever. On the other hand, it's clear that he has developed an ability to handle this kind of transcendent encounter. His childhood brush with the cliffs offered insight and inspiration, but also produced such awe that he was unable to function normally for a period after. As an adult, however, he understands himself as a counterpart of nature, with a clear role of transmitting and describing these awe-inspiring experiences. As he explains later in the book, when discussing his schooldays, a poet must be capable of both deep feeling and objective, descriptive distance. He has now developed these separate abilities, meaning that he can feel inspired by nature without feeling debilitated by it. Moreover, he has this adult experience of transcendence in Wales, reasonably far from his childhood home. We can see that, as an adult, he has an expanded experience of the world—and yet it is one grounded in love for his childhood landscape.
This final book is largely a meta-narrative, in which Wordsworth explains how he wrote the Prelude, why he wrote it, and what his hopes are for the text. In this way it is thematically concerned with the act of writing and with poetry itself. One aspect of poetry that Wordsworth touches on is practical: how should a poet, aspiring to write something universal and transcendent, cope with life's mundane necessities? In Wordsworth's case, the solution comes in the form of a donor named Calvert. Wordsworth stresses the fact that Calvert, though he may not have had an affinity for writing poetry himself, offered what he did have: money. Wordsworth argues that poetry requires not only poets, but a network of people to scaffold the poet's work with personal guidance, intellectual inspiration, and even financial assistance.
But having money to fund writing isn't the only meta-literary concern raised here. Wordsworth actually reveals a certain degree of self-doubt about this entire enterprise, wondering about the point of writing this autobiographical work in general. In Wordsworth's real life, The Prelude was intended to function as a kind of warmup to a longer, epic work called The Recluse. This longer work was intended to be done in collaboration with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, to whom this work is addressed. However, The Recluse was never completed. Despite the fact that The Prelude was composed as a forerunner to another poem, in this final book Wordsworth seems to be making a case for the poem's validity as a standalone work. As he himself indicates by noting some of the factual gaps in the poem, it is not necessarily meant to function as a mere record of his life's events (although, ironically, The Prelude is detailed enough that historians and critics have tended to rely on it to a great extent for facts about the poet's life). And, while the act of writing is in itself a satisfying one—as the metaphor of a songbird taking wing suggests—the pleasure of the poet himself isn't sufficient to justify the work's creation. Instead, Wordsworth locates the justification for this poem in his relationship with Coleridge, telling his friend that he wants The Prelude to serve as a source of comfort, entertainment, and inspiration. This makes sense, because throughout the Prelude, Wordsworth has expressed a desire to create immortal works that can mimic nature's awe-inspiring powers. Writing a work devoted to a single friend's enjoyment may seem a far cry from crafting an immortal, awe-inspiring piece of art. But consider the definitions of love delineated in this book. The first type of love, which is essentially social and includes friendship, is an expression of or element of a greater type—one expressed in nature itself. Therefore, by writing a poem oriented towards a single friend, this writer hopes to also engage with that second, "higher" type of love and create something imitative of nature itself.
