Summary
The speaker returns to the beautiful, pastoral area where he was raised at the start of his summer vacation from Cambridge. He takes joy in the familiarity of it, greeting the ferryman who will steer him to his beloved valley. He is thrilled to see an "old Dame," a woman whom, he explains, cared for him and housed him like a mother during his youth. He will, he says, never forget his gratitude towards her: while she had no children of her own she treated him and others with parental love for the eighty-plus years of her life. He explores the house he once lived in, nostalgically greeting its rooms and the brook outside. He addresses the brook, noting how its natural flow has been restricted by humans changing its course. He wanders around, greeting acquaintances casually and familiarly. With his former schoolmates he feels somewhat awkward, knowing that he dresses and acts differently after his time at Cambridge. He is overjoyed to eat at his familiar table and to sleep in his childhood bed, where he once spent so many nights listening to the rain and watching the moon. One of the faces he's most excited to see belongs, not to a person, but to a loyal dog—a former hunting hound who has grown old and is now kept as a companion. During the adventures and angsts of his childhood the dog watched over him and accompanied him, in his own way helping to guide the young poet towards the realization of his artistic potential. When feeling inspired, he would often express his happiness by petting and playing with the dog. The dog would watch over him and even warn him of others humans' approach, so that the frenzied artist could compose himself and not appear mad in front of others.
Like springtime, the speaker's once-regular walks through the valley return to him. That very night he walks around the valley, which is not at its most romantic or beautiful—but this makes him love it even more. He is filled with deep comfort, feeling strengthened and sustained, though before he did not realize he had been weakened or tired. He's filled with gratitude for the eternal beauty of the human soul and nature, as well as a more domestic love of the quiet, peaceful landscape. He sits and watches the lake and mountains, and he listens to the wind, occasionally mistaking it for the breathing of his favorite dog. He now finds the lives of the people most familiar to him newly fascinating, and is struck by the way that their aging appears so sudden and dramatic after his absence. In particular, the simple life of his "Dame"—his adoptive mother—is intriguing to him, oriented as it is around domestic comfort, hard work, and devotion to the church. It's not just people: every single object in nature seems new to him, or, rather, he feels newly born as he re-encounters the mountains, stars, and bodies of water. He observes them with less of his former adolescent turmoil and with a more controlled interest. Past and present perceptions meld imperceptibly into each other. He compares his perspective to that of someone in a boat, unable to discern the boundaries between reflections and the actual contents of the water beneath him. This isn't an unenjoyable problem, and in a way the simultaneous awareness of past and present excites him. However, even as he takes joy in the things he has always loved, he finds his head full of the frivolous, materialistic habits he enjoys at Cambridge. These parties and sports aren't so much valued for their inherent fun as they are for the masculine achievement they signify. These revelries were shallow pleasures, and paled beside the deeper joy of books or nature. Even so, he can't help remembering one night of such energy and excitement that he stayed out until dawn. Facing the break of day, he felt such profound gratitude that, almost against his will, he felt vows being made for him to be "a dedicated spirit." His mind was an odd place then, containing an unsorted blend of shallow and deep, insightful and silly.
One of his favorite pastimes is walking along a public road, which is extremely solitary at night. He loves its harmonious, beautiful tranquility, which makes him feel unusually self-possessed and calm. But on one such night his peace and solitude are disrupted. He discovers an odd shape, and realizes that a man is lying in a strange position and looks frightening, even ghostly. Sounds of pain or fear are emanating from him. Frightened and unsure, the speaker watches the stranger in the darkness before finally approaching him. The man reveals that he is a soldier, recently returned from the tropics, sick and stranded on his way home. The speaker tells him that he can help him find a comfortable place to spend the night. He helps the man to his feet and, as they walk, peppers him with questions about his life. But the soldier feels otherworldly, and he answers as if only partially present—as if remembering but not truly feeling his experiences. Eventually the speaker and soldier reach a cottage, and the speaker, explaining the soldier's plight to an inhabitant, leaves him there to sleep. The soldier, seeming revived, thanks the speaker. The speaker then starts out alone on his walk home.
