Summary
The speaker begins with a quick review of what he's covered, saying that he's done his best to give a cursory account of his early childhood. He then continues to describe his relationship to nature during childhood. Those days seem so distant, reflects the adult speaker, that sometimes he feels like a different person from his young self. He recalls a stone that used to sit in his village, from which an old woman sold snacks. When he returned to the village after years away, the stone had been taken and used to build an assembly room. Time passed quickly, and the speaker and his friends amused themselves with sailing races and exploring, even though they were poor and often hungry except when their summer jobs paid them. However, they ate humble food in different corners of nature, and sometimes used the horses of a friendly innkeeper to explore further. They'd visit a dilapidated but beautiful old abbey, feeling touched by the sad loveliness of it before racing home. The speaker describes a lakeside inn, extravagantly decorated and somewhat ridiculous and pretentious. He felt affection for it, and for the beautiful scenery outside, where he and his friends would relax. One night on the way home, he and his friends left one musical member of their group on an island in the lake, sailing away from him. He played a tune on his flute, and the music moved the speaker more than almost any other experience he'd had before. The speaker explains that he gained a new appreciation of nature, though the way he loved the moon and stars as a child was not as deep or complex as it is now, in his adulthood.
The speaker then delves into more abstract, philosophical ideas. He explains his distaste for worldviews that insist on strict categorization and conceptual boundaries, noting that human development is too complicated and gradual for these frameworks to apply. To the extent that this process of development can be traced, Wordsworth supposes, it begins in infancy. The baby experiences his mother's love, which prepares him to embrace nature and see himself as part of a vital, ever-changing universe. This access to nature's spiritual truths is present in all children, but only some manage to hold on to it as they age. The speaker considers his own movement along this trajectory, from his relationship with his mother in infancy to adulthood. Though this movement is ambiguous and hard to describe accurately, he knows that his relationship to nature allowed him to maintain a poet's sensitivity and curiosity even after the loss of his own parents. He continued having profound experiences in nature. While he no longer remembers those flashes of insight, he remembers the feeling of the sublime, and now knows that he should seek out that feeling as an adult.
The speaker recalls walking before school with a friend—someone he hasn't seen for years, though he remembers him fondly and imagines him reading the poem at hand. Other experiences of solitude in nature shaped his sensibility. Conversely, his growing poetic sensibility brought him new abilities to appreciate everything from the sun to nighttime storms. He became skilled at spotting the unacknowledged connections between seemingly disparate entities. By the age of seventeen, he felt overjoyed by the abundance of nature and by his own ability to analyze and observe the world around him. He addresses natural forms in the second person, praising them and explaining that they offer hope against the moral degradation and injustices of modernity. Finally, he addresses an unnamed friend, noting that despite the friend's urban upbringing he is also a lover of nature. The speaker and his friend therefore share a deep kinship.
Analysis
In this book, our speaker expresses a great deal of uncertainty. He readily admits that life and art are complicated, and that the project of writing an autobiographical text is a messy, maybe impossible one. In fact, he seems to be certain about only one thing: the inevitability of uncertainty and the dangers of arrogance. For the speaker, a huge part of becoming a wise, intelligent adult revolves around confronting the enormous power and inexplicability of nature, as well as one's own insignificance beside it. We saw this in Book First, when the speaker is frightened by looming cliffs in the boat-stealing scene. And we see it here, when he describes the bizarre blend of beauty and sadness created by the song of birds in an abandoned abbey. Embracing vulnerability, unknowability, and ambiguity are necessary parts of the speaker's growth as a poet, and he has very little patience for people who try to impose contrived human concepts on the mysteries of the natural world or the imagination. One way in which this impatience emerges is early in Book Second, when the speaker recalls the rock where an old woman once sold food. It's with sadness that he recalls the way that rock was taken away and used to build an assembly room. To him, this represents a movement from the informal, humble, communal role it once served towards a more constricted and proscribed role in maintaining human power structures. He's even more direct about this distaste in a brief tangent that begins shortly after line 200. Here, he argues that it is useless to describe one's own mental and emotional growth with "geometric rules,/split like a province into round and square." This line suggests a linkage between the arbitrary divvying-up of land into private or national property, and the arbitrary divvying-up of mysterious abstractions into easily-explained categories.
The speaker goes on to attack those who use scientific discovery in order to boost their own egos and feel invincible. He argues that science should be used as an imperfect defense against humans' imperfections and weaknesses. Here, we can see the way in which Wordsworth and the Romantic movement generally pushed back against Enlightenment values. Broadly speaking, Enlightenment thinkers tended to value empiricism and argue that the world was ultimately understandable and perfectible. This doesn't mean that Wordsworth was opposed to understanding, or improving, the world. We can even see that in the 1850 edition of the Prelude, he's added references to the appropriateness of "pity...upon aught that bears/Unsightly marks of violence or harm" (line 252), suggesting that political and personal compassion are essential. But he hints that it's best to expect defeat, since an over-confident attitude will actually bring harm and get in the way of true wisdom. Moreover, he's skeptical of empiricism. The speaker's engagements with nature are wrapped up in a very personal subjectivity. The word "dream" crops up four times in this book, and mostly in metaphorical contexts. The speaker links his most transformative observations of the natural world to internal experiences of dreaming, hinting that it is through subjective rather than purely empirical learning that people learn the most.
During this part of the "Prelude," the speaker also promotes the idea that brief, fleeting, and long-gone events remain important long after they have disappeared. This belief in the relevance of the past to the present is related to the idea that human psychology and development are complex, gradual processes that shouldn't be hemmed in through false conceptual boundaries. But it extends to a broader sense that fleeting moments are sacred, maybe all the more so because they are lost. The speaker talks fondly about a friend he has not seen since childhood, and seems not to value the friendship any less because of its impermanence. He argues that a mother's affection shapes a child's growth (and shaped his own growth), long after the end of childhood and even the death of the mother. And, of course, he devotes a great deal of descriptive space to the sad beauty of ruins. Romantics generally were interested in ancient and medieval ruins, in part because they were interested in the eras of history in which they were first built. Here, the ruined abbey also seems to symbolize the way in which the young speaker remains within the old one, in some ways lost and forever altered, but in other ways ever-present.
Finally, it's worth exploring the way in which Wordsworth uses the second-person address throughout this book and throughout The Prelude as a whole. Though he frequently uses the pronoun "you," the meaning of that pronoun is shifting and often ambiguous. For instance, he sometimes seems to address the unidentified reader, helping to bring us into the fold of the narrative and even to increase the emotional investment and involvement of readers who don't personally know Wordsworth. At another point, he addresses nature (and individual elements of nature), as if he is so overcome with gratitude that he must speak directly to the object of his thanks. Finally, at the end of Book Second, it is clear that he is addressing a highly specific reader—a friend who loves nature but was born in a city. This friend is likely the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, to whom Wordsworth originally dedicated The Prelude. When writing to his sister Dorothy, Wordsworth described The Prelude as a "Poem (title not yet fixed upon) to Coleridge." This also means that some moments in the text in which the speaker appears to address an unspecific reader may in fact be intended as asides to Coleridge. Ultimately, those moments are ambiguous, and we can think of them as functioning on several levels at once.
