Summary
This book is presented as a continuation of the previous one, explaining the speaker's feelings and choices following the regaining of his imagination (indeed, they are divided only in the later 1850 edition: they comprise a single, longer twelfth book in the 1805 edition). The speaker first explains that nature is the source of both emotional excitation and calmness. These twin powers provide balance and are the source of nature's strength. Humans are able to partake of these powers too, and the speaker does so. He finds that, through nature, he is able to put stock in things that are important, universal, and eternal instead of superficially interesting. Having come to this realization, he suddenly finds his fellow humans to be fascinating and delightful. He also realizes that power-hungry individuals, including those who have noble aims, are misguided and harmful. Intellectuals who theorize about social and economic issues (including economist Adam Smith, to whom Wordsworth alludes) are ignorant of the inequality that plagues so many of their countrymen. Average people are shut out of intellectual and political life because they are exploited, worked so hard that they have no time or energy left for other pursuits. The speaker came to this realization by returning to the rural landscapes and communities of his youth, observing the people there. Despite his indignation over the exploitation of others, he found these wanderings blissful, especially with a beloved woman at his side and at the peak of his youth. He adores the public roads where strangers seem like friends and every path seems to lead into eternity. In his interactions with the humble people there, he found them to be full of depth, counter to societal expectations. This cements his cynicism about conventional education, which places value on entirely the wrong things. Meanwhile, he says, many people think that love can exist only when nurtured by wealth and decadence. He disagrees, but concedes that the indignity of poverty and urban life stunts love and affection. Books, he says, generally fail to convey these truths, because they are written to appeal to wealthy readers who want flattery over truth.
Pausing, the speaker takes a moment to voice his appreciation for nature and the people who live surrounded by it. He commits himself to the task of recording their daily lives, and he is proud to take it on for the benefit of those who value and gain knowledge from the written word. Here, he praises several types of men whom he believes are generally undervalued. One is the self-sufficient variety, uninterested in outside validation. The other is a quiet, introspective type who exists on a level deeper than human language. God, says the speaker, knows and loves every person—even those who are unknown to society. At this point, the speaker recalls, he realized that nature had the power to make the everyday sacred. Nature's passions mix with human creations, and the poet is and has always been an ally of nature. Indeed, the speaker confesses, he hopes that his own work will be able to join forces with the eternal forms of nature, becoming similarly timeless and powerful. His insight into eternity was prompted by a visit to the Plain of Sarum, the location of Stonehenge. His experience of the ancient ruins prompted a reverie, complete with visions of prehistoric man communing with nature and celestial bodies. These men, especially Druids, were able to infuse the divine into the earthly. Addressing Coleridge, the speaker reminds his friend of a conversation they once had: Coleridge praised Wordsworth's ability to conjure up real-life detail in his writing and to bring a sense of the divine into his work. Indeed, the speaker says, he felt that he had access to a new, higher world in this period, and hoped to convey that insight to others through poetry.
Analysis
Compared to most previous books of the Prelude, this one is noticeably straightforward in its language, at least in many parts. Wordsworth's sentences are shorter, simpler, and more direct. At times he uses simple declaratives that would have been out of place in, for instance, Book Eleventh. This change in syntax reflects a change in the speaker's attitude. This book is an account of long-awaited clarity. The speaker has experimented with a series of different philosophies and worldviews, most recently one built around the valorization of reason and rationality. Rationalism, he recounts, served to complicate ideas that should be simple, inviting unnecessary and ultimately imagination-blunting types of analysis. But here, the speaker feels his imagination has been recovered. He returns to a way of life that makes intuitive sense to him—one revolving around the natural world and interactions with everyday people who live in it. The straightforwardness of this book's language reflects the easy straightforwardness of the speaker's newly recovered mindset.
In this book, the speaker also reaches a satisfying conclusion regarding a problem that's plagued him for a long time: the issue of poetry's impermanence. In Book Fifth, he shares the story of a nightmare, evidently an allegory for the fate of mankind's artistic work in an apocalyptic scenario. The ominous quality of that scene suggests just how deeply troubling the speaker finds his situation. As a poet, he is inspired by nature—but at the same time, his fleeting contribution seems deeply unimportant compared to nature's power. But here, returning to nature, he seems to conclude that poetry can achieve a kind of eternal power when it is used to evoke, share, and connect with natural and divine entities. In other words, human works needn't be compared to nature. Rather, they can, if successful, become another natural process. This is an optimistic scenario for the speaker. He bashfully confesses his hope that his own work can achieve such permanence, seeming to hope rather than entirely believe that it is true, at least in his case. However, the book ends with a nod to Coleridge's own praise for Wordsworth's poetry. The implication, then, is that the speaker has been successful in creating lasting or at least meaningful work.
Finally, this book contains a fascinating glimpse at Wordsworth's conception of Englishness. Early in the Prelude, he associates Britain with its natural beauty, noting that it may not be as clearly lovely as Italy or Greece but that it has a unique, dramatic quality. England's land is, in Wordsworth's reading, the soul or essence of the nation. The actual society of the country can work in harmony with that essence: the speaker describes his childhood community as one deeply aligned with the land on which they live. But human society can also work against that essence—for example, when England goes to war with France, the speaker is forced to separate the natural world he loves from the military and government associated with it. At the end of Book Thirteenth, the speaker experiences a vision of ancient Britons, living in radical harmony with the landscape around them and the celestial forces above. Wordsworth implies that the exploited, undervalued rural people of the nineteenth century are the spiritual descendants of these ancient Celts, making them authentic Englishmen in a way that their powerful exploiters are not. In some parts of Europe, the Romantic movement was part of a literal nation-building project. Here, no new country is created—rather, a new vision of English identity is articulated.
