Summary
At the end of summer, the speaker leaves home and returns to Cambridge. However, being young, he isn't especially sad. The subsequent years of schooling don't need to be described in much detail. The speaker settles down somewhat and reads a lot. He wants to dabble in academic thought without immersing himself or making commitments, in part because taking on independent intellectual projects feels like a betrayal to those who raised him. He is now thirty-four as he writes, and by this age he's achieved some of the poetic success he dreamed of during his college days. He'd often take walks at night while at Cambridge, enjoying the solitude he found in groves of trees and staying out until he heard the ring of the porter's bell. On these walks, he enjoys imaginative visions equivalent to those of great poets like Spenser. Intellectually, he feels that his true internal interests are alienated from the learning he found in books. However, he does find some enjoyment in geometry, and in the way that its rules reflected nature's laws, giving him something clear to hold on to in an uncertain period. He compares himself to a shipwrecked man who clings to a geometry textbook, his one possession. The abstract nature of geometry soothes the poet's busy, image-packed thoughts. Meanwhile, the speaker indulges in a luxurious, rather enjoyable melancholy.
During his summer vacations, the speaker wanders both the natural areas around his home and further-flung ones with his beloved sister. The siblings had been separated for a long time, and the chance to be in nature with her was deeply meaningful. Another person also seems to be present—the poet's friend Coleridge, to whom the Prelude is addressed. Wordsworth tells Coleridge that, although they didn't know each other at the time, he felt his friend's presence in these earlier years. He reflects on their similarities and differences. The two men share a love of nature, but Coleridge came from the city and managed to attend Cambridge only after Wordsworth had left. While there he struggled and experienced terrible circumstances. If only they had known each other, the speaker thinks, he might have been a soothing influence on his friend. But in the end, Coleridge turned out so well that sadness about his past might not be worthwhile.
Returning to the topic of his own youthful hobbies, the speaker recounts setting out for the Alps with a friend after finishing university. He is tempted, not only by nature, but by the cultural atmosphere of France. The country has just had its revolution, and it is full of hope, camaraderie, and excitement. The men work their way south from Calais, seeing the homes decorated for the Bastille Day celebration of the revolution. The speaker and his friend link up with other travelers and find solidarity from French people, who respect them as English lovers of liberty. They survey France's monasteries, its rustic towns, and eventually the grandeur of the Alps. However, Mont Blanc is almost disappointing, since its physical reality stamps out the lively imagined version that Wordsworth and his fellow mountaineers treasured. But the Chamonix valley's natural beauty compensates, and it ignites the sensitivities and sentimentality of the young hikers. One day, the speaker and his friend eat at a mountain inn with some other travelers, who then leave the two of them there to finish. The two men eventually get up and follow the other hikers. But as time goes on they are unable to find them, and realize they are lost. They encounter a peasant and ask him for help. The peasant tells the disbelieving speaker that he and his friend have walked across the Alps: they now have to return to the valley. At this realization, that he has achieved his goal without even knowing, the speaker feels a strange blend of euphoria and despair. He observes that the struggle towards a goal can be the main thing motivating people. But the speaker's mood improves as he descends into the valley again, seeing around him signs of nature's beauty and oneness.
The speaker and his friend continue their journey, crossing into Italy and enjoying a wide range of new sights. One morning they are so eager to begin that they accidentally wake up well before dawn. As they walk through the mountains, the sky stays dark. They're forced to sit down and wait for sunrise to come, listening to birds and insects. But the poet cuts himself off, saying there's simply too much to recount in detail. The main point is that these travels affected him deeply, even to this day. They offered him a glimpse into the idealism of Europe's revolutionary era. It was exciting, but at the same time the speaker felt like a distant, uninvested spectator. Being young and present in the natural, physical world was enough for him to feel happy.
Analysis
One of the most important events in this book concerns a character who isn't actually present during the speaker's time at Cambridge or during his Alpine travels: Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The entire Prelude is in fact dedicated to Coleridge, a friend of Wordsworth's and another Romantic poet known for works like the Rime of the Ancient Mariner. In real life, the two men—a slightly older Wordsworth and a slightly younger Coleridge—were collaborators as well as friends, writing the groundbreaking Lyrical Ballads together. While Wordsworth was known to be more reserved, Coleridge's personality was known to be more unpredictable and impulsive. He also suffered from a severe addiction to opium. The men's friendship was complex, and it included periods of all-consuming devotion and heady involvement in a local poetic circle. In Book Sixth, Wordsworth addresses Coleridge more explicitly and at far more length than he has done before. Coleridge, despite not being present during the part of Wordsworth's life described here, becomes a prominent presence—a character—in this book of the Prelude. Wordsworth's choice to frame his autobiographical poem as an extended monologue to his friend alters the experience of reading it. While the inwardness of this project might otherwise seem self-absorbed or indulgent, Coleridge's inclusion instead makes it seem intimate, like a revealing, vulnerable conversation between two friends getting to know each other better. The reader here becomes a privileged third party, privy to that conversation
Another character also crops up here, if only briefly: Wordsworth's sister Dorothy. The siblings were separated after becoming orphans in childhood—for this reason, the poet describes their summers together not just as an enjoyable period but as a long-overdue reunion. Dorothy is not mentioned by name, but the poet recalls spending leisurely summers exploring nature together. Like her brother, Dorothy Wordsworth produced naturalistic and poetic writing, although none of it was published during her lifetime. The two were both involved in an extended artistic circle that also included Coleridge. In fact, Coleridge and the two Wordsworths were extremely and intensely close, with an almost mystical connection revolving largely around experiences of the natural world. For this reason, it is apt that Wordsworth describes Coleridge's incorporeal presence joining his and his sister's summers together. Dorothy lived with her brother and his family both before and after he married, and he was her primary caretaker when she became sick and disabled later in life. But when Wordsworth mentions her here, he describes neither their childhood nor his caring for her as she aged. Instead, he speaks about her in relation to Coleridge, focusing on the fact that his relationship with his sister was in a sense incomplete before they met the third member of their group. The idea that Coleridge was spiritually part of their summertime wanderings, well before actually meeting the Wordsworths, is yet another example of the fluid orientation towards time and chronology that Wordsworth displays in this work. Past and present mingle and intermix here, just as they do in every section of the Prelude.
Finally, Book Sixth encompasses the speaker's travels to more far-flung regions of the world—and as such, it takes on international social and political issues. The speaker travels to France at the height of the revolution, and he perceives it as a utopia, utterly transformed by political idealism and wrapped up in a trance of celebration and unity. In fact, France's liberation creates a glow that extends even to Switzerland: when the speaker crosses the border he continues to feel the thrill of the revolution. Interestingly, though, Wordsworth (perhaps self-mockingly) describes his joy in the French Revolution as almost apolitical. It merely adds an ambiance to his adventures, giving him something exciting to observe. In reality, the young Wordsworth was indeed an ardent supporter of the Revolution. Only later, as the poet's views became less radical and as the French Revolution became more so, did he renounce the movement. The evolution of his views is on full display in the revision process of the Prelude. In the 1805 edition, Wordsworth describes the pleasantness and solitude of a French monastery. But in the 1850 edition, he adds a lengthy meditation on the persecution of religious orders during the radical phase of the revolution, reflecting that the monasteries may be unable to withstand that political moment despite their spiritual value to humanity.
