Summary
The speaker describes a grey morning on which he is approaching Cambridge University by carriage. He spots some famous landmarks of the university, as well as a student in a cap and gown. He is nervous but hopeful, especially once he becomes acquainted with a few other students. He imagines the life he will have at university as he wanders the nearby shops, feeling as if he is dreaming his surroundings, and wondering at the novelty of everything—after all, he's from the country. Luxuries, from new clothes to parties, overwhelm him and help compensate for his youth and cluelessness. As a member of St. John's College, he lives above the noisy kitchens, and can hear the clocktower bells chiming the time. Near his room is a statue of Isaac Newton. As for college lectures and examinations, while others are flustered by them, he has a hard time caring much. He is free and busy, but also misses home and nature. He often slips away from his schoolmates to wander in nearby fields and be alone. There, he looks for life and universality among the objects around him. Some people thought he was mad, but, he argues, the world's priorities are so askew that wisdom or clarity can look like madness. Nature made his thoughts clear and connected, not muddled. At the time, he wasn't seeking engagement with anything except his own internal life, which sometimes made it hard to communicate his thoughts to others.
However, he warns, he's now going to describe a different situation: his social life. The excitement and superficiality of college life distracted him somewhat from his more introspective nature, which lay dormant in many ways. Yet, surrounded by other young people, he's not unhappy, and in fact he's social by nature. With his friends he rides horses, goes sailing, and generally has a good time. His serious side looks to the famous thinkers who have passed through Cambridge, from Newton to Milton (in whose former dormitory a friend of the speaker's now lives). Once, while drinking to Milton's memory, the speaker gets so drunk that he stumbles in to church services late—an experience for which he now feels shame. Regardless, though, the memory of these great men can't change the fact that he's not very interested in books or serious thought. Something about the strictures of university life, cut off from nature, seems to weaken his mental discipline. This isn't necessarily inherent in the idea of schooling itself, but rather a result of the frivolity and vapidity surrounding much education in the modern world. He launches into a polemic about this problem, comparing the monastic studiousness that places like Cambridge once nourished to their modern state. He is especially indignant that the university and other institutions invoke religion so often while simultaneously perpetuating materialism and triviality. Once, he muses, young men would wander, begging for money to support their scholarly interests. But that era of all-consuming devotion to knowledge is long-gone, at least on an institutional level.
However, he pivots, it doesn't do any good to look back on the past with regret. True, he found the curriculum and the school's culture too restrictive. And true, he harshly judged some of his classmates (which he now regrets). And, amid all the social and intellectual eventfulness, his inward soul continued to lie in wait. However, his Cambridge days weren't a waste. They offered a kind of sheltered transition to adulthood, and he's not sure if he would have fared well making a more abrupt switch. And he amused himself observing the dramas of his professors and other mentors at college, which offered a very different (and perhaps less meaningful) model of aging than those of rural elderly people. Like a woven textile, he muses, life is made up of many colors and materials. Cambridge was simply part of that weaving, for better or for worse. University often felt like a pantomime of real life, but then again, it really was part of the world—although maybe a distasteful, superficial part. In any case, after nine long months away from home, it's time to return for summer.
Analysis
In this book, we dig into a theme that has been hinted at before: the problems with human institutions, and the vast gap between those institutions and the natural world when it comes to nurturing and imparting wisdom to young people. Cambridge, and other important institutions, have become a self-perpetuating structure, more concerned with preserving power dynamics and offering a vague impression of meaning than they are with actual intellectual exploration. Earlier, the speaker recounted the old woman who used to sell food in his village, and regretfully recalls that the stone she put her wares on has been taken and used to build an assembly room. That moment foreshadowed this section's critique of Cambridge, which is essentially portrayed as an embodiment of all that is artificial within the modern world. It hasn't always been this way, the speaker laments. Not only did men of learning once exist in monasteries or as ascetic beggars: they once existed at Cambridge itself, not too many centuries prior to Wordsworth's enrollment there. In other words, he indicates that this institutional decay is a modern problem of what he calls the "tutored age." It is one symptom of a broader alienation from nature, instinct, and in fact the self. After all, the patterns of university life make introspection nearly impossible. The speaker can achieve it only by putting in a lot of effort, and even then people think he has gone insane for seeking it out. Previously, the speaker has repeatedly argued that solitude and immersion in nature are essential parts of gaining wisdom. If Cambridge, supposedly a place founded with the sole intention of imparting and incubating wisdom, is preventing students from being alone in nature, then something is seriously wrong. The speaker's concession that university did indeed help him to transition to adulthood feels somewhat ominous in context. It suggests that he is soon to encounter an even more disconnected milieu, for which university has been mere practice.
In terms of tone and pace, this book stands apart from the two that precede it. It moves at a faster clip and, despite a few flights of fancy or irritation, remains relatively grounded in a linear narrative. Even its beginning and end display a kind of novelistic movement. The book begins with a carriage approaching Cambridge's campus, and ends with an assurance that, three seasons having passed, the speaker will soon be on the move back to his home. But another type of movement—the fluid switch from the adult narrator's thoughts to those of his childhood self—is fairly limited here compared to the first two books. This more prosaic relationship to chronological and spatial movement reflects the speaker's prosaic mood at university. When he was recalling informal explorations of the natural world, the speaker's style was fluid. When he recalls a more structured lifestyle, his style is also more structured. When we read Book Third, we will likely feel less relaxed and dreamy than we have in other moments of the "Prelude." It's reasonable to assume that this is deliberate, and that this mood echoes that of the speaker rushing around his university's campus.
Wordsworth also uses this section to lay out a theory of artistic madness. In some ways, this concept of there being a thin line between genius and madness is a familiar and even cliche one to contemporary readers. But this is in large part because of writers like Wordsworth, who helped to articulate a specific archetype of the poet. In the Romantic imagination, the poet (and the artist generally) is something of an outcast or rebel. Driven by passion and introspection so complex that others can scarcely understand it, the Romantic genius might even appear to be insane. But, as Wordsworth hints, the true poet isn't actually insane. Instead, he is able and willing to see through the widely-accepted insanity of human society. The speaker doesn't just argue that he himself is one of these artistic, clear-eyed thinkers. He extends the title to people he sees as intellectual forebears: monks or monkish scholars, rejecting earthly luxury to an extent that might seem mad in order to pursue deeper truths. To some readers of The Prelude, this self-assessment on the part of Wordsworth's speaker (and by extension Wordsworth himself) might feel self-aggrandizing. But it's worth keeping in mind that, when Wordsworth was writing, these weren't familiar ideals in the way they are now. Today's starving, passionate, mad artist trope owes a great deal to the Romantic movement.