Analysis
Wordsworth's writing is unusual for the complex, knotty ways in which it plays with time. Reading his work can feel like standing in a house of mirrors, with each moment in narrative time reflecting and casting a reflection on every other point in time. Up until now, we've dealt with a relatively simple relationship to temporality here. We've occupied the point of view of the grown speaker, who reminisces about his childhood. Sometimes we become more deeply absorbed in the childhood perspective, while at other times the speaker pulls back, recalling his past in a more abstracted and distant way. But here, Wordsworth introduces a new layer. His speaker has returned home, and is therefore caught up in feelings of nostalgia and in his own confusion and mixing of past and present. He is filled with thoughts about his childhood as well as about his university days, which make him experience his surroundings almost secondhand: he analyzes them through the lens of his past relationship to them, examining all the ways in which that relationship has changed. This complex chronological structure is slotted into the preexisting one, so that here we see an adult speaker remembering adolescent memories of childhood. These chronological acrobatics aren't just Wordsworth being showy (and, in fact, when Wordsworth is at his best these interlaced timelines don't feel especially noticeable). They are inextricable from the themes and narratives of the story itself. The Prelude's premise, after all, is that every moment in an artist's past contributes in some form to his art. This epic poem is an investigative journey of sorts, in which every moment in the poet's past is examined, often beside other seemingly unrelated moments, in order to determine how it might have impacted him and his work.
This book also brings in another, subtler change. Here, the speaker begins to highlight the ways individuals have contributed to his journey, building them out as vivid characters in ways beyond what he has done so far. He speaks in detail about three individuals in particular: the woman who helped raise him, the dog who accompanied him on walks, and the soldier he encounters in the woods. Each of these characters brings out a different element of the speaker's development at this phase. First, he reencounters the "dame" who housed and cared for him in his school days. He finds the simplicity and morality of her life not merely comforting, but almost exotic. This suggests that the extravagance of Cambridge has reset his sense of what is normal. As the speaker reflects, his own mind feels torn between the norms of his university and the norms of his home. With her religiousness, her selfless devotion to others, and the sheer repetitiveness of her routine, the woman embodies those hometown norms and therefore stands in opposition to the pretensions of Cambridge. Meanwhile, with his description of the dog, Wordsworth offers one of the more vivid non-human characterizations in English poetry. In the first few books of the Prelude, the speaker regularly explains that his relationship to nature isn't one of mere admiration—it's a mutual exchange between complex, dynamic, and even conscious entities. However, so far he has put forth that idea through metaphor or philosophical monologues. Here, he demonstrates it in a more accessible and straightforward way. The dog, a nonhuman part of the natural world, actively aids the speaker in his growth as a poet and seems to have an intelligence and will of his own. His interactions with the speaker are a symbiotic connection between man and nature, expressed through a single highly specific, minor-seeming instance. Finally, there's the speaker's encounter with the soldier. This is one of the most mysterious and striking scenes in the Prelude, evoked with spooky, haunting, and almost nightmarish language. One of the most interesting elements of the "discharged soldier" sequence is the way the speaker is torn between fear on the soldier's behalf and pity for his problems. He finds the man, despite his powerlessness and pain or perhaps because of it, frightening. He must overcome this fear, which never quite seems to subside, in order to help him.
More broadly, by highlighting the speaker's relationship to other characters, Wordsworth hints at his growing social awareness and perspective. Even as he claims that life at Cambridge has pushed him into an unprecedented shallowness, he seems instead to have new sympathies for those around him, or, perhaps more accurately, he seems to be noticing those around him for the first time. Wordsworth chooses to omit the woman and the dog from the early books of the Prelude, mentioning them for the first time here, when the speaker reunites with them. Thus, the speaker seems to be newly equipped with social instincts and care for others, as if emerging from a degree of youthful self-absorption. At the same time, Wordsworth suggests that his speaker is only able to see these individuals when he exists at something of a remove from them. His appreciation is wrapped up with nostalgia, alienation, and even a degree of condescension. Thus, he experiences an odd mix of closeness and distance, in which the two are not entirely opposite but instead function in a complicated tandem.
